Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents (37 page)
Read Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents Online
Authors: Isabel Wilkerson
“two men and two women”
:
Doyle,
Etiquette of Race Relations,
p. 145.
“cardinal sin”
:
Sokol,
There Goes My Everything,
pp. 108–9.
“charging horses, their hoofs”
:
George B. Leonard,“Journey of Conscience: Midnight Plane to Alabama,”
Nation,
March 10, 1965, pp. 502–5.
overwhelmingly an inherited trait
:
Chao-Qiang Lai, “How Much of Human Height Is Genetic and How Much Is Due to Nutrition?”
Scientific American,
December 11, 2006,
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-much-of-human-height/
.
“ ’caste or quality of authentic’ ”
:
Smedley and Smedley,
Race in North America,
pp. 37, 14, 19.
anthropologist Paul Broca
:
López,
White by Law,
p. 59.
The word was not passed down
:
Painter,
The History of White People,
pp. 72–84.
More than a century later
:
López,
White by Law,
p. 54.
“Race is a social concept”
:
Naomi Zack,
Philosophy of Science and Race
(New York: Routledge, 2002), p. 68.
“an arbitrary and superficial selection”
:
Montagu,
Most Dangerous Myth,
pp. 116, 72–73.
“Americans cling to race”
:
Painter,
History of White People,
p. xii.
“Racism is a modern conception”
:
Dante Puzzo, “Racism and the Western Tradition,”
Journal of the History of Ideas
25, no. 4 (October–December 1964): 579.
as happened to Barack Obama
:
Garance Frank-Ruta, “The Time Obama Was Mistaken for a Waiter at a Tina Brown Book Party,”
Atlantic,
July 19, 2013,
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2013/07/the-time-obama-was-mistaken-for-a-waiter-at-a-tina-brown-book-party/277967/
.
I saw the wayside altars
:
Borayin Larios and Raphaël Voi, “Introduction. Wayside Shrines in India: An Everyday Defiant Religiosity,”
South Asia Multidisciplinary Academic Journal
18 (2018),
https://journals.openedition.org/samaj/4546
.
“Perhaps only the Jews”
:
Rajshekar,
Dalit,
p. 11.
“The colonial powers officially”
:
Shah et al.,
Ground Down,
p. 3.
“Both occupy the lowest positions”
:
Verba, Ahmed, and Bhatt,
Caste, Race and Politics,
p. 15.
the Dalit hosts joined in
:
Kevin D. Brown, “African-American Perspective on Common Struggles: Benefits for African Americans Comparing Their Struggle with Dalit Efforts,” in Yengde and Teltumbde,
Radical Ambedkar,
p. 56.
“how to institutionalize racism”
:
Whitman,
Hitler’s American Model,
p. 113. Whitman’s unsettling book is a chilling investigation into how the American legal system influenced and inspired several Nazi race policies. Based on a wealth of research and his close reading of Nazi records and Reich-era literature, Whitman reconstructs a full picture of the Nazi connection to American race law. The book describes in detail the June 5, 1934, planning meeting of the Commission on Criminal Law Reform.
“For us Germans, it is”
:
Comments made in a review of Heinrich Krieger’s 1936 book,
The Race Law in the United States,
quoted in Kühl,
Nazi Connection,
p. 99.
“the dedication with which”
:
Ibid., pp. 14, 15.
They made Stoddard’s book
:
Ryback,
Hitler’s Private Library,
p. 112.
“weeding out the worst strains”
:
Kühl,
Nazi Connection,
pp. 61, 62.
“inferior stocks”
:
Spiro,
Defending the Master Race,
pp. xi, 357. As a measure of Stoddard and Grant’s place in popular American culture at the time, F. Scott Fitzgerald referred to them in a thinly veiled conflation of the two men in a section of dialogue in
The Great Gatsby.
Tom and Daisy talk about “a fine book” Tom is reading, about the challenges facing “the dominant race” by “this man Goddard.”
Hitler had studied America
:
Fischer,
Hitler and America,
pp. 2, 9.
“shot down the millions”
:
Waitman Wade Beorn,
The Holocaust in Eastern Europe: At the Epicenter of the Final Solution
(London: Bloomsbury, 2018), p. 61.
