And they were often petitioning to be admitted to the dominant caste. And at the beginning of the 20th century, there were petitions to the Supreme Court, petitions to the government, for clarity about where they would fit in. There was a tremendous churning at the beginning of the 20th century of people who were arriving in these undetermined or middle groups that did not fit neatly into the bipolar structure that America had created. On where people of color who are not Black fit into the caste system That means that until arriving here, people who were Irish, people who were Hungarian, people who were Polish would not have identified themselves back in the 19th century as being white, but only in connection to the gradations and ranking that occurred and was created in the United States - that is where the designation of white, the designation of Black and those in between came to have meaning. And also upon arrival, discovering that they were assigned to a particular category, whether they to be in it or not. And anyone who entered that caste system had to then navigate and figure out how were they going to manage, how are they going to survive and succeed in this system. to the very bottom of the caste system, and then elevated those who looked like those who had who created the caste system - meaning those who were British and Western Europeans - at the very top of the caste system. That is when you have a caste system that emerges, a caste system that emerges that instantly relegates those who were brought in to be enslaved. They were Irish or they were German or they were Polish or Hungarian, and only after the transatlantic slave trade, only after people who had been spread out all over the world converged in this one space - the New World - to create a new country, a new culture where all of these people were then interacting and having to figure out how they were going to relate to one another. And that is because before that time, there were humans on the land wherever they happened to be on this planet, and because of the way people were living on the land, they were merely who they were. It's an innovation that is only several hundred years old, dating back to the time of the transatlantic slave trade. On how being "white" is an American innovation only 400 or 500 years old, dating back to the transatlantic slave trade." Wilkerson notes that the concept of caste has been around for thousands of years: " predates the idea of race, which is. "Caste focuses in on the infrastructure of our divisions and the rankings, whereas race is the metric that's used to determine one's place in that," she says. Wilkerson describes caste an artificial hierarchy that helps determine standing and respect, assumptions of beauty and competence, and even who gets benefit of the doubt and access to resources. Instead, she prefers to refer to America as having a "caste" system. Pulitzer Prize-winning author Isabel Wilkerson says racism is an insufficient term for the systemic oppression of Black people in America. William Lovelace/Hulton Archive/Getty Images Above, a sign in Jackson, Miss., in May 1961. In her new book, Caste, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Isabel Wilkerson examines the laws and practices that created what she describes as a bipolar, Black and white caste system in the United States.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |