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.
Although caste is a not a difficult concept to understand, it is not one typically applied to American society. Caste is usually presented as a societal division that exists halfway across the world in countries where class is much more rigidly divided as a result of traditions going far back in time to an origination existing before America was born. In the U.S. the natural assumption is that caste is relatively the same as racial segregation, but the author takes pains to make sure this distinction is clarified. Without fully understanding the more subtle means by which castes exist and operate in American society, it would be almost impossible to apply the meaning here as it is more easily understood relative to countries like India.
The only way to keep an entire group of sentient beings in an artificially fixed place, beneath all others and beneath their own talents, is with violence and terror, psychological and physical, to preempt resistance before it can be imagined. Evil asks little of the dominant caste other than to sit back and do nothing.
The book starts off with a glimpse of sedition and rebellion against the Nazi machine of Germany. A description is given of a famous image in which one man among hundreds of Hitler-heiling lemmings sits with both arms defiantly by his side as he becomes a singular Waldo one is at great pains to find without the assistance of an arrow or circle pointing him out. We don’t normally associate Nazi fascism with caste systems either simply because it was of such a monumental evil that it makes any association with something like Indian culture beyond the pale. And yet, among those who occupy the oppressive castes in any country, the question must inevitably arise: how are these cultures really any different? A caste system can only exist and remain intact and become a systemic expectation of political ideology when accompanied by evil. Where that evil is comprehensive or more limited is beside the point.
Thus, before there was a United States of America, there was the caste system, born in colonial Virginia. At first, religion, not race as we now know it, defined the status of people in the colonies. Christianity, as a proxy for Europeans, generally exempted European workers from lifetime enslavement. This initial distinction is what condemned, first, indigenous people, and, then, Africans, most of whom were not Christian upon arrival, to the lowest rung of an emerging hierarchy before the concept of race had congealed to justify their eventual and total debasement.
The derivation of this point of origination is located in the first attempt to conduct a colonial census in Virginia in 1630. Although the population of the colony was quite clearly significantly made up of African stolen to become slaves, they were not deemed worthy of inclusion in the official count, at least not according to the same standards as white Europeans. Their arrival into colony came without knowledge of name or age because, obviously, there was no way to determine those things, much less any interest in specifics. This is that that dividing line between race and caste that is alluded to in the opening quote above. Race became related to the color of their skin (because up to that point there really had never been any such concept as racial difference), but the lowering of their placement in society is the example of how caste came to exist in American society.
