I FEATURE My college class asks what it means to be white in America — but interrogating that q

I

FEATURE

My college class asks what it means to be white in America — but
interrogating that question as a black woman in the real world is much
harder to do.

By Claudia Rankine

July 17, 2019

n the early days of the run-up to the 2016 election, I was just beginning

to prepare a class on whiteness to teach at Yale University, where I had

been newly hired. Over the years, I had come to realize that I often did

not share historical knowledge with the persons to whom I was speaking.

“What’s redlining?” someone would ask. “George Washington freed his

slaves?” someone else would inquire. But as I listened to Donald Trump’s

inflammatory rhetoric during the campaign that spring, the class took on a

new dimension. Would my students understand the long history that

informed a comment like one Trump made when he announced his

presidential candidacy? “When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending

their best,” he said. “They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and

they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re

bringing crime. They’re rapists.” When I heard those words, I wanted my

students to track immigration laws in the United States. Would they connect

I Wanted to Know What
White Men Thought About
Their Privilege. So I Asked.

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the treatment of the undocumented with the treatment of Irish, Italian and

Asian people over the centuries?

In preparation, I needed to slowly unpack and understand how whiteness

was created. How did the Naturalization Act of 1790, which restricted

citizenship to “any alien, being a free white person,” develop over the years

into our various immigration acts? What has it taken to cleave citizenship

from “free white person”? What was the trajectory of the Ku Klux Klan after

its formation at the end of the Civil War, and what was its relationship to the

Black Codes, those laws subsequently passed in Southern states to restrict

black people’s freedoms? Did the United States government bomb the black

community in Tulsa, Okla., in 1921? How did Italians, Irish and Slavic peoples

become white? Why do people believe abolitionists could not be racist?

I wanted my students to gain an awareness of a growing body of work by

sociologists, theorists, historians and literary scholars in a field known as

“whiteness studies,” the cornerstones of which include Toni Morrison’s

“Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination,” David

Roediger’s “The Wages of Whiteness,” Matthew Frye Jacobson’s “Whiteness

of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race,”

Richard Dyer’s “White” and more recently Nell Irvin Painter’s “The History

of White People.” Roediger, a historian, had explained the development of the

field, one that my class would engage with, saying, “The 1980s and early ’90s

saw the publication of major works on white identity’s intricacies and costs

by James Baldwin and Toni Morrison, alongside new works by white writers

and activists asking similar questions historically. Given the seeming novelty

of such white writing and the urgency of understanding white support for

Ronald Reagan, ‘critical whiteness studies’ gained media attention and a

small foothold in universities.” This area of study aimed to make visible a

history of whiteness that through its association with “normalcy” and

“universality” masked its omnipresent institutional power.

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My class eventually became Constructions of Whiteness, and over the two

years that I have taught it, many of my students (who have included just

about every race, gender identity and sexual orientation) interviewed white

people on campus or in their families about their understanding of American

history and how it relates to whiteness. Some students simply wanted to

know how others around them would define their own whiteness. Others

were troubled by their own family members’ racism and wanted to

understand how and why certain prejudices formed. Still others wanted to

show the impact of white expectations on their lives.

Perhaps this is why one day in New Haven, staring into the semicircle of oak

trees in my backyard, I wondered what it would mean to ask random white

men how they understood their privilege. I imagined myself — a middle-aged

black woman — walking up to strangers and doing so. Would they react as

the police captain in Plainfield, Ind., did when his female colleague told him

during a diversity-training session that he benefited from “white male

privilege”? He became angry and accused her of using a racialized slur

against him. (She was placed on paid administrative leave, and a reprimand

was placed permanently in her file.) Would I, too, be accused? Would I hear

myself asking about white male privilege and then watch white man after

white man walk away as if I were mute? Would they think I worked for

Trevor Noah or Stephen Colbert and just forgot my camera crew? The

running comment in our current political climate is that we all need to

converse with people we don’t normally speak to, and though my husband is

white, I found myself falling into easy banter with all kinds of strangers

except white men. They rarely sought me out to shoot the breeze, and I did

not seek them out. Maybe it was time to engage, even if my fantasies of these

encounters seemed outlandish. I wanted to try.

Weeks later, it occurred to me that I tend to be surrounded by white men I

don’t know when I’m traveling, caught in places that are essentially

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nowhere: in between, en route, up in the air. As I crisscrossed the United

States, Europe and Africa giving talks about my work, I found myself

considering these white men who passed hours with me in airport lounges, at

gates, on planes. They seemed to me to make up the largest percentage of

business travelers in the liminal spaces where we waited. That I was among

them in airport lounges and in first-class cabins spoke in part to my own

relative economic privilege, but the price of my ticket, of course, does not

translate into social capital. I was always aware that my value in our

culture’s eyes is determined by my skin color first and foremost. Maybe

these other male travelers could answer my questions about white privilege.

I felt certain that as a black woman, there had to be something I didn’t

understand.

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Just recently, a friend who didn’t get a job he applied for told me that as a

white male, he was absorbing the problems of the world. He meant he was

being punished for the sins of his forefathers. He wanted me to know he

understood it was his burden to bear. I wanted to tell him that he needed to

take a long view of the history of the workplace, given the imbalances that

generations of hiring practices before him had created. But would that really

make my friend feel any better? Did he understand that today, 65 percent of

elected officials are white men, though they make up only 31 percent of the

American population? White men have held almost all the power in this

country for 400 years.

[The grief that white Americans can’t share.]

I knew that my friend was trying to communicate his struggle to find a way

to understand the complicated American structure that holds us both. I

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wanted to ask him if his expectation was a sign of his privilege but decided,

given the loss of his job opportunity, that my role as a friend probably

demanded other responses.

