On caste, not-Chris-Pine-guy, and degree revocation

2021, Week 1 Musings

This is hopefully the first of weekly posts this year I’ll call “Musings” which are all the scraps that I think are worth sharing but not substantive enough to be “entrees” (like my post about the events at the Capitol). I’m basically jotting random ideas down on Google Keep, and each weekend I’ll see if I can whip up a meaningful enough parfait.

Two books, Caste and A Promised Land: The former by Isabel Wilkerson had the more profound impact on my thinking, while the latter by President Obama simply deepened my admiration for him. In recent years I’ve generally used the mental framework of class more so than race, but Wilkerson introduces caste in an American context, which I think does the same work of breaking free of racial essentialism (which I think is one of those dangerous off-road excursions some on the progressive left are taking) to focus more on hardwired tribalism, which grabs simply grabs ahold of whatever is most salient (often race, but not always) and attempts to assert dominance and power at the expense of the other. Especially effective is her intertwining exploration of caste in America, India, and Nazi Germany (a passage about the Nazis literally researching the American South and offering ideas about how to define Jewishness based on bloodlines, and Hitler literally finding the American model too intense, will floor you). She reminded me that beyond hardwired psychology, and what she neatly describes as “group narcissism” of the dominant…