I considered using the blog archive in the lower left of the blog web page to post links to August 11 posts in 2019-15 just to show what was on my mind then. But there are other items that have more value at this time.
Main item for me is the book by Isabel Wilkerson called "Caste". Wilkerson is the author of "The Warmth of Other Suns", about the movement of African Americans out of the South and into the North. I have only read about 8% of the book but I can tell that Wilkerson is my kind of writer. I read that Oprah Winfrey picked the Caste book for her book club recommendation and said it was the most important book she had ever picked. She described what happened as her work to understand class and caste in all societies and especially India, which has a very old systems of castes, attracted the attention of scholars of India, many in the US. She was invited to a conference such scholars held. She writes:
To their astonishment, I began to be able to tell who was high-born and who was low-born among the Indian people among us, not from what they looked like, as one might in the United States, but on the basis of the universal human response to hierarchy—in the case of an upper-caste person, an inescapable certitude in bearing, demeanor, behavior, a visible expectation of centrality.
After one session, I went up to a woman presenter whose caste I had ascertained from observing her interactions. I noticed that she had reflexively stood over the Dalit speaker and had taken it upon herself to explain what the Dalit woman had just said or meant, to take a position of authority. as if by second nature, perhaps without realizing it.
We chatted a bit, and then I said to her, "I believe you must be upper caste, are you not?" She looked crestfallen. "How did you know?" she said, "I try so hard." We talked for what seemed an hour more, and I could see the effort it took to manage the unconscious signals of encoded superiority, the presence of mind necessary to counteract the programming of caste. I could see how hard it was even for someone committed to healing the caste divide, who was, as it turned out, married to a man from the subordinate caste and who was deeply invested in egalitarian ideals.
Wilkerson, Isabel. Caste (Oprah's Book Club) (p. 31). Random House Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