After a series of casual conversations with my white male travelers, would I

come to understand white privilege any differently? They couldn’t know

what it’s like to be me, though who I am is in part a response to who they are,

and I didn’t really believe I understood them, even as they determined so

much of what was possible in my life and in the lives of others. But because I

have only lived as me, a person who regularly has to negotiate conscious and

unconscious dismissal, erasure, disrespect and abuse, I fell into this

wondering silently. Always, I hesitated.

I hesitated when I stood in line for a flight across the country, and a white

man stepped in front of me. He was with another white man. “Excuse me,” I

said. “I am in this line.” He stepped behind me but not before saying to his

flight mate, “You never know who they’re letting into first class these days.”

Was his statement a defensive move meant to cover his rudeness and

embarrassment, or were we sharing a joke? Perhaps he, too, had heard the

recent anecdote in which a black woman recalled a white woman’s stepping

in front of her at her gate. When the black woman told her she was in line,

the white woman responded that it was the line for first class. Was the man’s

comment a sly reference? But he wasn’t laughing, not even a little, not even

a smile. Deadpan.

Later, when I discussed this moment with my therapist, she told me that she

thought the man’s statement was in response to his flight mate, not me. I

didn’t matter to him, she said; that’s why he could step in front of me in the

first place. His embarrassment, if it was embarrassment, had everything to

do with how he was seen by the person who did matter: his white male

companion. I was allowing myself to have too much presence in his

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imagination, she said. Should this be a comfort? Was my total invisibility

preferable to a targeted insult?

During the flight, each time he removed or replaced something in his case

overhead, he looked over at me. Each time, I looked up from my book to meet

his gaze and smiled — I like to think I’m not humorless. I tried to imagine

what my presence was doing to him. On some level, I thought, I must have

dirtied up his narrative of white privilege securing white spaces. In my class,

I had taught “Whiteness as Property,” an article published in The Harvard

Law Review in 1993, in which the author, Cheryl Harris, argues that “the set

of assumptions, privileges and benefits that accompany the status of being

white have become a valuable asset that whites sought to protect.” These are

the assumptions of privilege and exclusion that have led many white

Americans to call the police on black people trying to enter their own homes

or vehicles. Racial profiling becomes another sanctioned method of

segregating space. Harris goes on to explain how much white people rely on

these benefits, so much so that their expectations inform the interpretations

of our laws. “Stand your ground” laws, for example, mean whites can claim

that fear made them kill an unarmed black person. Or voter-registration laws

in certain states can function as de facto Jim Crow laws. “American law,”

Harris writes, “has recognized a property interest in whiteness.”

On the plane, I wanted to enact a new narrative that included the whiteness

of the man who had stepped in front of me. I felt his whiteness should be a

component of what we both understood about him, even as his whiteness

would not be the entirety of who he is. His unconscious understanding of

whiteness meant the space I inhabited should have been only his. The old

script would have left his whiteness unacknowledged in my consideration of

his slight. But a rude man and a rude white man have different

presumptions. Just as when a white person confronted by an actual black

human being needs to negotiate stereotypes of blackness so that he can

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arrive at the person standing before him, I hoped to give the man the same

courtesy but in the reverse. Seeing his whiteness meant I understood my

presence as an unexpected demotion for him. It was too bad if he felt that

way. Still, I wondered, what is this “stuckness” inside racial hierarchies that

refuses the neutrality of the skies? I hoped to find a way to have this

conversation.

[Sign up for Race/Related, a weekly newsletter focused on race, identity and

culture.]

The phrase “white privilege” was popularized in 1988 by Peggy McIntosh, a

Wellesley College professor who wanted to define “invisible systems

conferring dominance on my group.” McIntosh came to understand that she

benefited from hierarchical assumptions and policies simply because she

was white. I would have preferred if instead of “white privilege” she had

used the term “white dominance,” because “privilege” suggested

hierarchical dominance was desired by all. Nonetheless, the phrase has

stuck. The title of her essay “White Privilege and Male Privilege: A Personal

Account of Coming to See Correspondences Through Work in Women’s

Studies” was a mouthful. McIntosh listed 46 ways white privilege is enacted.

“Number 19: I can speak in public to a powerful male group without putting

my race on trial”; “Number 20: I can do well in a challenging situation

without being called a credit to my race”; “Number 27: I can go home from

most meetings of organizations I belong to feeling somewhat tied in, rather

than isolated, out-of-place, outnumbered, unheard, held at a distance or

feared”; “Number 36: If my day, week or year is going badly, I need not ask

of each negative episode or situation whether it has racial overtones.” I’m not

clear why McIntosh stopped at 46 except as a way of saying, “You get the

picture.” My students were able to add their own examples easily.

My students and I also studied the work of the white documentary

filmmaker Whitney Dow. In the last couple of years, Dow has been part of

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Columbia University’s Interdisciplinary Center for Innovative Theory and

Empirics (Incite), which gathered data on more than 850 people who identify

as white or partly white and the communities in which they live. He filmed

more than a hundred of their oral histories. This work, like McIntosh’s, was

another way of thinking about the ordinariness of white hierarchical

thinking. I asked Dow what he learned in his conversations with white men.

“They are struggling to construct a just narrative for themselves as new

information comes in, and they are having to restructure and refashion their

own narratives and coming up short,” he said. “I include myself in that,” he

added after a moment. “We are seeing the deconstruction of the white-male

archetype. The individual actor on the grand stage always had the support of

a genocidal government, but this is not the narrative we grew up with. It’s a

challenge to adjust.”

The interviews, collected in Incite’s initial report, “Facing Whiteness,” vary

greatly in terms of knowledge of American history and experiences. One

interviewee declares: “The first slave owner in America was a black man.

