Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents (40 page)
Read Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents Online
Authors: Isabel Wilkerson
The other, the scapegoat
:
Leviticus 16:5–10, 20–22.
“This serves to relieve others”
:
Perera,
Scapegoat Complex,
p. 8.
“The scapegoater feels a relief”
:
Ibid., pp. 12, 13.
“before binding them to the stakes”
:
Weld,
American Slavery,
p. 59.
“The Negro becomes both”
:
Davis, Gardner, and Gardner,
Deep South,
p. 49.
“at the hands of persons unknown”
:
For more on the ritual of lynching, see Dray,
Persons Unknown
; Raper,
Tragedy of Lynching
; and Litwack,
Trouble in Mind.
“Whites were unified in seeing”
:
Myrdal,
American Dilemma,
vol. 2, p. 598.
it is white women, and thus white families
:
Kimberlé W. Crenshaw, “Framing Affirmative Action,” 105
Michigan Law Review First Impressions
123 (2007),
https://repository.law.umich.edu/mlr_fi/vol105/iss1/4/
; Victoria M. Massie, “White Women Benefit Most from Affirmative Action—and Are Among Its Fiercest Opponents,”
Vox,
May 25, 2016,
https://www.vox.com/2016/5/25/11682950/fisher-supreme-court-white-women-affirmative-action
.
“for structural economic problems”
:
Ashley Crossman, “Definition of Scapegoat, Scapegoating, and Scapegoat Theory,”
ThoughtCo.,
August 2, 2019,
https://www.thoughtco.com/scapegoat-definition-3026572
.
“He never tried to comfort”
:
Margaret Carlson, “Presumed Innocent,”
Time,
June 24, 2001,
http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,153650,00.html
.
Anthony Stephan House
:
“In another line of inquiry with potential racial undertones, police sought to determine whether House’s death was cartel-related. Mark McCrimmon, a defense attorney, said a client who had been arrested in a drug raid in the neighborhood weeks before was interviewed by police during their investigation into the bombing.” Eli Rosenberg, “Exploding Packages Tap into Simmering Tensions over Austin’s Racial Segregation,”
Washington Post,
March 15, 2018,
https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/exploding-packages-tap-into-simmering-tensions-over-austins-racial-segregation/2018/03/15/595a7b24-28a4-11e8-874b-d517e912f125_story.html
.
“We can’t rule out that Mr.”
:
Ibid.; “Police: Exploding Package Caused Death of NE Austin Man, Tips Sought,” CBS Austin, March 5, 2018,
https://cbsaustin.com/news/local/austin-police-identify-man-killed-in-explosion
.
“Based on what we know”
:
Tom Dart, “Austin Bombings: How They Unfolded, and What They Revealed,”
Guardian,
March 24, 2018,
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/mar/24/austin-bombings-mark-conditt-texas
.
“The main characteristic of an alpha”
:
Safina,
Beyond Words,
p. 155.
“a kind of social glue”
:
Wolf Howl Organization, “Wolf Behavior,” part 1,
Running with the Wolves,
n.d.,
http://www.runningwiththewolves.org/behavior1
. Running with the Wolves, an organization founded by Teresa DeMaio on Long Island, is devoted to wolf and wildlife conservation.
“One of them”
:
Bancroft,
Slave Trading,
p. 81.
“countermanding an order”
:
Richard Frucht,
Black Society in the New World
(New York: Random House, 1971), p. 32.
“shelter or security from the”
:
Stampp,
Peculiar Institution,
p. 343.
“You’re in a Yale building”
:
Brandon Griggs, “A Black Yale Graduate Student Took a Nap in Her Dorm’s Common Room. So a White Student Called Police,” CNN, May 12, 2018,
https://www.cnn.com/2018/05/09/us/yale-student-napping-black-trnd/index.html
.
In Milwaukee, a woman
:
Nicole Rojas, “Black Man Records White Woman Calling 911 After Accusing Him of Breaking into His Own Car,”
Newsweek
, August 17, 2018,
https://www.newsweek.com/woman-calls-police-video-black-man-breaking-own-car-milwaukee-reporachel-1078717
.
