Pillars of Caste~I

As the Human Genome Project conclusively established, all humanity is biologically one and indivisible, with 99.9 per cent of our DNAs being shared. We are all part of a six-million-year history of adaptation and survival which is written in the language of our genes in every cell of our body, evolving in East Africa and then migrating in different directions to colonise the world. Africans are not black - they see themselves as Igbo and Yoruba, Ewe, Akan, Ndebele, etc. - they became black only after coming to America or Europe

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'Throughout human history, three caste systems have stood out. The tragically accelerated, chilling, and officially vanquished caste system of Nazi Germany. The lingering, millennia-long caste system of India. And the shape-shifting, unspoken, race-based caste pyramid in the United States. Each version relied on stigmatizing those deemed inferior to justify the dehumanization necessary to keep the lowest-ranked people at the bottom and to rationalize the protocols of enforcement", the Pulitzer winning journalist Isabel Wilkerson says in her well-researched book "Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents".

We tend to think that America has a racial divide, which is substantially different from our own caste system. But Ms Wilkerson, who has herself suffered and continues to suffer from discrimination in her own country because of the colour of her skin, despite being one of the most brilliant journalists of her times, asserts it is one and the same, going by the common characteristics that define any caste system. Going further, she says that even the annihilation of the Jews attempted by Nazi Germany belonged to the same genre.