Caste - Sermon for Week Ending October 17, 2020

Readings:

From Caste: The Origins of our Discontents

Caste is the granting or withholding of respect, status, honor, attention, privileges, resources, benefit of the doubt, and human kindness to someone on the basis of their perceived rank or standing in the hierarchy. It is the warm grooves of comforting routines and unthinking expectations, patterns of a social order that have been in place for so long that it looks like the natural order of things. Casteism is the investment in keeping the hierarchy as it is in order to maintain your own ranking, advantage, privilege, and keep others beneath you.

From Matthew 15: 21-28.

Jesus went to the district of Tyre and Sidon. A Canaanite woman from that region came out and started shouting, “Have mercy on me Lord! My daughter is being tormented by a demon.” But he did not answer at all, and the disciples came and urged him saying, “Send her away, for she keeps shouting after us.” Jesus said, “I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.” But she knelt before him, saying, “Lord, help me.” He answered, “It is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.” She said, “Yes, but even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their master’s table.” Then Jesus answered, “Great is your faith. Let it be done for you as you wish.” And her daughter was healed instantly.

Sermon: 

I have just finished this very interesting book, Caste: The Origins of our Discontents by journalist and author Isabel Wilkerson. She defines caste as “an artificial ranking of human value that uses rigid boundaries to keep the ranked groups apart and in their assigned places.” She expands on that definition throughout the book, as we heard in our reading. And she looks at 3 different caste systems: India, Nazi Germany, and America, saying that, in India, the Dalits were the untouchables. In Nazi Germany, it was the Jews. And in the United States, it is black people.

Caste, she says, is the underlying structure of race and class. Someone of any race can rise in class through hard work and ingenuity, but caste is fixed at birth, and those who are at the bottom will remain at the bottom. She quotes NBA star LeBron James, who says, “No matter how great you become in life, no matter how wealthy you become, how people worship you or what you do, if you are an African-American man or an African-American woman, you will always be that.” Her research led her to identify the pillars of belief that caste rests on, like divine will and heredity. One of the strangest ones to me is the belief in the purity of the dominant caste and the fear of pollution from the castes beneath it, which is where ‘untouchable’ originated. This belief has been on display here in the U.S throughout history,  in the supposed sanctity of water. Even as late as the 1970’s when I was a teenager, African-Americans were banned from white beaches, lakes, and pools, lest they pollute them.

And the white dominant caste went to great lengths to enforce the bans. When St. Louis attempted to open their public pools to black people, white mobs chased, kicked, and beat any black person they saw coming to the pool, including children on bicycles. In Cincinnati, whites threw nails and broken glass into the water. When a civil rights activist attempted to integrate a public pool by diving in and swimming a lap, the pool was drained and filled with fresh water. White people would not go into water that had touched black skin. On the PBS show, Tell Me More, lawyer and Justice advocate Bryan Stevenson recently shared a personal experience about a pool that has stayed with him his whole life. When he was a kid, their family was traveling from their home in Delaware to South Carolina, and they spent the first night in a hotel. When they saw the pool, he and his sister couldn’t wait to get in. They stood at the edge.

He held her, and they jumped in, and it was glorious. Then he noticed that all the white parents “were going crazy,” shouting to their children, “get out of the pool, get out of the pool,” and children were scrambling to get out. Finally there was one little boy left. His father came and grabbed him by the arm and yanked him out. Bryan asked the man, “What’s wrong?” And he said, “You are wrong, followed by a racial epithet.” Stevenson said that black people have so many of these memories that they have to find a way to navigate them so they can stay healthy. He said, when they were teens, he and his sister told a different version of this story to their friends, that she stood on the side and said, “All white people out. I’m coming in.” They all knew it wasn’t true, but it was a way to carry the story, he said, so they could hold onto their humanity. How did humans get to the place of believing that they could be polluted by other humans? Wilkerson says that the caste system was created and is maintained by continually persuading a majority of people that it is ordained by God for certain people to be lower than others, some even subhuman. I don’t think those white children in the pool believed that they would be polluted by the black children. But their parents did. And soon enough, they would too. Caste is a state of mind that holds everyone captive. Even Jesus wasn’t immune.  In our gospel reading, Jesus, who was of higher rank than the Canaanite woman, first ignored her plea to heal her daughter, then said he didn’t heal her kind, and drove the point home by calling her a derogatory name. It took her prodding to get him to take a look at what he is doing and ask himself why? To take off his cultural blinders and awaken to the tyranny of the caste system.

Jesus was open to being awakened. And he made a choice to see past artificial boundaries. He and the Canaanite woman reached across caste and made a connection as two humans. We can do that too. We must do it if we want a world of justice and equality. But it will take work. It will take rejecting the myth that we always took for truth. For those of us in the dominate caste, it will take owning our responsibility for helping to maintain the system which benefits us to the detriment of others. And it will take radical empathy, to listen to and work to understand other folks’ lived experience. We can change our mindsets so that we who in the dominant caste can choose not to dominate. And we who are in a subordinate caste can resist the box others try to force on us. We can become invested in the well-being of all our fellow humans, and join together to help solve the problems of our world.