As the white man briefed
:
Patrick May, “Video of a San Francisco Dad’s ‘Trespassing’ 911 Call to Report a Black Software Engineer Goes Viral,”
Mercury News,
July 9, 2019,
https://www.mercurynews.com/2019/07/09/video-of-a-san-francisco-dad-trespassing-9-1-1-call-to-report-black-software-engineer-goes-viral/
.
In the video that the man took
:
Melissa Gomez, “White Woman Who Blocked Black Neighbor from Building Is Fired,”
New York Times,
October 15, 2018,
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/15/us/hilary-brooke-apartment-patty-st-louis.html
.
“This lady is following me”
:
Melissa Gomez, “Babysitting While Black: Georgia Man Was Stalked by Woman as He Cared for 2 White Children,”
New York Times
, October 9, 2018,
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/09/us/black-man-babysitting.html
. Corey Lewis’s video is at
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=TyATgNSAkj8
. See also Yamiche Alcindor, “Living While Black: How Does Racial Bias Lead to Unnecessary Calls to Police?”
PBS NewsHour,
July 2, 2018,
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=o3r3mOo4LmY
.
“The masters feared their former”
:
Du Bois,
Black Reconstruction,
p. 633.
“This indulgence and this”
:
Col. J.L.A. Linard of American Expeditionary Force headquarters advised the French command on how African-American soldiers were to be handled. His memo, quoted here and in the next paragraphs, was published as “A French Directive,”
Crisis,
no. 18 (May 1919): 16–18, available at
https://glc.yale.edu/french-directive
. See also Rebecca Onion, “A WWI–Era Memo Asking French Officers to Practice Jim Crow with Black American Troops,”
Slate,
April 27, 2016,
https://slate.com/human-interest/2016/04/secret-information-concerning-black-troops-a-warning-memo-sent-to-the-french-military-during-world-war-i.html
.
Freddie Stowers
:
Nicole Bauke, “Black Soldier Killed in WWI Was Denied Medal of Honor. Advocates Are Now Trying to Change That,”
Army Times,
February 28, 2018,
https://www.armytimes.com/news/your-army/2018/02/28/black-soldier-killed-in-wwi-was-denied-medal-of-honor-advocates-are-now-trying-to-change-that/
.
“Imagine”
:
Ibid.
“halting white motorists, apparently”
:
Ward,
Defending White Democracy,
p. 41.
“I am a man just like”
:
Richard Gergel,
Unexampled Courage: The Blinding of Sgt. Isaac Woodard and the Awakening of President Harry S. Truman and Judge J. Waties Waring
(New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2019), p. 14.
“I was shocked by”
:
Richard Kluger,
Simple Justice: The History of Brown v. Board of Education and Black America’s Struggle for Equality
(New York: Knopf, 2004), p. 298. The attack on Woodard and other black veterans returning from the war so alarmed President Truman that, in 1948, he issued two landmark executive orders, 9981, banning segregation in the armed forces, and 9980, ending segregation in the federal government.
“If a Negro rises, he”
:
Schrieke,
Alien Americans,
p. 143.
“single bloodiest election day”
:
Paul Ortiz, “Ocoee, Florida: Remembering ‘the Single Bloodiest Day in Modern U.S. Political History,’ ”
Facing South,
May 14, 2010,
https://www.facingsouth.org/2010/05/ocoee-florida-remembering-the-single-bloodiest-day-in-modern-us-political-history.html
.
“A finer, cleaner man than”
:
Ida B. Wells,
Crusade for Justice: The Autobiography of Ida B. Wells,
ed. Alfreda M. Duster (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970), p. 55.
“Moss was murdered for running”
:
Nathaniel C. Ball, “Memphis and the Lynching at the Curve,”
Uplift Memphis, Uplift the Nation: The Blog for Community Engagement
(Memphis: Benjamin Hooks Institute for Social Change, 2015),
https://blogs.memphis.edu/benhooksinstitute/2015/09/30/memphis-and-the-lynching-at-the-curve/
.
“When slaves earned money”
:
Stampp,
Peculiar Institution,
p. 166.
