Illustration by the Big Fat Bao.
Bao (she/they) is an independent illustrator and researcher whose work focuses on redefining Indian design education from the anticaste perspective. Published in https://futuress.org/stories/on-caste/
On race, caste and Kamala Harris
This has been a historic month in our nation. Kamala Harris’s candidacy generated a strong and polarizing response, with some going calling her the “DEI Candidate” and questioning whether she is truly Black to a Black crowd. Her career, which career as an attorney general and policymaker with plenty of track record to debate, became immediately rooted in an attack on her identities, illuminates the power of caste as an underlying operating system in our nation. What is caste and how is it relevant? Let’s break it down together.
Isabel Wilkerson, in her book Caste traces Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King’s journey to India and discovering that the “untouchables” in India are equivalent to Black people in the US–and that both are at the lowest rung of a false hierarchy of human value. Embedded in the idea of race and caste is that idea that some groups of people are de facto “more deserving” or “better” than others–and that the role of those who are “less deserving” or “less than” in this false hierarchy of human value is to serve and those who are born with more (who have the right to concentrate wealth and power and have those who are lower caste organized societally to work for them).
In this WIN Digest, we explore what caste is and how caste–a cross-cutting way to understand these false hierarchies of human value–affects us all.
by Somava Saha, WE in the World
Published by WIN DIGEST
