Satchel Paige
The great Negro League baseball pitcher Satchel Paige gets his own chapter as an iconic symbol of the stupidly self-sacrificial nature of discrimination by caste. Separating the myth of Paige from the reality is probably a useless exercise, but suffice to say that any team in Major League Baseball that was fielding players while Paige languished in the unfairness of the color line suffered every bit as much as he himself. While Paige’s statistics will never be given proper account to allow him to take his place numerically among the best that ever played, it is also equally true that teams perpetually losing out to the dominant likes of the Yankees, Giants, Cardinals and Tigers suffered the potential loss of becoming World Series champions.
Harold Hale
During the Jim Crow era, it was at least an unwritten rule—and probably a rule actually written down in some cases—that black men were never to be addressed as “Mister” and unmarried black women were never to be addressed as “Miss.” At least not in an official circumstance. Harold Hale brilliantly found a way to work around this ridiculous prohibition by deciding—and then actually going through—with a plan to name a daughter he might one day produce Miss. And so it was that those who were introduced to Harold’s daughter had little choice but to address her as Miss Hale.
Albert Einstein
The brilliant physicist might well have ended facing up the ultimate absurdity of the caste system by being among six million Jews murdered by men who were clearly their inferior in every imaginable way had he not managed to escape Germany just before Hitler was named Chancellor. Upon his arrival in the country founded upon the principle that “all men are created equal” he was almost immediately horrified to learn the sad hypocritical truth about America. Although a passionate defender of his adopted homeland, he vigorously brought attention to the systemic racism on which it was founded and operated until he died, recognizing in the discrimination against blacks the history of his own people.
Donald Trump
Because of what is arguably the stupidest system of counting votes in an election ever devised, Donald Trump managed to become President in 2016 despite receiving more than three million fewer votes than his competitor. The demographics of those groups which voted for Trump are so starkly drawn that they become a “remarkable blueprint of caste hierarchy in America.” In other words, Trump’s greatest percentage of votes align with near-perfect precision to the breakdown of castes in America from the most plentiful to the least with his gaining the lion’s share of white male voters while, barely a third of the overall Hispanic vote, and while the number of black women who cast their vote for Trump barely even registers as statistical fraction of the overall population. The 2016 election—and, subsequently, the 2020 electoral and popular loss for Trump—serve to put into sharply defined relief the problems America is facing with caste division years after the ascendency of Barack Obama to the White House supposedly signaled the end of racism in the country.
