Annihilation of caste and race

The analogy between Indian caste and American race – an analogy recognized by Martin Luther King, among others – is important for a number of reasons. Not least of these is that when you observe how a different society handles a similar problem, you can see how parochial your own society’s approach might have been.

I was struck by this point in reading the work of B.R. Ambedkar, the famous advocate for the rights of India’s lowest caste groups (formerly called “untouchables” and now called “scheduled caste” or SC, referred to by Ambedkar as Dalit or “oppressed”). The particular work of Ambedkar’s I was reading was a famous undelivered speech entitled Annihilation of Caste.

Already in the title of this work we see how different Ambedkar’s approach is from that of typical lower-caste Americans. It’s pretty rare for Americans to call for the annihilation of race! Black racial abolitionists, like Amir Zaki and Kmele Foster, are definitely out there, but they’re viewed as weird at best, and often associated with the political right wing or centre-right – not something anyone would ever accuse Ambedkar of. Americans will of course call for abolishing racism, but they still want to keep race. Some of them even tell you to embrace it.

Yet, just as our earliest records show caste in India was always a hierarchical phenomenon, by the time François Bernier invented the pseudo-biological concept of race, Europe was already deeply enmeshed in its project of colonizing the rest of the world, and that project was deeply aided by the newly invented characterization of Europeans as “white”. Ambedkar never dreams of saying “let’s keep caste but get rid of casteism”; the people who say that are his more conservative opponents, like Gandhi, who are not really all that bothered by the hierarchy. For Ambedkar it’s obvious that if you want to get rid of caste oppression you have to get rid of caste. Caste is casteism. And I increasingly suspect that he may be right about that in a more global context: to fully get rid of racial oppression, I think we’ll need to get rid of race.

One passage of Ambedkar’s is particularly revealing, both about how sincerely he believes in the abolition of caste, and about how far his view is from the American mainstream:

I am convinced that the real remedy is intermarriage. Fusion of blood can alone create the feeling of being kith and kin, and unless this feeling of kinship, of being kindred, becomes paramount, the separatist feeling—the feeling of being aliens—created by caste will not vanish…. The real remedy for breaking caste is intermarriage. Nothing else will serve as the solvent of caste. (Annihilation of Caste 20.5)

By proposing intermarriage as a solution, Ambedkar hopes to end caste not just as a concept, but as a phenomenon: caste groups have been defined in part by their separateness, and once they mix, caste distinctions will make less sense. Such a solution is anathema to classical brahminical texts like the Bhagavad Gītā, which specifies that caste mixing (varṇasaṃkara) “leads to hell for both the destroyers of the family and the family itself” (I.42). For Ambedkar, being anathema in that way is part of the point: the traditional “Hindu” caste-based social order rests on a separation and segregation that is defined against intermarriage, and intermarriage is a way of resisting it.

Now Ambedkar’s solution would immediately run into a significant problem in the American context. Ambedkar’s great foe the dharmaśāstras – those oppressor’s handbooks that order a lower-caste person’s ears should be filled with molten lead for the crime of hearing sacred texts – also specify that the offspring of an inter-caste marriage belongs to the lower caste. Like American segregationists, dharmaśāstra viewed intermarriage as polluting the upper group: the product of miscegenation is in the lower group and nothing more.

The problem, of course, is that “progressive” Americans think the segregationists were right. If, like Kamala Harris, you happen to be the mix of two lower races, they will speak glowingly about how you belong to both of them and act indignant at anyone who denies that. But when it comes to white background, they take for granted the view of the segregationists that preceded them, the view of the dharmaśāstra: that one drop of non-white blood denies you any of Harris’s hybridity, any claim to any amount of whiteness. Obama’s blackness crowds out his whiteness entirely, such that none of the latter is left. Ambedkar’s remedy is a non-starter to most Americans because they can’t even handle the very concept of people who are part white and part non-white, part brahmin and part śūdra. In their eyes, that mixing doesn’t actually break down racial boundaries; it just creates more people who are entirely “of colour” and not at all white.

The most common defence I’ve heard progressives make of their approach to white purity is this: they note that most “black” people in the US have at least some white ancestry (often for terrible reasons), so that to acknowledge mixed people as mixed could end the very concept of black identity.

And to that I say: good!

Every concept of racial identity, qua racial identity, is bound up with racism and its history. In order to help abolish race eventually, we might still need to make some temporary and selective use of racial categories. But what we shouldn’t do is make that race our identity! Ending black identity, and white identity and the rest, is exactly what we should be aiming at doing.

This is not at all to denigrate the rich and admirable culture that Americans have come to know as “black” or “African-American”, or to say that anyone should cease identifying with that culture. Those raised in that culture have every reason to be proud of rock’n’roll and Martin Luther King Jr. and the other magnificent products of their shared history. I would never want to see that culture’s identity end. But what defines that culture is not being black! An immigrant from Nigeria or Ethiopia has her own separate history, one in many ways further removed from “African-American” culture than white Americans’ culture is. Jamaican and Haitian cultures are separate too. To define the African-American, the Ethiopian and the Haitian all primarily as “black”, rather than through each of their distinct rich heritages, is to diminish each. It seems to me that getting rid of “black” identity does both groups a service.

I am the proud product of intermarriage, between a brahmin and a white woman: a crime that would horrify both the dharmaśāstras and the segregationists. And I have seen – I have lived – what a post-racial world looks like. I think more racial mixing can help us get there – but we have to acknowledge it as mixing, not simply as a fall from whiteness. The racially diverse societies of Latin America, for their part, seem to me significantly more advanced in this regard than their neighbours to the north; they have embraced mestizaje, mixing. Quico Toro points out that Venezuelans embraced Ambedkar’s solution of varṇasaṁkara centuries ago, such that “Venezuelans in general were presumed to be a little bit white, a little bit black and a little bit indigenous.” And so now Venezuelans, quite sensibly in my view, use “white” and black” to refer only to skin tone, and cannot comprehend the way Americans use those terms as markers of ethnic identity:

Try to explain to a Venezuelan that in many cases an American picking up the phone can tell instantly whether the person on the other end of the line is Black, and you’ll get an uncomprehending stare back.
“Wait, what? Does their skin somehow change their voice?! How?!”

A Venezuelan knows that she’s different from a Brazilian or a Mexican, but she knows that that difference is cultural. Being “black” or “white”, on the other hand – that’s like being tall or short, blonde or brunette. It doesn’t define you the way it defines people up here. That’s not to say that Latin Americans have solved racism, by any means – but it sure seems to me like they’ve got further than the US has.