Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents (14 page)

We would all like to believe that we would resist the impulse to inflict such horror on fellow members of our own species, and some of us very likely would. But not as many as we might like to believe.

In a famous though controversial 1963 study of people’s threshold for violence when ordered to inflict it, college students were told to administer electric shocks to a person in an adjoining room. The people “receiving” the shocks were unharmed but yelled out and banged on the walls as the intensity of the shocks increased. The conductor of the study, the psychologist Stanley Milgram, found that a majority of participants, two out of three, “
could be induced to deliver the maximal voltage to an innocent suffering subject,” wrote the scholar David Livingstone Smith, who specializes in the study of dehumanization.

In a similar experiment, conducted at Stanford University in 1975, the participants did not have to be ordered to deliver the shocks. They needed only to overhear a single negative comment about the students facing potential punishment. The participants were led to believe that students from another college were arriving for a joint project. Some participants overheard the experimenters, presumably by accident, make neutral or humanizing comments about the visiting students (that they seemed “nice”). Other participants heard dehumanizing comments (that they seemed like “animals”). Participants gave the dehumanized people twice the punishment of the humanized ones and significantly more than those they knew absolutely nothing about. The participants were willing to go to maximum intensity on the dehumanized group.

“
Dehumanization is a joint creation of biology, culture and the architecture of the human mind,” Smith wrote. “The human story is filled with pain and tragedy, but among the horrors that we have perpetrated on one another, the persecution and attempted extermination of the Jewish people, the brutal enslavement of Africans, and the destruction of Native American civilizations in many respects are unparalleled.”

In America, a culture of cruelty crept into the minds, made violence and mockery seem mundane and amusing, built as it was into the games of chance at carnivals and county fairs well into the twentieth century. These things built up the immune system against empathy.
There was an attraction called the “Coon Dip,” in which fairgoers hurled “projectiles at live African Americans.” There was the “Bean-em,” in which children flung beanbags at grotesquely caricatured black faces, whose images alone taught the lesson of caste without a word needing to be spoken.

And enthusiasts lined up to try their luck at the “Son of Ham” shows at Coney Island or Kansas City or out in California, “in which white men paid for the pleasure of hurling baseballs at the head of a black man,” Smith wrote.

A certain kind of violence was part of an unspoken curriculum for generations of children in the dominant caste. “White culture desensitized children to racial violence,” wrote the historian Kristina DuRocher, “so they could perpetuate it themselves one day.”

The only way to keep an entire group of sentient beings in an artificially fixed place, beneath all others and beneath their own talents, is with violence and terror, psychological and physical, to preempt resistance before it can be imagined. Evil asks little of the dominant caste other than to sit back and do nothing. All that it needs from bystanders is their silent complicity in the evil committed on their behalf, though a caste system will protect, and perhaps even reward, those who deign to join in the terror.

Jews in Nazi-controlled Europe, African-Americans in the antebellum and Jim Crow South, and Dalits in India were all at the mercy of people who had been fed a diet of contempt and hate for them, and had incentive to try to prove their superiority by joining in or acquiescing to cruelties against their fellow humans.

Above all, the people in the subordinate caste were to be reminded of the absolute power the dominant caste held over them. In both America and in Germany, people in the dominant caste whipped and hanged their hostages for random and capricious breaches of caste, punished them for the natural human responses to the injustice they were being subjected to. In America, “
the whip was the most common instrument of punishment,” the historian Kenneth Stampp wrote. “Nearly every slaveholder used it, and few grown slaves escaped it entirely.”

In Germany, the Nazis forced and strapped Jews and political prisoners onto a wooden board to be flogged for minor infractions like rolling cigarettes from leaves they gathered or killing rats to augment their bare rations. The captives were forced to count out each lash as it was inflicted upon them. The Nazis claimed a limit of twenty-five lashes, but would play mind games by claiming that the victim had not counted correctly, then extend the torture even longer. The Americans went to as many as four hundred lashes, torture that amounted to murder, with several men, growing exhausted from the physical exertion it required, taking turns with the whip.

In the New World, few living creatures were, as a class of beings, subjected to the level of brute physical assault as a feature of their daily lives for as many centuries as were the subjects of American slavery. It was so commonplace that some overseers, upon arriving at a new plantation, summarily chose “
to whip every hand on the plantation to let them know who was in command,” Stampp wrote. “Some used it as incentive by flogging the last slave out of the cabin in the morning. Many used it to ‘break in’ a young slave and to ‘break the spirit’ of an insubordinate older one.”

