America’s Enduring Caste System

We've already been over this with the working class and the ruling class, Karl Marx talked about it a lot. What are we going to do about it? I say we seize the means of production.

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.

.... 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.

Excellent article, really helpful analysis of where we’re at.

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What a smug and delusional article. Anyone who has been to a country with a real, hard enforced caste system knows the US lacks one in any meaningful way. It especially does not exist at the top, where all the data collected clearly indicates a class problem with very, very rich people collecting most of the money and everyone else fighting for scraps they distribute worldwide.

This is especially evident in the author's total disregard for the end of sharecropping as the South industrialized in the 1930s, a massive effort that made civil rights plausible by tearing down the old system. Apparently all the manufacturing jobs, jobs that are statistically some of the most diverse and quantitatively hire the most black people of any sector, don't matter and are not worth consideration. Same for South Africa, whose industrialization forced a more visible crisis which inevitably ended Apartheid. Israel is the last holdout of old caste systems but this is not mentioned in the article despite their connection to US police policy via the war on terror. This is elitist logic at it's finest, and it is the deliberate ignorance on display here is why people vote for Trump.