Jetaime’s Reviews > Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents > Status Update

While the Nazis praised "the American commitment to legislating racial purity,” they could not abide "the unforgiving hardness” under which "an American man or woman who has even a drop of Negro blood in their veins counted as blacks," Whitman wrote. "The one-drop rule was too harsh for Nazis."

"It is caste or rather the policing of and adherence to the caste system. It’s the autonomic unconscious, reflexive response to expectations from a thousand imaging inputs and neurological societal downloads that affix people to certain roles based on what they look like and what they have historically have been assigned to or the characteristics and stereotypes by which they have been categorized."

Hitler saw himself as the voice of the Volk, of their grievances and fears, especially those in the rural districts, as a god chosen savior, running on instinct. He had never held elected office before.

The old guard did not foresee, or chose not to see, that his actual mission was to "explore the methods of democracy to destroy democracy. By the time they recognized their fatal miscalculation, it was too late. Hitler had risen as an outside agitator, a cult figure enamored of pageantry and rallies with parades of people carrying torches that an observer said looked like "river’s of fire."

Hitler especially marveled at the American "knack for maintaining an air of robust innocence in the wake of mass death."

But in the same way that individuals cannot move forward, become whole and healthy, unless they examine the domestic violence they witnessed as children or the alcoholism that runs in their family, the country cannot become whole until it confronts what was not a chapter in its history, but the basis of its economic and social order. For a quarter millenium, slavery was the country.

To their astonishment, I began to be able to tell who was high-born and who was low born among the Indian people among us, not from what they looked like, as one might in the United States, but on the basis of human universal human response to hierarchy—in the case of an upper caste person, an inescapable certitude in bearing, demeanor, behavior, a visible expectation of centrality.

We in the developed world are like homeowners who inherited a house on a piece of land that is beautiful on the outside, but whose soil is unstable loam and rock, heaving and contracting over generations, cracks pitched but the deeper ruptures away for decades, centuries even. Many people may rightly say, "I had nothing to do with how this all started. I have nothing to do with the sins of the past."

“Looking beneath the history of ons country is like learning that alcoholism or depression runs in ones family or that sauciness has occurred more often than might be usual or, with the advances in medical genetics, discovering that one has inherited the markers of a BRCA mutation for breast cancer. You don’t ball up in a corner with guilt or shame at these discoveries. You don’t, if you are wise..”