Pillars of Caste ~ II

When a country has developed and perfected an elaborate system of segregation and discrimination against a large group of its own people, it is only natural that another regime seeking such marginalisation against another group would draw lessons from it. In the early days of the Third Reich, Franz Gurtner, the Reich minister of justice was chairing a meeting of 17 legal luminaries to finalise a legal framework to turn their ideology into law for an Aryan nation. The first item on their agenda was what they could learn from the United States in this regard

- ISABEL WILKERSON

The fifth pillar of caste, according to Isabel Wilkerson, author of "Caste: The Origins of our Discontents" is the division of labour based on one's place in the hierarchy. We are very well aware of the reality in India, where we still find a majority of the lower caste people employed in low-skill, labour intensive jobs, and the situation is no different in America, where the range of occupations for the blacks still remains very narrow. But where she brings new insight into the process of systematic and institutional prejudice is in the next pillar, dehumanisation and stigmatisation of the people belonging to the out-groups - Dalits, Blacks, Jews.

Underlying this is the belief that an ordinary human - even a soldier obeying his orders - cannot inflict unspeakable atrocities on another being he considers a human like him. But then Nazis, Whites and dominant castes have inflicted such atrocities upon millions of humans without a shred of guilt.

For that they had to dehumanise them first, not as individuals but as a group duce each to a nameless, identity-less, undifferentiated member of a group carrying a permanent, indelible stigma. Once the group is dehumanised and thus quarantined from all others, every individual in it is automatically dehumanised.

Thus, in the Nazi concentration camps, individuals were no longer individuals, but a number, all of them similarly dressed, heads shaved, their every distinguishing feature like a moustache ruthlessly removed.

Stripped of their clothing and all accoutrements of their former lives, they were no longer humans one needed to engage with, no different from a herd of animals on which any atrocity can be inflicted without remorse. In America, enslaved Africans were given new names by their masters and made to forget their own, thus stripping them of their past identities.