Caste 2 - Sermon for week ending October 24, 2020

Reading 

From Caste: The Origin of our Discontents by Isabel Wilkerson

When people have lived with assumptions long enough, passed down through the generations as incontrovertible fact, they are as accepted as the truths of physics. They are as true and as unremarkable as the air that we breathe. In a caste system, the abiding faith in the entitlement of birth becomes enmeshed in the minds of the dominant caste, so that if a lower caste person rises, the response by the dominant caste person is to perceive a threat to their existence, a heightened sense of unease, of displacement, of fear for their very survival. 

Sermon

I’m devoting a second week to this book, Caste: The Origins of our Discontents. If you are reading it and want to delve more deeply, since it is an Oprah Book Club pick, there are lots of good resources online, including a podcast, with Oprah and the author, Isabel Wilkerson talking about the book with a panel of folks from different places in the caste hierarchy. And filmmaker Ava DuVernay, who brought us When they See Us, 13^th, and Selma is making it into a film for Netflix. There is so much in this book that is relevant to everything we have been talking about this summer and fall. The topic of Chapter 11, for example, is being played out these very days.  It is called “Dominant group Status Threat,” and it is at the root of so much of the hatred and vitriol coming from white people aimed at black people. Wilkerson notes in the chapter that working class white people need the demarcation of caste the most because they have relied on the illusion, perpetuated in the Jim Crowe South, that no matter what downward social mobility they experienced, they would never be on the bottom. They would always be above black people. She quotes historian David Roediger, who said about this group,“They might lose everything, but not their whiteness. Psychologically, this gave them a since of safety.” But they saw things beginning to change with the Civil Rights movement, which opened up the job market to African Americans. People that they had viewed as inherently inferior were now in the mainstream, which left them with the fear that their white skin might be losing the value it had had in the past. Black people became a threat to their place in the hierarchy. During the 8 years of an African American president, these working class white people began to feel more and more threatened, and the fear that their standing was losing ground became worse. By 2016, they were proclaiming that they were more discriminated against than black people, who were taking their jobs away from them. These fears and resentments made them receptive to the racist and xenophobic messages of the white supremacy movement. Attaching themselves to politicians who voiced white supremacist views, they were even willing to vote against their own interests, healthcare and the government programs they were benefitting from, because of their greater need to maintain their status as members of the dominant caste. Wilkerson says there is no greater motivator than the belief that undeserving groups are getting ahead while your group is left behind. A recent PRRI survey revealed that 65% of white working-class Americans believe that American culture and way of life has deteriorated since the 1950’s. They report feeling like strangers in their own country, and they are doing whatever they have to do to protect the caste hierarchy. We are seeing this in action every day, across our country, our state, and our town. White people mock the murders of black people by police, and celebrate when the police aren’t held accountable. They vilify the Black Lives Matter movement, and venerate the armed white supremacists who show up at protests and shoot unarmed black Americans at will. Those in the dominant caste who fear their demise have always reacted by seeking to destroy those in subordinate castes. It’s the cause of most wars. Someone fears that someone else might take away what they believe is rightfully theirs. So they eliminate them to maintain their superiority. We see it in the church, as we learned more about from the book White Too Long .And we see it throughout the Bible, in the persecution of the Jews, by higher castes, the Egyptians, the Babylonians, the Persians. It’s in all the prophetic books and the Psalms. It’s in the gospels, from the Romans, and throughout the New Testament. The caste system, the belief that it is ordained by God and necessary for society that certain groups are below others has been around for so long, and is so deeply ingrained in the human mind that it seems almost impossible to be free from it. But it isn’t impossible. What humans built, humans can dismantle. In the last paragraph of the book, Wilkerson gives us a view of what our world could be if we were to free ourselves from the illusion of caste. She says, “In a world without caste, instead of a false swagger over our own tribe or family or ascribed community, we would look upon all humanity with wonderment, astonished at what our species is capable of and grateful to be alive to experience it. In a world without caste, being male or female, light or dark, immigrant or native-born would have no bearing on what anyone was perceived as capable of. We would recognize that we are in need of one another more than we have been led to believe. A world without caste would set everyone free.” May we continue to do all that we can to help dismantle this system, this mindset, that keeps us so separated from one another and replace it with one that brings us together.