How many people know that? The slaves that were brought to America were

sold to the white man by blacks. So, I don’t feel that we owe them any special

privileges other than that anybody else has, any other race.” While this

interviewee denies any privilege, another has come to see how his whiteness

enables his mobility in America: “I have to accept the reality that because

I’m a man, I — whether I was aware of that or not at any specific time —

probably had some sort of hand up in a situation.” He added, “The longer I’m

in law enforcement and the more aware I am of the world around me, the

more I realize that being of Anglo-Saxon descent, being a man and being in a

region of America that is somewhat rural, and because it’s rural by default

mostly white, means that I definitely get preference.” This interviewee, who

while recognizing his privilege, and who according to Whitney Dow had been

“pretty ostracized because of his progressiveness” in the workplace, still

indicates — through his use of words like “probably” and phrases like

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“because it’s rural by default mostly white” — that he believes white

privilege is in play in only certain circumstances. Full comprehension would

include the understanding that white privilege comes with expectations of

protection and preferences no matter where he lives in the country.

[How privilege became a provocation.]

How angry could I be at the white man on the plane, the one who glanced at

me each time he stood up the way you look at a stone you had tripped on? I

understood that the man’s behavior was also his socialization. My own

socialization had, in many ways, prepared me for him. I was not

overwhelmed by our encounter because my blackness is “consent not to be a

single being.” This phrase, which finds its origins in the work of the West

Indian writer Édouard Glissant but was reintroduced to me in the recent

work of the poet and critical theorist Fred Moten, gestures toward the fact

that I can refuse the white man’s stereotypes of blackness, even as he

interacts with those stereotypes. What I wanted was to know what the white

man saw or didn’t see when he walked in front of me at the gate.

It’s hard to exist and also accept my lack of existence. Frank Wilderson III,

chair of African-American studies at the University of California, Irvine,

borrows the sociological term “social death” to explain my there-but-not-

there status in a historically anti-black society. The outrage — and if we are

generous, the embarrassment — that occasioned the white passenger’s

comment were a reaction to the unseen taking up space; space itself is one of

the understood privileges of whiteness.

I was waiting in another line for access to another plane in another city as

another group of white men approached. When they realized they would

have to get behind a dozen or so people already in line, they simply formed

their own line next to us. I said to the white man standing in front of me,

“Now, that is the height of white male privilege.” He laughed and remained

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smiling all the way to his seat. He wished me a good flight. We had shared

something. I don’t know if it was the same thing for each of us — the same

recognition of racialized privilege — but I could live with that polite form of

unintelligibility.

I found the suited men who refused to fall in line exhilarating and amusing

(as well as obnoxious). Watching them was like watching a spontaneous play

about white male privilege in one act. I appreciated the drama. One or two of

them chuckled at their own audacity. The gate agent did an interesting sort

of check-in by merging the newly formed line with the actual line. The people

in my line, almost all white and male themselves, were in turn quizzical and

accepting.

After I watched this scene play out, I filed it away to use as an example in my

class. How would my students read this moment? Some would no doubt be

enraged by the white female gate agent who let it happen. I would ask why it

was easier to be angry with her than with the group of men. Because she

doesn’t recognize or utilize her institutional power, someone would say.

Based on past classes, I could assume the white male students would be

quick to distance themselves from the men at the gate; white solidarity has

no place in a class that sets out to make visible the default positions of

whiteness.

As the professor, I felt this was a narrative that could help me gauge the level

of recognition of white privilege in the class, because other white people were

also inconvenienced by the actions of this group of men. The students

wouldn’t be distracted by society’s abuse of minorities because everyone

seemed inconvenienced. Some students, though, would want to see the

moment as gendered, not racialized. I would ask them if they could imagine a

group of black men pulling off this action without the white men in my line

responding or the gate agent questioning the men even if they were within

their rights.

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As I became more and more frustrated with myself for avoiding asking my

question, I wondered if presumed segregation in business or first class

should have been Number 47 on McIntosh’s list. Just do it, I told myself. Just

ask a random white guy how he feels about his privilege.

On my next flight, I came close. I was a black woman in the company of

mostly white men, in seats that allowed for both proximity and separate

spaces. The flight attendant brought drinks to everyone around me but

repeatedly forgot my orange juice. Telling myself orange juice is sugar and

I myself am overdetermined by my race. Is that avoidable?
Is that a problem? Had I made the problem or was I given
the problem? Photo illustration by Najeebah Al-Ghadban

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she might be doing my post-cancer body a favor, I just nodded when she

apologized for the second time. The third time she walked by without the

juice, the white man sitting next to me said to her: “This is incredible. You

have brought me two drinks in the time you have forgotten to bring her one.”

She returned immediately with the juice.

I thanked him. He said, “She isn’t suited to her job.” I didn’t respond: “She

didn’t forget your drinks. She didn’t forget you. You are seated next to no one

in this no place.” Instead, I said, “She just likes you more.” He perhaps

thought I was speaking about him in particular and blushed. Did he

understand I was joking about white male privilege? It didn’t seem so. The

red crept up his neck into his cheeks, and he looked shy and pleased at the

same time. He brought both hands up to his cheeks as if to hold in the heat of

this embarrassing pleasure.

“Coming or going?” he asked, changing the subject.

“I’m returning from Johannesburg.”

“Really?” he said. “I was just in Cape Town.”

Hence your advocacy, I thought ungenerously. Why was that thought in my

head? I myself am overdetermined by my race. Is that avoidable? Is that a

problem? Had I made the problem or was I given the problem?

As I looked at the man in Seat 2B, I wondered if my historical positioning was

turning his humanity into evidence of white male dominance. Are white men

overly determined by their skin color in my eyes? Are they being forced, as

my friend suggested, to absorb the problems of the world?