“God have mercy on”
:
“How an African Slave in Boston Helped Save Generations from Smallpox,”
History,
February 1, 2019,
https://www.history.com/news/smallpox-vaccine-onesimus-slave-cotton-mather
.
“the Holy Grail of smallpox prevention”
:
Washington,
Medical Apartheid,
pp. 72–73; Rene F. Najera, “Black History Month: Onesimus Spreads Wisdom That Saves Lives of Bostonians During a Smallpox Epidemic,”
History of Vaccines,
February 3, 2019,
https://www.historyofvaccines.org/content/blog/onesimus-smallpox-boston-cotton-mather
; and Erin Blakemore, “How an African Slave in Boston Helped Save Generations from Smallpox,”
History,
February 1, 2019,
https://www.history.com/news/smallpox-vaccine-onesimus-slave-cotton-mather
.
“When two Negro teachers applied”
:
Du Bois,
Black Reconstruction,
p. 697.
“everything must be done to”
:
Raphael Gross, “Guilt, Shame, Anger, Indignation: Nazi Law and Nazi Morals,” in Steinweis and Rachlin,
Law in Nazi Germany,
p. 92.
African-Americans account for 59 percent
:
Tracy Jan, “News Media Offers Consistently Warped Portrayals of Black Families, Study Finds,”
Washington Post,
December 13, 2017,
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2017/12/13/news-media-offers-consistently-warped-portrayals-of-black-families-study-finds/
.
Crimes involving a black suspect
:
C.K., “Black Americans Are Over-Represented in Media Portrayals of Poverty,”
Economist,
February 20, 2018,
https://www.economist.com/democracy-in-america/2018/02/20/black-americans-are-over-represented-in-media-portrayals-of-poverty
.
rate of black teenagers giving birth
:
“Long-term declines in birth rates for non-Hispanic black teens have been particularly steep,” the researchers found. “Declines in birth rates among Hispanic teens have been nearly as sharp, from 105 births per 1,000 women, ages fifteen to nineteen in 1991, to 29 births per 1,000 in 2017.” The rate of births among non-Hispanic white teenagers, historically a fraction of the rate of black and Latina teenagers, fell at a steady but slower pace from 43 per 1,000 to 13 per 1,000 during the same period, or from a little more than a quarter of the black birth rate to now about half. “Teen Births,”
Child Trends,
May 24, 2019,
https://www.childtrends.org/indicators/teen-births
. The analysis was derived from Centers for Disease Control data.
“The long-term downward trends”
:
Ibid.
closed, auctioned off, or poured concrete
:
Albany, Georgia, “auctioned three pools and a tennis court rather than desegregate them.” The city “padlocked the library for months.” Sokol,
There Goes My Everything,
p. 93.
When black boys instinctively rushed
:
“McKinney Video: Protest over Texas Pool Party Policing,” BBC, June 9, 2015,
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-33059484
.
Within days, the officer resigned
:
Jonathan Capehart, “The McKinney, Texas Pool Party: More Proof That ‘Black Children Don’t Get to Be Children,’ ”
Washington Post,
June 10, 2015,
https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/post-partisan/wp/2015/06/10/the-mckinney-texas-pool-party-more-proof-that-black-children-dont-get-to-be-children/
.
“The stigmatized stratify their”
:
Matory,
Stigma and Culture,
p. 384.
“Conspicuously outperforming”
:
Ibid., p. 333.
“They even quarrelled over”
:
Ambedkar,
Annihilation of Caste,
p. 277.
“the team just cannot”
:
Sudipta Sarangi, “Capturing Indian ‘Crab’ Behaviour,”
Hindu Business Line,
April 1, 2013,
https://www.thehindubusinessline.com/opinion/capturing-indian-crab-behaviour/article22995064.ece
.
“the greatest predictor of”
:
Bryan Stevenson,
Just Mercy
(New York: Spiegel & Grau, 2014), p. 142.
“While white immigrants”
:
Kasinitz,
Caribbean New York,
p. 36.
“Since I have been”
:
Ibid.
“act like African-Americans”
:
Matory,
Stigma and Culture,
p. 49.
“each caste takes its pride”
:
Ambedkar,
Annihilation of Caste,
p. 294.