A teenager endured a whipping that went on for so long, he passed out in the middle of it. “He woke up vomiting,” the historian Edward Baptist recounted. “They were still beating him. He slipped into darkness again.”

One enslaver remarked “that he was no better pleased than when he could hear…the sound of the driver’s lash among the toiling slaves,” for then, Baptist wrote, “he knew his system was working.”

Human history is rife with examples of inconceivable violence, and as Americans, we like to think of our country as being far beyond the guillotines of medieval Europe or the reign of the Huns. And yet it was here that “
Native Americans were occasionally skinned and made into bridle reins,” wrote the scholar Charles Mills. Andrew Jackson, the U.S. president who oversaw the forced removal of indigenous people from their ancestral homelands during that Trail of Tears, used bridle reins of indigenous flesh when he went horseback riding. And it was here that, into the twentieth century, African-Americans were burned alive at the stake, as seventeen-year-old Jesse Washington was in Waco, Texas, in 1916 before a crowd of thousands.

The crimes of homicide, of rape, and of assault and battery were felonies in the slavery era as they are today in any civil society. They were seen then as wrong, immoral, reprehensible, and worthy of the severest punishment. But the country allowed most any atrocity to be inflicted on the black body. Thus twelve generations of African-Americans faced the ever-present danger of assault and battery or worse, every day of their lives during the quarter millennium of enslavement.

Advertisements for runaways record a catalog of assaults upon them. A North Carolina enslaver took out an ad for the return of Betty and reported having burnt her “
with a hot iron on the left side of her face; I tried to make the letter M.” A warden in Louisiana reported that he had just taken custody of a runaway and noted that “he has been lately gelded and is not yet well.” Another Louisianan reported his disgust for a neighbor who had “castrated 3 men of his.”

An order from the justices went out in New Hanover County, North Carolina, in the search of a runaway named London, granting that “
any person may KILL and DESTROY the said slave by such means as he or they may think fit.” This casual disregard for black life and the deputizing of any citizen to take that life would become a harbinger of the low value accorded African-Americans in the police and vigilante shootings of unarmed black citizens that continued into the early decades of the twenty-first century.

Some argue in hindsight that people who were enslaved were seen as too valuable to be hurt or killed. That argument disregards the many instances of humans trashing their own property, of absentee slumlords who get by with the least maintenance of their buildings, for example, with often catastrophic consequences. But more important, it misinterprets violence as merely damage to one’s property, presumably rare and against the interest of the “owner,” when it was actually a terror mechanism that was part of the regular maintenance of an unnatural institution, part of the calculus of American slavery. A Louisiana planter once left his plantation in the care of an overseer and staff. Upon returning after a year’s absence, the planter discovered the overseer and his men had beaten and starved the enslaved people while the planter was away and that his inventory had shrunk. On that one family plantation, “
at least twelve slaves had died at the overseer’s hands,” Stampp wrote. The planter would have to factor that “loss” into the cost of doing business.

Nazi Germany and the American South devised shockingly similar means of punishment to instill terror in the subordinate caste. Hostages in Nazi labor camps were subjected to public hangings, in front of a full assemblage of camp prisoners, for any minor offense or merely to remind the survivors of the power of their captors
.
In the special prisons inside the concentration camps, there stood a lynching post designed to draw out the agony of the captive being killed. Across the ocean, in the same era, lynchings, preceded by mutilation, were a feature of the southern landscape.

Both the Germans in the Nazi era and the descendants of the Confederacy used ritualized torture for arbitrary infractions, some as minor as stealing shoes or pocket change or, in the case of the American South, for acting out of one’s place.

It was during the era of enslavement that Americans in the South devised a range of horrors to keep human beings in the unnatural state of perpetual, generational imprisonment.
Fourteen-pound chains and metal horns radiating two or three feet from the skull were locked onto the heads of people who tried to escape. Slave pens had flogging rooms in the attics where rows of wooden cleats for the reaving cords were screwed into the floor to tie people down for their floggings for “
not speaking up and looking bright and smart” to their potential buyers. “Every day there was flogging going on,” wrote John Brown, a survivor of slavery.