On the long flight, I didn’t bring up white male privilege, jokes or otherwise,

again. Instead we wandered around our recent memories of South Africa and

discussed the resort where he stayed and the safari I took. I didn’t bring up

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Soweto or the Apartheid Museum that I visited in Johannesburg or the

lynching memorial in Montgomery, Ala., which the Apartheid Museum

reminded me of. I wanted my fellow traveler to begin a conversation about

his privilege this time. For once. I wanted him to think about his whiteness,

especially because he had just left South Africa, a country that suffered, as

James Baldwin said, “from the same delusion the Americans suffer from — it

too thought it was a white country.” But I imagined he felt the less said about

race relations in the United States or South Africa, the more possible it was

for us to be interlocutors. That was my fantasy, in any case.

Back home, when I mentioned these encounters to my white husband, he

was amused. “They’re just defensive,” he said. “White fragility,” he added,

with a laugh. This white man who has spent the past 25 years in the world

alongside me believes he understands and recognizes his own privilege.

Certainly he knows the right terminology to use, even when these agreed-

upon terms prevent us from stumbling into moments of real recognition.

These phrases — white fragility, white defensiveness, white appropriation —

have a habit of standing in for the complicated mess of a true conversation.

At that moment, he wanted to discuss our current president instead. “That,”

he said, “is a clear case of indignation and rage in the face of privilege writ

large. Real power. Real consequences.” He was not wrong, of course, but he

joined all the “woke” white men who set their privilege outside themselves —

as in, I know better than to be ignorant or defensive about my own privilege.

Never mind that that capacity to set himself outside the pattern of white

male dominance is the privilege. There’s no outrunning the kingdom, the

power and the glory.

I finally got up my nerve to ask a stranger directly about white privilege as I

was sitting next to him at the gate. He had initiated our conversation,

because he was frustrated about yet another delay. We shared that

frustration together. Eventually he asked what I did, and I told him that I

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write and teach. “Where do you teach?” he asked. “Yale,” I answered. He told

me his son wanted to go there but hadn’t been accepted during the early-

application process. “It’s tough when you can’t play the diversity card,” he

added.

Was he thinking out loud? Were the words just slipping out before he could

catch them? Was this the innocence of white privilege? Was he yanking my

chain? Was he snapping the white-privilege flag in my face? Should I have

asked him why he had the expectation that his son should be admitted early,

without delay, without pause, without waiting? Should I have asked how he

knew a person of color “took” his son’s seat and not another white son of one

of these many white men sitting around us?

I was perhaps holding my breath. I decided to just breathe.

“The Asians are flooding the Ivy Leagues,” he added after a moment.

Perhaps the clarification was intended to make it clear that he wasn’t

speaking right now about black people and their forms of affirmative action.

He had remembered something. He had recalled who was sitting next to him.

[50 years of affirmitive action: what went right and what it got wrong?]

Then I did it. I asked. “I’ve been thinking about white male privilege, and I

wonder if you think about yours or your son’s?” It almost seemed to be a non

sequitur, but he rolled with it.

“Not me,” he said. “I’ve worked hard for everything I have.”

What was it that Justice Brett Kavanaugh said at his Supreme Court

confirmation hearing? “I got into Yale Law School. That’s the No. 1 law

school in the country. I had no connections there. I got there by busting my

tail in college.” He apparently believed this despite the fact that his

grandfather went to Yale. I couldn’t tell by looking at this man I was sitting

next to, but I wondered if he was an ethnic white rather than a …

1/15/2021 America’s Enduring Caste System – The New York Times

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/01/magazine/isabel-wilkerson-caste.html 1/15

W

FEATURE

Our founding ideals promise liberty and equality for all. Our reality is an enduring racial hierarchy that has persisted for centuries.

By Isabel Wilkerson

July 1, 2020

e saw a man face down on the pavement, pinned beneath a car, and above him another man, a man in uniform, his skin lighter
than the man on the ground, and the lighter man was bearing down on the darker man, his knee boring into the neck of the
darker man, the lighter man’s hands at his sides, in his pockets — could it be that his hands were so nonchalantly in his pockets?
— such was the ease and casual calm, the confidence of embedded entitlement with which he was able to lord over the darker

man.

We heard the man on the ground pleading with the man above him, saw the terror in his face, heard his gasps for air, heard the anguished
cries of an unseen chorus, begging the lighter man to stop. But the lighter man, the dominant man, looked straight at the bystanders, into
the camera, and thus at all of us around the world who would later bear witness and, instead of heeding the cries of the chorus, pressed his
knee deeper into the darker man’s neck as was the perceived right granted him in the hierarchy. The man on the ground went silent,
drained of breath. A clear liquid crept down the pavement. We saw a man die before our very eyes.

What we did not see, not immediately anyway, was the invisible scaffolding, a caste system with ancient rules and assumptions that made
such a horror possible, that held each actor in that scene in its grip. Off camera, two other men in uniform, who looked like the lighter man,
were holding down the darker man from the other side of the police car as dusk approached in Minneapolis. Yet another man in uniform, of
Asian descent and thus not in the dominant caste, stood near, watching, immobilized, it seemed, at a remove from his own humanity and
potential common cause, as the darker man slipped out of consciousness. We soon learned that the man on the ground, George Floyd, had
been accused of trying to pass a counterfeit $20 bill, and, like uncountable Black men over the centuries, lost his life over what might have
been a mere citation for people in the dominant caste.

In the weeks leading up to the country’s commemoration of its founding, protests and uprisings took hold in cities in every state, in
Bakersfield, Charleston, Buffalo, Poughkeepsie, Wichita, Boise, Sioux Falls. Protesters tore down a statue of Christopher Columbus in St.
Paul, Minn. They toppled a statue of Jefferson Davis in Richmond, Va. And the country was forced to contemplate the observation of
Frederick Douglass a century and a half before: “What, to the American slave, is your Fourth of July?” What, we might ask in our day, is
freedom to those still denied it as their country celebrates its own?

