On vacation in the cool and rainy Pfalz, I have finally finished reading Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents by Isabel Wilkerson. It is a powerful book, surgically clinical in its analysis, but down to earth with innumerable examples and stories that illustrate and support her analysis – masterfully written. If you have not read it, read it! I am still trying to sort out my thoughts and emotions. In the book Wilkerson examines the well-known history of racism and discrimination in the US, the 13 year terror of the Nazi dictatorship in Germany and the age-old caste system in India. In my almost 40 years of living in Germany, I have learned and studied German history, especially recent German history, to try to understand how such a civilized and advanced culture could descend so low. That is a journey on which many of my generation here have also embarked. I just joined them.
As a White male Southerner who grew up and started school under Jim Crow (my school was not desegregated until I started the 8th grade), I soon saw parallels between life in Nazi Germany and life in the Jim Crow South. It is nonetheless chilling to read how Wilkerson develops and explains the parallels. The Nazis studied the American South, the Jim Crow legislation, for example, to help them figure out how to codify their discrimination against Jews, Sinti and Roma and others. In her analysis of casteism, Wilkerson shows convincingly how destructive such discriminatory conceptions also are for those at the top of the caste hierarchy.
Mulling over this book after having finished it much too late one night, I remembered W.E.B. DuBois and James Baldwin. For these two thinkers have also written on the effect of racism on the racists.
If you have heard of DuBois and can remember one thing he wrote, it is probably The Souls of Black Folk. At least, that is the first book by DuBois I remember hearing about. It is still on my list of books to read in this vacation, summer 2023. However, he also wrote an essay entitled “The Souls of White Folk,” which I have read. It is a playful, amusing, savage deconstruction of the absurdity and brutality of white supremacy. In the midst of his bitterness and anger DuBois lays out the corrosive effect this illusion has on white souls that believe it: “Am I, in my blackness, the sole sufferer? I suffer. And yet, somehow,… there surges in me a vast pity,– pity for a people imprisoned and enthralled, hampered and made miserable for such a cause, such a fantasy!… A true and worthy ideal frees and uplifts a people; a false ideal imprisons and lowers.”[1]
James Baldwin puts it a bit differently. In all of his work, he combats the “lie of whiteness.” (See, for example his essay, “On Being White… And Other Lies,” Essence, April 1984). The thought that the racists harm themselves shows up repeatedly in his writings in different formulations. The perhaps clearest and directed statement is found in an essay, “Down at the Cross: Letter from a Region in my Mind,” which first appeared in The New Yorker, November 17, 1962, under the title “Letter from a Region in my Mind”: “It is so simple a fact and one that is so hard, apparently, to grasp: Whoever debases others debases himself. That is not a mystical statement but a most realistic one, which is proved by the eyes of any Alabama sheriff….” That was in 1962. We know the old black-and-white photos and news clips and can recognize the debasement there. Sadly, it is still around. If you look into the eyes of the White supremacists in Charlottesville or others you can easily find on cable or YouTube, you will see the same twisted, tortured, dehumanized souls as in one of those sheriffs.
In their analyses of racism and casteism Wilkerson, DuBois and Baldwin show how destructive such discriminatory conceptions are for those at the top of the racial or caste hierarchy. You can only maintain these ways of thinking by dehumanizing those below you. The cost of keeping your place at the top of the hierarchy is dehumanizing yourself. Wilkerson’s, DuBois’s and Baldwin’s words radiate a radical humanism. In the midst of their advocacy and struggle for the acceptance of discriminated groups as full members of the human race, they sincerely care for the misguided racists or upper caste discriminators. Reading these words and feeling their passionate, radical humanism humbles me.
These conclusions are not only the result of observation and analysis. Recent empirical confirmation of the negative effects of racism and casteism for those on top comes from Jonathan Metzl. In his book, Dying of Whiteness: How the Politics of Racial Resentment is Killing America’s Heartland, published 2019, he shows that more and more White Americans are dying “because white America’s investment in maintaining an imagined place atop a racial hierarchy—that is, an investment in a sense of whiteness—ironically harms the aggregate well-being of U.S. whites as a demographic group, thereby making whiteness itself a negative health indicator.”[2]
However, we must go farther than only fighting “the lie of whiteness,” as Baldwin calls it. Martin Oliver points out that we on the top of the race or caste hierarchy must also confront another, much more seductive lie: “a lie of enlightenment, righteousness, virtue. It is the lie that explains away responsibility and culpability by referring to some proof or evidence of achieved moral high ground.”[3] We use this lie to excuse us, to keep us from having to look deep into our souls. I was at that demonstration. I signed this petition. I can recognize racism and caste discrimination and point it out. I have this degree. I have studied here and there. I attend that church or that synagogue. I pray at that mosque or that temple. It helps us to feel good – and comfortable – because we can point to the unenlightened, uneducated, deplorables down there – and avoid examining ourselves.
And, quite frankly, that is my fear: Do I succumb to this lie? Do I rest in a comfortable self-righteousness that insulates me from having to deal with the whiteness in my own soul? I hope not, but I cannot be sure alone. As Metzl observes, “the larger conversation about the effects of whiteness is the one we, white Americans, badly need to have.”[4]
These thoughts about Wilkerson, DuBois and Baldwin are the little contribution of an old White guy to that conversation.
[1] W.E.B DuBois, Writings, ed. Nathan Huggins, Library of America: New York, 1986, p. 926
[2] Jonathan M. Metzl, Dying of Whiteness: How the Politics of Racial Resentment is Killing America’s Heartland, New York: Basic Books, 2019, p. 9
[3] Michael Oliver, “James Baldwin and the “Lie of Whiteness”: Toward an Ethic of Culpability, Complicity, and Confession,” Religions (16 June 2021), published online https://www.mdpi.com/2077-1444/12/6/447/htm, accessed August 10, 2023.
[4] Metzl, p. 11.