US election campaign: USA: The one in the penthouse and the one in the basement

Once on board, she asks the flight attendant to lift her heavy suitcase into the luggage rack. “Go on,” he says, “they will help you in economy class.” – “But I’m flying first class.” He checks her ticket in disbelief. Isabel Wilkerson once again experiences that she is not white. Although she taught at Harvard and Princeton and headed the Chicago bureau of the New York Times for a long time, she is set back. Even winning the Pulitzer Prize for Journalism as the first Black woman could make some wonder if it wasn’t a symbolic gesture.

According to the Civil Rights Act in the USA, any discrimination based on race, color, religion, gender or national origin is prohibited. But the law was only signed in 1964 (!) by Lyndon Baines Johnson. And it wasn’t until a year later that everyone had the right to vote.

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If Isabel Wilkerson had been born ten years earlier rather than in 1961, she would have had to fully experience what segregation meant. Although their parents had made it into the middle class, the oppression of their ancestors continued to exist in the form of prohibitions, precautions and demands to be even more hardworking. Wilkerson’s book is so powerful because it is without illusions. “The caste system in the USA is 400 years old and will not be eliminated by a single law or by a single person, no matter how powerful.”

Since the arrival of the first slave ship in Virginia in 1619, African people have been nothing more than commodities, at the mercy of all arbitrariness. They provided the urgently needed workers for the cultivation of tobacco, sugar cane, rice and cotton. They had to submit not only to their master, but to every white man. At the same time, “whiteness” brought together the very different European immigrants into one nation.

»Newcomers learn to court the favor of the dominant caste and to differentiate themselves from the lower castes. They learn to conform to the dictates of the dominant caste if they want to thrive in their new country, and to see black people as historical contrast figures to rise above in a harsh economy where everyone works only for themselves.

Caste: The term is commonly used for India, which is discussed in detail in the book. But the author is suspicious of “race.” She also devotes a chapter to the Nazis’ “racial laws.” Caste refers to a much more complex status hierarchy. No matter how you try to explain it away, differences are asserted in all immigration environments; Not only between Europeans, Latinos, Asians, but also black people view skin tones as a distinguishing feature. A distributional struggle, not just in the material sense: it is about “granting or denying respect, status, honor, attention, privileges, resources, benevolence and human attention… on the basis of rank and position within the hierarchy.”

Isabel Wilkerson is particularly impressive because, in her personal outrage and striving for justice, she does not suppress the unpleasant fact that every demand, no matter how just, the more radical it is expressed, can also reinforce its opposite. How happy she was about the election of Barak Obama. At the same time, it was clear to her how “his origin story freed members of the dominant caste” from “having to deal with the unpleasant sides of American history.” Revealing quote from Joe Biden: “Here you have the first middle-class African American who is articulate, intelligent and clean and good-looking.”

Obama’s presidency did not bring peace to the country. The “Tea Party” was born. “At opposition rallies, people brandished weapons and carried signs that read ‘Death to Obama.'” The Republican Party managed to make changes to voting laws. “A study from 1912 found that anti-black attitudes and racist prejudice increased during Obama’s first term.”

The caste system places the richest and most powerful “in the penthouse of a mythical high-rise and everyone else, in descending order, on the floors below. The people of the lower caste are relegated to the basement… When they start climbing to the floors above, the statics of the entire building are threatened. This is how the caste system is able to pit basement people against each other in a basement that is about to be flooded and create panic based on the illusion that the only competition they have is the other basement people.”

Social climbers are hated if you can’t follow them. Differentiation from poorer people strengthens one’s sense of self. Without scapegoats the system would not work. The author alternates between narrative passages and analytical observations in a captivating way. Room for reflection: Is Germany really an example of overcoming a misanthropic caste system? It’s true: Even the most privileged will one day belong to the despised “caste of the elderly.” But how you pay for care does make a difference.

Isabel Wilkerson could have easily taken the usual route of identity politics demands. But as understandable as it is to denounce the disadvantages of a population group (and oneself), the system of capitalist competition is not called into question. At the end of the book, however, she makes an almost communist confession: “A world without caste would liberate all people.” How is that possible? Would everyone then fly economy?

Isabel Wilkinson: Caste. The causes of our discomfort. A.d. America. v. Jan Wilms. Kjona-Verlag, 576 pages, hardcover, €36.

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