An Old House and an Infrared Light
The inspector trained his infrared lens onto a misshapen bow in the ceiling, an invisible beam of light searching the layers of lath to test
what the eye could not see. This house was built generations ago, and I had noticed the slightest welt in a corner of plaster in a spare
bedroom and chalked it up to idiosyncrasy. Over time, the welt in the ceiling became a wave that widened and bulged despite the new roof.
It had been building beyond perception for years. An old house is its own kind of devotional, a dowager aunt with a story to be coaxed out
of her, a mystery, a series of interlocking puzzles awaiting solution. Why is this soffit tucked into the southeast corner of an eave? What is
behind this discolored patch of brick? With an old house, the work is never done, and you don’t expect it to be.

America is an old house. We can never declare the work over. Wind, flood, drought and human upheavals batter a structure that is already
fighting whatever flaws were left unattended in the original foundation. When you live in an old house, you may not want to go into the
basement after a storm to see what the rains have wrought. Choose not to look, however, at your own peril. The owner of an old house
knows that whatever you are ignoring will never go away. Whatever is lurking will fester whether you choose to look or not. Ignorance is
no protection from the consequences of inaction. Whatever you are wishing away will gnaw at you until you gather the courage to face
what you would rather not see.

We in this country are like homeowners who inherited a house on a piece of land that is beautiful on the outside but whose soil is unstable
loam and rock, heaving and contracting over generations, cracks patched but the deeper ruptures waved away for decades, centuries
even. Many people may rightly say: “I had nothing to do with how this all started. I have nothing to do with the sins of the past. My
ancestors never attacked Indigenous people, never owned slaves.” And yes. Not one of us was here when this house was built. Our
immediate ancestors may have had nothing to do with it, but here we are, the current occupants of a property with stress cracks and
bowed walls and fissures in the foundation. We are the heirs to whatever is right or wrong with it. We did not erect the uneven pillars or
joists, but they are ours to deal with now.

America’s Enduring Caste System

1/15/2021 America’s Enduring Caste System – The New York Times

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And any further deterioration is, in fact, on our hands.

Unaddressed, the ruptures and diagonal cracks will not fix themselves. The toxins will not go away but rather will spread, leach and
mutate, as they already have. When people live in an old house, they come to adjust to the idiosyncrasies and outright dangers skulking in
an old structure. They put buckets under a wet ceiling, prop up groaning floors, learn to step over that rotting wood tread in the staircase.
The awkward becomes acceptable, and the unacceptable becomes merely inconvenient. Live with it long enough, and the unthinkable
becomes normal. Exposed over the generations, we learn to believe that the incomprehensible is the way that life is supposed to be.

In my own house, the inspector was facing the mystery of the misshapen ceiling, and so he first held a sensor to the surface to detect if it
was damp. The reading inconclusive, he then pulled out the infrared camera to take a kind of X-ray of whatever was going on, the idea
being that you cannot fix a problem until and unless you can see it. He could now see past the plaster, beyond what had been wallpapered
or painted over, as we now are called upon to do in the house we all live in, to examine a structure built long ago.

Like other old houses, America has an unseen skeleton: its caste system, which is as central to its operation as are the studs and joists that
we cannot see in the physical buildings we call home. Caste is the infrastructure of our divisions. It is the architecture of human hierarchy,
the subconscious code of instructions for maintaining, in our case, a 400-year-old social order. Looking at caste is like holding the country’s
X-ray up to the light.

1/15/2021 America’s Enduring Caste System – The New York Times

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[The 1619 project: reframing the legacy of slavery in the United States.]

Photo illustration by Chris Burnett

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A caste system is an artificial construction, a fixed and embedded ranking of human value that sets the presumed supremacy of one group
against the presumed inferiority of other groups on the basis of ancestry and often immutable traits, traits that would be neutral in the
abstract but are ascribed life-and-death meaning in a hierarchy favoring the dominant caste, whose forebears designed it. A caste system
uses rigid, often arbitrary boundaries to keep the ranks apart, distinct from one another and in their assigned places.

Throughout human history, three caste systems have stood out. The lingering, millenniums-long caste system of India. The tragically
accelerated, chilling and officially vanquished caste system of Nazi Germany. And the shape-shifting, unspoken, race-based caste pyramid
in the United States. Each version relied on stigmatizing those deemed inferior to justify the dehumanization necessary to keep the lowest-
ranked people at the bottom and to rationalize the protocols of enforcement. A caste system endures because it is often justified as divine
will, originating from sacred text or the presumed laws of nature, reinforced throughout the culture and passed down through the
generations.

As we go about our daily lives, caste is the wordless usher in a darkened theater, flashlight cast down in the aisles, guiding us to our
assigned seats for a performance. The hierarchy of caste is not about feelings or morality. It is about power — which groups have it and
which do not. It is about resources — which groups are seen as worthy of them and which are not, who gets to acquire and control them
and who does not. It is about respect, authority and assumptions of competence — who is accorded these and who is not.

As a means of assigning value to entire swaths of humankind, caste guides each of us often beyond the reaches of our awareness. It
embeds into our bones an unconscious ranking of human characteristics and sets forth the rules, expectations and stereotypes that have
been used to justify brutalities against entire groups within our species. In the American caste system, the signal of rank is what we call
race, the division of humans on the basis of their appearance. In America, race is the primary tool and the visible decoy for caste.

Race does the heavy lifting for a caste system that demands a means of human division. If we have been trained to see humans in the
language of race, then caste is the underlying grammar that we encode as children, as when learning our mother tongue. Caste, like
grammar, becomes an invisible guide not only of how we speak but also of how we process information, the autonomic calculations that
figure into a sentence without our having to think about it.