The tortures were elaborate enough to be given names. One was called “bucking,” in which the person was stripped naked, hands and feet tied, forced into a sitting position around a stake and rotated for three hours of flogging with a cowhide, as other enslaved people were forced to watch. The person was then washed down with salt and red pepper. An enslaved man named John Glasgow was punished in this way for having slipped away to see his wife on another plantation. Then there was “the picket,” which involved iron cleats, pulleys, and cords that formed a gallows, along the crossbeam of a whipping post, and the sharp end of a stake. John Glasgow suffered this, too, after attempting to see his wife again. His fellow captives were made to take turns whipping him or face the same punishment themselves. “
He was left to die or recover, as might be,” Brown said. “It was a month before he stirred from his plank, five months more elapsed ere he could walk. Ever after he had a limp in his gait.”

After slavery ended, the former Confederates took power again, but now without the least material investment in the lives of the people they once had owned. They pressed down even harder to keep the lowest caste in its place. African-Americans were mutilated and hanged from poplars and sycamores and burned at the courthouse square, a lynching every three or four days in the first four decades of the twentieth century.

A slaveholder in North Carolina seemed to speak for the enforcers of caste throughout the world. “
Make them stand in fear,” she said.

The dominant caste demonstrated its power by forcing captives to perform some of the more loathsome duties connected to the violence against their fellow captives. People in the upper caste did not often trouble themselves with the dirty work, unless specifically hired for the job of enforcement, as were the plantation overseers in the American South. It was caste privilege to order the lowest caste to do their bidding and dirty work.

It was part of the psychological degradation that reinforced one’s own stigma and utter subjugation, so dominated that they were left with little choice but to cooperate if they were to save themselves for one more day. The Nazis in Germany and the planters in the authoritarian South sowed dissension among the subordinate caste by creating a hierarchy among the captives, rewarding those who identified more with the oppressor rather than the oppressed and who would report back to them any plots of escape or uprising. They would select a captive they felt they could control and elevate that person above the others.

In Nazi labor camps, it was the
kapo,
the head Jew in each hut of captives, whose job it was to get everyone up by five in the morning and to exact discipline. In exchange, he would get a bunk of his own or other meager privileges. In the American South, it was the slave driver, the head Negro, who served this role, setting the pace for the work at hand and elevated with the task of watching over the others and disciplining them when called to do so.

The dominant caste often forced its captives to exact punishment on one another or to dispose of the victims as their tormenters watched. In Nazi Germany, the SS guards were not the ones who put the prisoners into the ovens. The captives were forced into that grim detail. It was not the SS who collected the bodies of the people who had died the night before. That was left to the captives. In the American South, black men were made to whip their fellow slaves or to hold down the legs and arms of the man, woman, or child being flogged. Later, when lynchings were the primary means of terror, it was the people who had done the lynching who told the family of the victim or the black undertaker when they would be permitted to take down what was left of the body from the lynching tree.

One day in the mid-eighteenth century, an elder of the Presbyterian Church was passing through a piece of timbered land in a slaving province of the American South when he heard what he called “
a sound as of murder.” He rode in that direction and discovered “a naked black man, hung to the limb of a tree by his hands, his feet chained together and a pine rail laid with one end on the chain, between his legs, and the other upon the ground to steady him.” The overseer had administered four hundred lashes on the man’s body. “The miserably lacerated slave was then taken down and put to the care of a physician,” the Presbyterian elder said.

The elder asked the overseer, one of the men who had inflicted this upon another human being, “the offence for which all this was done.” He was told that the enslaved man had made a comment that was seen as beyond his station. It began when the owner said that the rows of corn the enslaved man had planted were uneven. The enslaved man offered his opinion. “Massa, much corn grow on a crooked row as a straight one,” the enslaved man replied. For that, he was flogged to the brink of death.

“This was it, this was enough,” the Presbyterian elder said. The overseer boasted of his skill in managing the master’s property. The enslaved man “was submitted to him, and treated as above.”

A century later, slavery was over, but the rules, and the consequences for breaking them, were little changed. A young white anthropologist from Yale University, John Dollard, went south to the Mississippi Delta in 1935 for his research into the Jim Crow caste system. He noticed how subservient the black people were, stepping aside for him, taking their hats off, and calling him “sir” even if they were decades older.

One day he was out riding with some other white men, southern white men, who were checking out some black sharecroppers. The black people were reluctant to come out of their cabins when the car with the white men pulled up. The driver had some fun with it, told the sharecroppers he was not going to hang them. Later, Dollard mentioned to the man that “
the Negroes seem to be very polite around here.”

The man let out a laugh. “They have to be.”