CRJU 2200H: Social Science and the American Crime Problem (Tami Thomas): Caste by Isabel Wilkerson

The paper explores mobilization to reduce the deepest inequalities in the two largest democracies, those along caste lines in India and racial lines in the United States. I compare how the groups at the bottom of these ethnic hierarchies—India's former untouchable castes (Dalits) and African Americans—mobilized from the 1940s to the 1970s in pursuit of full citizenship: the franchise, representation, civil rights, and social rights.

This essay provides the first account and examination of caste education in the work of W.E.B. Du Bois. In so doing, I argue that caste education plays a central role in realizing the political and social goals of racial capitalist society for Du Bois. Using Du Bois's caste analytic, I take up and articulate three biopolitical governing strategies of the racial capitalist state/industrial schooling regime. The final section ties Du Bois's caste analytic to recent work in Afro-pessimist thought to look at the charter/choice debate. I argue here that Du Bois's caste analysis, when paired with Afro-pessimist thought, shows how even critical scholarship on charter/choice policies fall short in their reliance on a model democracy and humanism based on antiblackness.

India's struggle for caste justice has been likened by many to the struggle for racial justice in the United States. Small wonder then, that the activists who spearheaded the movement for caste justice were inspired by the most famous of the activists in the United States, the Black Panthers of the Black Power Movement of the 1960s and 70s. One of my most memorable encounters from my newsroom days in India in the early 1990s was with Namdeo Dhasal, one of the Dalit activists who had founded the Dalit Panthers movement. This essay draws on that experience, as also some others with the Dalit movement and Dalit leaders in India and links their struggle for social justice with that of African Americans, from the Harlem Renaissance era to the present.

In this theoretical analysis of US racism, we examine contributions and deficiencies of Michael Omi and Howard Winant's influential racial formation theory from the critical perspective of systemic racism theory. Analysing important concepts and arguments in both theoretical frameworks, we demonstrate that racial formation theory inadequately explains: racial meanings and white racial framing; US society's racial foundation; the US state and other sites of racial contestation; whites' and white elites’ centrality in contemporary racism; challenges to a racially pluralistic democracy; and group resistance to racism, especially that of the black ‘radical’ intellectual tradition. We find racial formation theory provides some innovative concepts that move beyond outdated mainstream ethnicity/assimilation theories, but that formation theory lacks the conceptual tools for fully understanding the deep foundation, layered complexities, and institutionalized operations of systemic racism in the USA.

This paper proposes a revised and expanded conception of caste grounded in the Black-White dynamic of American race relations.