Many of us have never taken a class in grammar, yet we know in our bones that a transitive verb takes an object, that a subject needs a
predicate; we know without thinking the difference between third-person singular and third-person plural. We may mention “race,”
referring to people as Black or white or Latino or Asian or Indigenous, when what lies beneath each label is centuries of history and
assigning of assumptions and values to physical features in a structure of human hierarchy.

What people look like, or rather, the race they have been assigned or are perceived to belong to, is the visible cue to their caste. It is the
historic flashcard to the public of how they are to be treated, where they are expected to live, what kinds of positions they are expected to
hold, whether they belong in this section of town or that seat in a boardroom, whether they should be expected to speak with authority on
this or that subject, whether they will be administered pain relief in a hospital, whether they are more or less likely to survive childbirth in
the most advanced nation in the world, whether they may be shot by the authorities with impunity.

We know that the letters of the alphabet are neutral and meaningless until they are combined to make a word, which itself has no
significance until it is inserted into a sentence and interpreted by those who speak or hear it. In the same way that “black” and “white”
were applied to people who were literally neither, but rather gradations of brown and beige and ivory, the caste system sets people at poles
from one another and attaches meaning to the extremes, and to the gradations in between, and then reinforces those meanings, replicates
them in the roles each caste was and is assigned and permitted or required to perform.

And yet, in recent decades, we have learned from the human genome that all human beings are 99.9 percent the same. “Race is a social
concept, not a scientific one,” said J. Craig Venter, the genomics expert who ran Celera Genomics when the initial sequencing was
completed in 2000. “We all evolved in the last 100,000 years from the small number of tribes that migrated out of Africa and colonized the
world.” Which means that an entire racial caste system, the catalyst of hatreds and civil war, was built on what the anthropologist Ashley
Montagu called “an arbitrary and superficial selection of traits,” derived from a tiny fraction of the tens of thousands of genes that make up
a human being. “The idea of race,” Montagu wrote, “was, in fact, the deliberate creation of an exploiting class seeking to maintain and
defend its privileges against what was profitably regarded as an inferior social caste.”

Caste and race are neither synonymous nor mutually exclusive. They can and do coexist in the same culture and serve to reinforce each
other. Race, in the United States, is the visible agent of the unseen force of caste. Caste is the bones, race the skin. Race is what we can see,
the physical traits that have been given arbitrary meaning and become shorthand for who a person is. Caste is the powerful infrastructure
that holds each group in its place. Its very invisibility is what gives it power and longevity. And though it may move in and out of
consciousness, though it may flare and reassert itself in times of upheaval and recede in times of relative calm, it is an ever-present
through line in the country’s operation.

Caste is rigid and deep; race is fluid and superficial, subject to periodic redefinition to meet the needs of the dominant caste in what is now
the United States. While the requirements to qualify as white have changed over the centuries, the fact of a dominant caste has remained
constant from its inception — whoever fit the definition of white, at whatever point in history, was granted the legal rights and privileges of

1/15/2021 America’s Enduring Caste System – The New York Times

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the dominant caste. Perhaps more critical and tragic, at the other end of the ladder, the subordinated caste, too, has been fixed from the
beginning as the psychological floor beneath which all other castes cannot fall.

Thus we are all born into a silent war game, centuries old, enlisted in teams not of our own choosing. The side to which we are assigned in
the American system of categorizing people is proclaimed by the team uniform that each caste wears, signaling our presumed worth and
potential. That any of us manages to create abiding connections across these manufactured divisions is a testament to the beauty of the
human spirit.

An American Untouchable
In the early winter of 1959, after leading the Montgomery bus boycott that arose from the arrest of Rosa Parks and before the trials and
triumphs to come, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and his wife, Coretta, landed in India, in the city then known as Bombay, to visit the
land of Mohandas K. Gandhi, the father of nonviolent protest. They were covered in garlands upon arrival, and King told reporters, “To
other countries, I may go as a tourist, but to India I come as a pilgrim.”

He had long dreamed of going to India, and they stayed for more than a month, welcomed by Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru. King
wanted to see for himself the place whose fight for freedom from British rule had inspired his fight for justice in America. He wanted to see
the so-called untouchables, the lowest caste in the ancient Indian caste system, whom he had read of and had sympathy for, and who were
left behind after India gained its independence the decade before.

He discovered that people in India had been following the trials of his own oppressed people in America, knew of the bus boycott he led.
Wherever he went, people on the streets of Bombay and Delhi crowded around him for an autograph.

One afternoon, King and his wife journeyed to the southern tip of the country, to the city then known as Trivandrum in the state of Kerala,
and visited with high school students whose families had been untouchables. The principal made the introduction.

“Young people,” he said, “I would like to present to you a fellow untouchable from the United States of America.”

King was floored. He had not expected that word to be applied to him. He was, in fact, put off by it at first. He had flown in from another
continent, had dined with the prime minister. He did not see the connection, did not see what the Indian caste system had to do directly
with him, did not immediately see why the lowest-caste people in India would view him, an American Negro and a distinguished visitor, as
low-caste like themselves, see him as one of them.

“For a moment,” he would later recall, “I was a bit shocked and peeved that I would be referred to as an untouchable.”

Then he began to think about the reality of the lives of the people he was fighting for — 20 million people, consigned to the lowest rank in
America for centuries, “still smothering in an airtight cage of poverty,” quarantined in isolated ghettos, exiled in their own country.

And he said to himself, “Yes, I am an untouchable, and every Negro in the United States of America is an untouchable.” In that moment, he
realized that the Land of the Free had imposed a caste system not unlike the caste system of India and that he had lived under that system
all his life. It was what lay beneath the forces he was fighting in America. He would later describe this awakening at Ebenezer Baptist
Church in Atlanta in 1965 during his sermon for the Fourth of July.

