The analogy between Indian caste and American race – an analogy acknowledged by Martin Luther King, amongst others – is essential for a lot of causes. Not least of those is that once you observe how a unique society handles an identical drawback, you may see how parochial your personal society’s strategy may need been.
I used to be struck by this level in studying the work of B.R. Ambedkar, the well-known advocate for the rights of India’s lowest caste teams (previously referred to as “untouchables” and now referred to as “scheduled caste” or SC, referred to by Ambedkar as Dalit or “oppressed”). The actual work of Ambedkar’s I used to be studying was a well-known undelivered speech entitled Annihilation of Caste.
Already within the title of this work we see how totally different Ambedkar’s strategy is from that of typical lower-caste Individuals. It’s fairly uncommon for Individuals to name for the annihilation of race! Black racial abolitionists, like Amir Zaki and Kmele Foster, are positively on the market, however they’re seen as bizarre at greatest, and infrequently related to the political proper wing or centre-right – not one thing anybody would ever accuse Ambedkar of. Individuals will in fact name for abolishing racism, however they nonetheless need to hold race. A few of them even inform you to embrace it.
But, simply as our earliest data present caste in India was all the time a hierarchical phenomenon, by the point François Bernier invented the pseudo-biological idea of race, Europe was already deeply enmeshed in its undertaking of colonizing the remainder of the world, and that undertaking was deeply aided by the newly invented characterization of Europeans as “white”. Ambedkar by no means goals of claiming “let’s hold caste however do away with casteism”; the individuals who say which might be his extra conservative opponents, like Gandhi, who usually are not actually all that bothered by the hierarchy. For Ambedkar it’s apparent that if you wish to do away with caste oppression you need to do away with caste. Caste is casteism. And I more and more suspect that he could also be proper about that in a extra international context: to completely do away with racial oppression, I feel we’ll must do away with race.
One passage of Ambedkar’s is especially revealing, each about how sincerely he believes within the abolition of caste, and about how far his view is from the American mainstream:
I’m satisfied that the true treatment is intermarriage. Fusion of blood can alone create the sensation of being kith and kin, and until this sense of kinship, of being kindred, turns into paramount, the separatist feeling—the sensation of being aliens—created by caste won’t vanish…. The true treatment for breaking caste is intermarriage. Nothing else will function the solvent of caste. (Annihilation of Caste 20.5)
By proposing intermarriage as an answer, Ambedkar hopes to finish caste not simply as an idea, however as a phenomenon: caste teams have been outlined partly by their separateness, and as soon as they combine, caste distinctions will make much less sense. Such an answer is anathema to classical brahminical texts just like the Bhagavad Gītā, which specifies that caste mixing (varṇasaṃkara) “results in hell for each the destroyers of the household and the household itself” (I.42). For Ambedkar, being anathema in that means is a part of the purpose: the normal “Hindu” caste-based social order rests on a separation and segregation that’s outlined in opposition to intermarriage, and intermarriage is a means of resisting it.
Now Ambedkar’s answer would instantly run into a major drawback within the American context. Ambedkar’s nice foe the dharmaśāstras – these oppressor’s handbooks that order a lower-caste individual’s ears needs to be full of molten lead for the crime of listening to sacred texts – additionally specify that the offspring of an inter-caste marriage belongs to the decrease caste. Like American segregationists, dharmaśāstra seen intermarriage as polluting the higher group: the product of miscegenation is within the decrease group and nothing extra.
The issue, in fact, is that “progressive” Individuals assume the segregationists have been proper. If, like Kamala Harris, you occur to be the combo of two decrease races, they may communicate glowingly about the way you belong to each of them and act indignant at anybody who denies that. However relating to white background, they take without any consideration the view of the segregationists that preceded them, the view of the dharmaśāstra: that one drop of non-white blood denies you any of Harris’s hybridity, any declare to any quantity of whiteness. Obama’s blackness crowds out his whiteness totally, such that not one of the latter is left. Ambedkar’s treatment is a non-starter to most Individuals as a result of they’ll’t even deal with the very idea of people who find themselves half white and half non-white, half brahmin and half śūdra. Of their eyes, that mixing doesn’t really break down racial boundaries; it simply creates extra people who find themselves totally “of color” and under no circumstances white.
The commonest defence I’ve heard progressives make of their strategy to white purity is that this: they observe that the majority “black” folks within the US have at the least some white ancestry (usually for horrible causes), in order that to acknowledge blended folks as blended may finish the very idea of black identification.
And to that I say: good!
Each idea of racial identification, qua racial identification, is sure up with racism and its historical past. So as to assist abolish race ultimately, we’d nonetheless must make some non permanent and selective use of racial classes. However what we shouldn’t do is make that race our identification! Ending black identification, and white identification and the remainder, is precisely what we needs to be aiming at doing.
This isn’t in any respect to denigrate the wealthy and admirable tradition that Individuals have come to know as “black” or “African-American”, or to say that anybody ought to stop figuring out with that tradition. These raised in that tradition have each motive to be pleased with rock’n’roll and Martin Luther King Jr. and the opposite magnificent merchandise of their shared historical past. I might by no means need to see that tradition’s identification finish. However what defines that tradition shouldn’t be being black! An immigrant from Nigeria or Ethiopia has her personal separate historical past, one in some ways additional faraway from “African-American” tradition than white Individuals’ tradition is. Jamaican and Haitian cultures are separate too. To outline the African-American, the Ethiopian and the Haitian all primarily as “black”, reasonably than via every of their distinct wealthy heritages, is to decrease every. It appears to me that eliminating “black” identification does each teams a service.
I’m the proud product of intermarriage, between a brahmin and a white girl: a criminal offense that might horrify each the dharmaśāstras and the segregationists. And I’ve seen – I’ve lived – what a post-racial world seems to be like. I feel extra racial mixing will help us get there – however we have now to acknowledge it as mixing, not merely as a fall from whiteness. The racially various societies of Latin America, for his or her half, appear to me considerably extra superior on this regard than their neighbours to the north; they’ve embraced mestizaje, mixing. Quico Toro factors out that Venezuelans embraced Ambedkar’s answer of varṇasaṁkara centuries in the past, such that “Venezuelans basically have been presumed to be a little bit bit white, a little bit bit black and a little bit bit indigenous.” And so now Venezuelans, fairly sensibly in my opinion, use “white” and black” to refer solely to pores and skin tone, and can’t comprehend the best way Individuals use these phrases as markers of ethnic identification:
Attempt to clarify to a Venezuelan that in lots of instances an American selecting up the cellphone can inform immediately whether or not the individual on the opposite finish of the road is Black, and also you’ll get an uncomprehending stare again.
“Wait, what? Does their pores and skin someway change their voice?! How?!”
A Venezuelan is aware of that she’s totally different from a Brazilian or a Mexican, however she is aware of that that distinction is cultural. Being “black” or “white”, then again – that’s like being tall or quick, blonde or brunette. It doesn’t outline you the best way it defines folks up right here. That’s to not say that Latin Individuals have solved racism, by any means – however it certain appears to me like they’ve bought additional than the US has.
