March 25, 2024
A week ago, courtesy of the activist group Until Freedom, I attended a screening of Origin, Ava DuVernay’s brilliant adaptation of Isabel Wilkerson’s groundbreaking book, Caste. The film could not have arrived at a better time than now, as we confront regimes around the world determined to uphold or install rigid caste systems that arbitrarily cement a marginalized group to permanent lower class status.
Both the film and the book powerfully make the point that societies that ruthlessly dehumanize one segment of their society in order to mark them for subjugation or extermination have more similarities than differences. They draw parallels between the United States and Nazi Germany, who modeled their Nuremberg Laws after the Jim Crow laws of the American South. Origin and Caste also do a deep dive into the original caste system in India, exploring the harsh persecution of the Dalit people.
Origin does not argue that the caste systems of the United States, Nazi Germany and India are identical, but that they share common structural features, giving us a framework for understanding how such systems persist or re-emerge, so that we can recognize the danger signs.
We are at such a moment in the United States right now, and the lights are blinking red. The outcome of this presidential election will determine whether we hurtle backwards 100 years, or continue our fitful journey towards embracing multiracial democracy. The signs are not good. Although many Black people, LGBTQ people and women of all races have been shouting from the rooftops that Trump and this version of the Republican Party pose an existential threat to democracy, a disturbingly large number of people seem oddly complacent.
Even though several of Trump’s former staffers say he is unfit for office and his own Vice President refuses to endorse him, one of our major broadcast networks, NBC, responded by hiring former RNC chair and election denier, Ronna McDaniel, as a political analyst. When Trump promised a bloodbath if he loses and called migrants “animals” at a rally, the initial defense by Republican apologists was to ask us to put Trump’s remarks “in context.” As Mehdi Hassan said, the context is that these were statements made by a man who fomented an insurrection in which people were killed, (Source: “Trump, a ‘Bloodbath’ and ‘The Banality of Crazy,’” by Mehdi Hassan, Zeteo.com, 3/18/24).
Trump’s full-throated embrace of the most vile stereotypes and his efforts during his first presidency to enact policies to persecute everyone from Black people, to Muslims, to asylum seekers to Trans people created a permission structure for everybody else. Americans are no longer shy about saying the quiet part out loud and an entire movement funded by billionaires has been supercharged to ban Black history and queer lives and to reduce every woman to a breeding vessel with no control over her own body. This movement seeks nothing less than to torch every program or initiative that tries to level the playing field for Black people and other marginalized groups of Americans and remedy past discrimination. They want to return to the jurisprudence of the Dred Scott decision, where Black people had “no rights the white man was bound to respect.”
As Nikole Hannah Jones detailed in her essay in The New York Times, just as the right had a 50 year game plan for overturning Roe v. Wade, from the moment that Barry Goldwater lost in 1964, the right made a plan to reverse the gains of the civil rights movement, (Source: “The ‘Colorblindness’ Trap. How A Civil Rights Idea Got Hijacked,” by Nikole Hannah Jones, The New York Times, 3/13/24). Conservative Justices redefined affirmative action to mean the pursuit of “diversity” for its own sake, rather than the redress of the continuing harm suffered by Black Americans as a result of slavery and the ensuing 100 year Jim Crow regime of segregation and terror. Recasting the goal of affirmative action as “cosmetic,” rather than rooted in justice, made it much easier to attack and dismantle.
This is how we find ourselves in the present moment, where tech bros embrace debunked and discredited “scientific racism” and bankroll the quacks who peddle it, (Source: “Why an Unremarkable Racist Enjoyed the Backing of Billionaires,” by Jamelle Bouie, The New York Times, 8/12/23). Dope-addled Klan Wizard Elon Musk platforms the most vile antisemitism and racism, retweeting “great replacement theory” posts and blaming Boeing’s faulty door plugs on Black pilots. The continuing decision by major media outlets to platform these people and sanitize their truly hateful and anti-democratic ideas is evidence either that our media is so warped by greed they don’t care about the content, as long as it gets views or that they’re silently hoping to re-establish a rigid white, patriarchal, supremacist caste system, with Black people permanently at the bottom, queer people back in the closet and women the virtual property of men. As Sinclair Lewis warned us nearly a century ago, don’t think it can’t happen here.