The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in India, whose nonviolent-protest movement inspired
his own. Royal Studio via American Friends Service Committee

1/15/2021 America’s Enduring Caste System – The New York Times

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“Caste” is not a word often applied to the United States. It is considered the language of India or feudal Europe. But some anthropologists
and scholars of race in America have made use of the word for decades. Before the modern era, one of the earliest Americans to take up the
idea of caste was the antebellum abolitionist and U.S. senator Charles Sumner as he fought against segregation in the North. “The
separation of children in the Public Schools of Boston, on account of color or race,” he wrote, “is in the nature of Caste, and on this account
is a violation of Equality.” He quoted a native of India: “Caste makes distinctions among creatures where God has made none.”

What are the origins and workings of the hierarchy that intrudes upon the daily life and life chances of every American? That had intruded
upon my own life with disturbing regularity and consequences? I wanted to understand the origins and evolution of classifying and
elevating one group of people over another and the consequences of doing so to the presumed beneficiaries and to those targeted as
beneath them. Moving about the world as a living, breathing caste experiment myself, I wanted to understand the hierarchies that I and
many millions of others have had to navigate to pursue our work and dreams.

The R Word
Once awakened to the underlying power of caste, we can better see the tool of race for what it is. What we face in our current day is not the
classical racism of our ancestors’ era but a mutation of the software that adjusts to the updated needs of the operating system. In the half
century since civil rights protests forced the United States to make state-sanctioned discrimination illegal, what Americans consider to be
racism has shifted, and now the word is one of the most contentious and misunderstood in American culture. For many in the dominant
caste, the word is radioactive — resented, feared, denied, lobbed back toward anyone who dares to suggest it. Resistance to the word often
derails any discussion of the underlying behavior it is meant to describe, thus eroding it of meaning.

Social scientists often define racism as the combination of racial bias and systemic power, seeing racism, like sexism, as primarily the
action of people or systems with personal or group power over another person or group with less power, as men have power over women,
white people over people of color and the dominant over the subordinate.

But over time, racism has often been reduced to a feeling, a character flaw, conflated with prejudice, connected to whether one is a good
person or not. It has come to mean overt and declared hatred of a person or group because of the race ascribed to them, a perspective few
would ever own up to. While people will admit to or call out sexism or xenophobia or homophobia, people may immediately deflect
accusations of racism, saying they don’t have “a racist bone in their body” or are the “least racist person you could ever meet,” that they
“don’t see color,” that their “best friend is Black,” and they may have even convinced themselves on a conscious level of these things.

What does racism mean in an era when even extremists won’t admit to it? What is the litmus test for racism? Who is racist in a society
where someone can refuse to rent to people of color, arrest brown immigrants en masse or display a Confederate flag but not be “certified”
as a racist unless he or she confesses to it or is caught using derogatory signage or slurs? The instinctive desire to reject the very idea of
current discrimination on the basis of a chemical compound in the skin is an unconscious admission of the absurdity of race as a concept.

With no universally agreed-upon definition, we might see racism as a continuum rather than an absolute. We might release ourselves of
the purity test of whether someone is or is not racist and exchange that mind-set for one that sees people as existing on a scale based on
the toxins they have absorbed from the polluted and inescapable air of social instruction we receive from childhood.

An Atlanta trolley in 1956, before the Supreme Court decision outlawing segregation on
all public buses. Horace Cort/Associated Press

1/15/2021 America’s Enduring Caste System – The New York Times

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Caste, on the other hand, predates the notion of race and has survived the era of formal state-sponsored racism long officially practiced in
the mainstream. The modern-day version of easily deniable racism may be able to cloak the invisible structure that created and maintains
hierarchy and inequality. But caste does not allow us to ignore structure. Caste is structure. Caste is ranking. Caste is the boundaries that
reinforce the fixed assignments based upon what people look like. Caste is a living, breathing entity. It is like a corporation that seeks to
sustain itself at all costs. To achieve a truly egalitarian world requires looking deeper than what we think we see.

Caste is the granting or withholding of respect, status, honor, attention, privileges, resources, benefit of the doubt and human kindness to
someone on the basis of their perceived rank or standing in the hierarchy. Caste pushes back against an African-American woman who,
without humor or apology, takes a seat at the head of the table speaking Russian. It prefers an Asian-American man to put his
technological expertise at the service of the company but not aspire to chief executive. Yet it sees as logical a white 16-year-old serving as
store manager over employees from the subordinate caste three times his age. Caste is insidious and therefore powerful because it is not
hatred; it is not necessarily personal. It is the worn grooves of comforting routines and unthinking expectations, patterns of a social order
that have been in place for so long that it looks like the natural order of things.

What is the difference between racism and casteism? Because caste and race are interwoven in America, it can be hard to separate the
two. Any action or institution that mocks, harms, assumes or attaches inferiority or stereotype on the basis of the social construct of race
can be considered racism. Any action or structure that seeks to limit, hold back or put someone in a defined ranking, seeks to keep
someone in their place by elevating or denigrating that person on the basis of their perceived category, can be seen as casteism.

Casteism is the investment in keeping the hierarchy as it is in order to maintain your own ranking, advantage or privilege or to elevate
yourself above others or keep others beneath you. For those in the marginalized castes, casteism can mean seeking to keep those on your
disfavored rung from gaining on you, to curry the favor and remain in the good graces of the dominant caste, all of which serve to keep the
structure intact.

In the United States, racism and casteism frequently occur at the same time, or overlap or figure into the same scenario. Casteism is about
positioning and restricting those positions, vis-à-vis others. What race and its precursor, racism, do extraordinarily well is to confuse and
distract from the underlying structural and more powerful Sith lord of caste. Like the cast on a broken arm, like the cast in a play, a caste
system holds everyone in a fixed place.