“a model for his program”
:
Spiro,
Defending the Master Race,
p. 357.
“knack for maintaining an air”
:
Eugene DeFriest Bétit,
Collective Amnesia: American Apartheid: African Americans’ 400 Years
in North America, 1619–2019
(Xlibris, 2019), p. 282. Hitler had taken a personal look into American race policies. “I have studied with interest the laws of several American states,” he said around the time of these deliberations, “concerning prevention of reproduction by people whose progeny would, in all probability, be of no value or injurious to the racial stock.” Ryback,
Hitler’s Private Library,
p. 112.
“was not just a country”
:
Whitman,
Hitler’s American Model,
p. 138.
“the American Supreme Court”
:
Ibid., p. 77.
“there were no other models”
:
Ibid., p. 138. South Africa would not enact a ban on interracial marriage until 1949, with the passage of the Prohibition of Mixed Marriages Act. In 1957, South Africa passed section 16 of the Immorality Act, which prohibited blacks and whites from living together and having sex. Nathaniel Sheppard, “S. Africa Plans to Repeal Racial Sex Ban,”
Chicago Tribune,
April 16, 1985,
https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct-xpm-1985-04-16-8501220310-story.html
; Michael Parks, “S. Africa to End Racial Ban on Sex: Will Repeal Laws Forbidding Blacks to Marry Whites,”
Los Angeles Times,
April 16, 1985,
https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1985-04-16-mn-23232-story.html
.
the country’s last free and fair election
:
In the last free and fair elections of the Nazi era, held in 1932, the Nazis won nearly 38 percent of the German vote. Brustein,
Logic of Evil,
p. 9; Hett,
Death of Democracy,
p. 201.
“to exploit the methods of democracy”
:
Fischer,
Hitler and America,
p. 4.
more than a third of Germans
:
Barry Eichengreen and Tim Hatton,
Interwar Unemployment in International Perspective,
IRLE Working Paper no. 12–88 (April 1988),
https://www.irle.berkeley.edu/files/1998/Interwar-Unemployment-In-International-Perspective.pdf
.
“public opinion accepted them”
:
Koonz,
Nazi Conscience,
p. 176.
“white children and colored children”
:
Whitman,
Hitler’s American Model,
pp. 122, 121.
“who thought American law”
:
Ibid., pp. 122–23.
“any further penetration of Jewish”
:
Alan E. Steinweis,
Studying the Jew: Scholarly Anti-Semitism in Nazi Germany
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2006), p. 45.
“There is a growing tendency”
:
Whitman,
Hitler’s American Model,
p. 120.
“Gürtner simply refused to concede”
:
Ibid., p. 102.
“political construction of race”
:
Ibid., pp. 107–8.
“this jurisprudence would suit”
:
Ibid., p. 109.
“because he did not wish”
:
Koonz,
Nazi Conscience,
p. 171.
“We have been talking past”
:
Ibid., p. 177.
“Germany became a full-fledged”
:
Fredrickson,
White Supremacy,
pp. 123–24.
“The scholars who see parallels”
:
Whitman,
Hitler’s American Model,
p. 128.
Mothers pulled their children inside
:
Nigel Dunkley, interview by author, Berlin and Sachsenhausen, May 24, 2019.
the local lynching tree
:
Schrieke,
Alien Americans,
p. 133.
The townspeople of the East Texas village
:
Ralph Ginzburg,
100 Years of Lynchings
(Baltimore: Black Classic Press, 1988), p. 155.
The little girls appear to be
:
National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and James Weldon Johnson, N.A.A.C.P. Rubin Stacy Anti-Lynching Flier, Yale University, Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library,
https://brbl-dl.library.yale.edu/vufind/Record/3833735
; Emma Sipperly, “The Rubin Stacy Lynching: Reconstructing Justice,” Northeastern University Civil Rights and Restorative Justice Clinic working document, Fall 2016,
https://repository.library.northeastern.edu/downloads/neu:m04285648?datastream_id=content
; John Dolen, “His Name Was Rubin Stacy,”
Fort Lauderale Magazine,
August 1, 2018,
https://fortlauderdalemagazine.com/his-name-was-rubin-stacy/
.
Photographers were tipped off in advance
:
The Crisis
10, no. 2, June 1915, p. 71.
