You were born when? You, too, are responsible for this!

In retrospect, the comments to this post from four years ago come across as being consistent with how supremacists view the world.

In my post, I wrote, "The older I get, the more I am appalled that people lived and behaved so awfully.  Especially my people who belonged to the privileged upper caste."  I followed it up with, "Deep down within me, I want the leaders of the Brahmin community to issue a formal and heartfelt apology."

That was about the caste system in which I was born into the upper caste of Brahmin.

I reflected on the atrocities here in my adopted land, and I wrote, "we have a long way to go to correcting the grievous errors of the past."

The commenters, on the other hand, did not see any reason for any kind of a "I am sorry."

Referring to their horrible (ill)logic, I responded that according to them, "I, as a naturalized citizen, am in the clear and do not have to worry a bit about the American past, right?"  How twisted is that logic!  It has always been clear to me that "It is not about "victimhood" but about honest engagement with the past. It is our collective responsibility even though I--as an individual--had no part in this."

For a long time, I have been feeling the weight of caste issues from the old country, and anti-Blackness in the adopted country.  Two unbearable burdens, as I have referred to them.

Isabel Wilkerson brings them together in her latest book, Caste.  The book arrived a couple of days ago.  It lives up to the expectations.

Kwame Anthony Appiah articulates my feelings for me, as great writers do:

In chapter after chapter, Wilkerson brings out suggestive similarities in the treatment of Dalits in India, African-Americans in the United States and Jews in Nazi Germany. Lower-caste members are dehumanized and stigmatized, kept in their place through cruelty and terror, and forbidden to intermarry with members of the higher castes. Privileges are arrogated to the high caste. Pollution comes from contact with the low caste. When, in the 1960s, a Black civil rights activist sought to “integrate” a pool by swimming a lap, Wilkerson tells us, it was subsequently drained and entirely refilled to appease its white users.
What distinguishes Wilkerson is her grasp of the power of individual narratives to illustrate such general ideas, allowing her to tell us what these abstract notions have meant in the lived experience of ordinary people both of the higher castes (white Americans, Brahmins and “Aryan” Germans) and of the lowest (African-Americans, Dalits and Jews).

I am approaching the halfway mark of the book, and that is exactly how I feel about Wilkerson's writing.  The connections that she makes across the different strings of history when helping us understand the dark chapters of history!

While Wilkerson including the Nazi framework is understandable for how those monsters drew ideas from the American treatment of Blacks and Native Americans, the manner in which the Nazis treated their "others," especially the Jewish population, is starkly different from how the enslaved were treated and how the Dalits fared in India.  This is a point that this review in The New Yorker brings up:

In the book’s comparison of the Third Reich to India and America, for example, a rather jarring distinction is set aside: the final objective of Nazi ideology was to eliminate Jewish people, not just to subordinate them. While American whites and Indian upper castes exploited Blacks and Dalits to do their menial labor, the Nazis came to see no functional role for Jews. In Nazi propaganda, Jews weren’t backward, bestial, natural-born toilers; they were cunning arch-manipulators of historical events. (When Goebbels and other Nazis reviled “extreme Jewish intellectualism” and claimed that Jews had helped orchestrate Germany’s defeat in the Great War, they were insisting on Jewish iniquity, not occupational incapacity.) The violence exercised against Dalits in India and Black people in America provides an ill-fitting template for eliminationist anti-Semitism.

In the US and in India, the system made sure that everyone knew their respective stations and stayed there.  Any attempt to rise above one's station meant extreme violence for the "untouchable."

From 1619 to 1865 was a long 250 years of enslaving human beings.  And then another 100 years of separate-and-unequal.  How can we move forward?

I took a peek at the epilogue.  Isabel Wilkerson refers to the same framework that we always end up with--create a Truth and Reconciliation Commission.

For that, and more, we first need to vote away from power all the white supremacists--starting with the one in the White House.