For this reason, many people — including those we might see as good and kind people — could be casteist, meaning invested in keeping
the hierarchy as it is or content to do nothing to change it, but not racist in the classical sense, not active and openly hateful of this or that
group. Actual racists, actual haters, would by definition be casteist, as their hatred demands that those they perceive as beneath them
know and keep their place in the hierarchy.

In everyday terms, it is not racism that prompts a white shopper in a clothing store to go up to a random Black or brown person who is also
shopping and to ask for a sweater in a different size, or for a white guest at a party to ask a Black or brown person who is also a guest to
fetch a drink, as happened to Barack Obama as a state senator, or even perhaps a judge to sentence a subordinate-caste person for an
offense for which a dominant-caste person might not even be charged. It is caste or rather the policing of and adherence to the caste
system. It’s the autonomic, unconscious, reflexive response to expectations from a thousand imaging inputs and neurological societal
downloads that affix people to certain roles based upon what they look like and what they historically have been assigned to or the
characteristics and stereotypes by which they have been categorized. No ethnic or racial category is immune to the messaging we all
receive about the hierarchy, and thus no one escapes its consequences.

When we assume that a woman is not equipped to lead the meeting or the company or the country, or that a person of color or an
immigrant could not be the one in authority, is not a resident of a certain community, could not have attended a particular school or
deserved to have attended a particular school, when we feel a pang of shock and resentment, a personal wounding and sense of unfairness
and perhaps even shame at our discomfort upon seeing someone from a marginalized group in a job or car or house or college or
appointment more prestigious than we have been led to expect, we are reflecting the efficient encoding of caste, the subconscious
recognition that the person has stepped out of his or her assumed place in our society. We are responding to our embedded instructions of
who should be where and who should be doing what, the breaching of the structure and boundaries that are the hallmarks of caste.

Race and caste are not the cause of and do not account for every poor outcome or unpleasant encounter. But caste becomes a factor, to
whatever infinitesimal degree, in interactions and decisions across gender, ethnicity, race, immigrant status, sexual orientation, age or
religion that have consequences in our everyday lives and in policies that affect our country and beyond. It may not be as all-consuming as
its targets may perceive it to be, but neither is it the ancient relic, the long-ago anachronism, that post-racialists, post-haters of everything,
keep wishing away. Its invisibility is what gives it power and longevity. Caste, along with its faithful servant race, is an X-factor in most any
American equation, and any answer one might ever come up with to address our current challenges is flawed without it.

RACE/RELATED: A deep and provocative exploration of race, identity
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1/15/2021 America’s Enduring …

Race: Are We So Different?, First Edition. Alan H. Goodman, Yolanda T. Moses, and Joseph L. Jones.
© 2012 American Anthropological Association. Published 2012 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

Introduction
Race ≠ Human Biological Variation

7

Isn’t Race Biologically Obvious?

You have probably heard it said that race is genetic, or
biological, or physical. Most Americans assume that
there is an unassailably tangible reality to race and that
race has a clear inherent basis. Race is in our genes.
Race seems to be obvious: certain and scientific. Race is
universal. Race is a truth. Without thinking much, you
have probably taken the fact that race is biologically real
and a scientific universal to be unquestionably true.
A fact! Like the air we breathe, race is just there.

But the facts are different from what our eyes tell us.
Simply put, people are different. We see this differ-

ence, first with our eyes and later on by measuring
and by microscopes.

However, this does not mean that races are real.
Human variation is real. Race is an explanation for
that variation. We have better explanations. Evolution
is a much more dynamic and fitting explanation. Our
culture still retains the idea that race explains variation
as a remnant from a time, not so long ago, when we
thought that what was today, was always. The world
did not change. But it evolves and that evolutionary
process explains the variations and similarities among
us. Race, on the other hand, does not.

In part 2 we explore human variation, patterns of
differences and similarities from one person to another
and one group to another. We describe the patterns
we observe over space and time as well as other ways

to look at variation. Our question is, How did the
structure of human variation, the patterns we see,
come to be? In some cases, specifically for skin color
and sickle cell, we use scientific detective work to
make a case for how specifics of evolution and history
lead to these well-known variations. We then explore
why race is a faulty and even harmful explanation.

You might marvel at the many, many physical
differences, or what biologists call outward pheno-
typic differences, among us. People come in different
sizes and shapes. Skin colors are different. So too are
eye colors. Hair varies in color and texture. Our eyes
see lots and lots of difference. Below these visible dif-
ferences are even more variations from the size, shape,
and function of internal organs to single changes in
the chemical structures of molecules such as proteins
and DNA. Vive la différence!

But these differences are not RACE.
Some of you might remember a widely used American

Express Commercial featuring Wilt Chamberlain, the
retired basketball player, and the retired jockey, Willie
Shoemaker. They are similarly attired in white formal
wear against a blue sky. Among their many differences
are skin color and height: Willie is rather short and
light skinned Wilt is rather tall and darker skinned.
Figure 7.1 also foregrounds two famous personalities
from the world of basketball. Jeff Van Gundy, a coach,
is in the suit and Yao Ming, the basketball player is in
the red and white uniform.

Goodman, Alan H., et al. Race : Are We So Different?, John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated, 2012. ProQuest Ebook Central,
http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/upenn-ebooks/detail.action?docID=818189.
Created from upenn-ebooks on 2018-12-07 13:54:18.

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For this discussion, think through personal experiences you or others you
know had with classifying people on biological characteristics other than
skin color. Describe one of these experiences. Using the Rachel Dolezal
case as an example, discuss how you or others have reacted.

● What light does this case shed on race as a cultural versus
biological category?