Experiments with Caste| Wokeism#7

As we move ahead with our series on Wokeism, we arrive at an important juncture where the course of the series would be a mix of western centric and India centric topics. In this part we are going to look at the concept of caste being mixed in the American framework of Black/White racial politics and also the attempt to project African Americans and Dalits to be the victims of a same kind.

 

 

 

In the recent times, Isabel Wilkerson, an African-American journalist and author used the term caste to articulate the struggles between the Blacks and Whites in the USA. She equates race with caste. She says that the Indian society is the world’s original caste system which results in racism in the US and India. According to her, there was no identity such as Blacks, also, there were no such people called Whites. The identities of the Black people comprised their particular tribes in Africa and the Whites identified themselves to be Germans, French, Irish, Italians, etc.

 

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The Blacks became blacks and the Whites became whites only due the caste system. She says that the American caste system began after several years after the arrival of the first Africans to the US in 1619. Wilkerson equates the Whites and Brahmins. She says that the Whites belong to the upper caste, Asians and Latinos to be the middle caste and African Americans to be the lowest caste. According to her, the American society has the caste system as its invisible skeleton that is central to the operation of racism and that the caste is the operating system for social, economic and political interactions in the United States.

 

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Suraj Yengde, senior fellow at Harvard Kennedy School has expanded the Critical Race Theory beyond its original scope of racism. He believes that caste is the mother of all problems. He believes Brahmins to be villains for caste abuses and the caste hierarchy is built into the core values of Hinduism. According to him, this caste system has taken lives of thousands of innocent lives since a very long time. The Brahmins are protectors of this system, so they must be attacked and Hinduism must be dismantled. This must be done on a global scale. He applies the Critical Race Theory to caste and projects Brahmins to be White Americans and Dalits as the Black Americans. He also believes the globally rejected Aryan Invasion Theory to be true and that the Brahmins continued the Aryan traditions in which women were not treated equally, which has produced the fashionable terminology of Brahminical Patriarchy.

 

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These experimentations with the caste and race are slowly gaining ground in the US (caste is not recognized by law as a category of discrimination in the US) , particularly in the corporate ecosystem where the company owners have been hiring professionals for their Environmental Social and Governance (ESG) programs where these caste-race theories are tutored.