They made postcards
:
Allen,
Without Sanctuary,
pp. 29, 174–77, 183,
https://withoutsanctuary.org/pics_22_picback_text.html
.
“Even the Nazis did not”
:
Richard Lacayo,“Blood at the Root,”
Time,
April 2, 2000,
http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,42301,00.html
.
The leaders of the mob pulled Brown
:
“A Horrible Lynching,”
Nebraska Studies,
n.d.,
http://www.nebraskastudies.org/1900-1924/racial-tensions/a-horrible-lynching/
.
“Man just naturally can’t take”
:
Sean Hogan, “Turning On the Light: Henry Fonda and Will Brown,”
Roger Ebert,
January 31, 2018,
https://www.rogerebert.com/balder-and-dash/turning-on-the-light-henry-fonda-and-will-brown
.
T
HE
E
IGHT
P
ILLARS OF
C
ASTE
Pillar Number One: Divine Will and the Laws of Nature
“The Brahmin is by Law”
:
Manu,
Law Code,
p. 20.
“Cursed be Canaan!”
:
Genesis 9:20–27.
the biblical passage would be summoned
:
The English trader Richard Jobson wrote in 1623 of the people he encountered in sub-Saharan Africa, “Undoubtedly, these people originally sprung from the race of Canaan, the sonne of Ham, who discovered his father Noah’s secrets, for which Noah awakening cursed Canaan as our holy Scripture testifieth.” Quoted in Jordan,
White over Black,
p. 35.
“Both thy bondmen”
:
Leviticus 25:44.
“The curse of Ham is now”
:
Thomas R. R. Cobb,
Slavery from the Earliest Period
s (Philadelphia, 1858), pp. xxxv–vi, clvii. This interpretation of Genesis was debated, oddly enough, by some who were even more hateful of blacks than most enslavers. They argued that this interpretation could not be true, because Africans were not human, they were beasts and therefore could not have descended from a son of Noah, cursed or not.
“Let the negro have the crumbs”
:
Bailey,
Race Orthodoxy in the South,
p. 93.
“Whereas some doubts have arisen”
:
William Waller Hening, ed.,
The Statutes at Large; Being a Collection of All the Laws of Virginia from the First Session of the Legislature, in the Year 1619
(New York, 1823), p. 2:170,
https://www.encyclopediavirginia.org/_Negro_womens_children_to_serve_according_to_the_condition_of_the_mother_1662
.
“He may neither earn nor wed”
:
Davis, Gardner, and Gardner,
Deep South,
p. 15.
“Like the Hindu caste system”
:
Raymond T. Diamond and Robert J. Cottrol, “Codifying Caste: Louisiana’s Racial Classification Scheme and the Fourteenth Amendment,”
Loyola Law Review
29, no. 2.
“It’s a humiliating thing”
:
“Forest Whitaker Was ‘Humiliated’ During Shoplifting Incident,”
Express,
August 27, 2013,
https://www.express.co.uk/celebrity-news/424990/Forest-Whitaker-was-humiliated-during-shoplifting-incident
.
New York City police officers broke
:
David Zirin, “So…the NYPD Just Broke an NBA Player’s Leg,”
Nation,
April 10, 2015,
https://www.thenation.com/article/so-nypd-just-broke-nba-players-leg/
; Jack Maloney, “Sefolosha to Donate Large Portion of $4M Settlement from Police Brutality Lawsuit,” CBS Sports, April 7, 2017,
https://www.cbssports.com/nba/news/sefolosha-to-donate-large-portion-of-4m-settlement-from-police-brutality-lawsuit/
.
The video that surfaced
:
Lindsey Bever, “Video Shows Former NFL Player’s Violent Arrest After He Said Police Mistook a Phone for a Gun,”
Washington Post,
April 27, 2018,
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-nation/wp/2018/04/27/desmond-marrow-video-shows-ex-nfl-players-violent-arrest/
.
“No matter how great you”
:
Scott Davis, “LeBron James on His Advice to His Kids About Dealing with Police: Be Respectful and Put Your Phone on Speaker,”
Business Insider,
October 17, 2017,
https://www.businessinsider.com/lebron-james-kids-advice-police-2017-10
.
