The judge was also a woman from the subordinate caste, and she stepped down from the bench to give the convicted killer a Bible. Then she held the dominant-caste woman close to her bosom and prayed on her and with her. No one could remember ever seeing such a thing, a judge or an officer of the court hugging and consoling a newly convicted felon. The judge’s embrace seemed not so far removed from the comfort black maids extended to the disconsolate white children in their care as they wiped away their tears over the centuries.
“It’s almost impossible to imagine the same level of compassion,” wrote the journalist Ashley Reese, “being extended toward a black person who was just charged with murder.”
Around the same time, in fact, a twenty-one-year-old black man in Florida was sentenced to ten days in jail for the crime of arriving late to jury duty. The judge, a man from the dominant caste, showed none of the compassion shown a dominant-caste woman who had killed a man in his own home. The judge excoriated the young juror, threw the full weight of the law at him for a single misstep rather than show mercy.
The judge even took the young man, Deandre Somerville, to task over the composition of the jury, saying that the man was needed at the trial because he was the only black juror. Somerville was, in effect, singled out and held to a different standard from white jurors—he alone was being blamed for inadequacies of a system that happened not to have enough people who looked like him. He had not had a criminal record, and now, on the cusp of life, due to the one-way expectation of empathy from the powerless toward the empowered, he did.
“This expectation feels fueled by a perverse need to see harmed people demonstrate nobility,” the poet Hanif Abdurraqib wrote in Pacific Standard, “because that’s how we can believe the myths that political suffering builds character, and that righteousness rather than power will inevitably triumph.”
* * *
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From the moment I saw the pictures, they rattled me. It was November 2014, in the middle of the post-Ferguson protests against police brutality. At a rally in Portland, Oregon, there appeared a melancholy black boy in front of a crowd of protesters, holding a sign in the direction of the officers that said, “Free hugs.”
There was something deeply unsettling about that image that I could not figure out at first. For one thing, the boy’s face looked more like that of a man’s on a child’s small frame. His face was contorted in anguish, tears glistening down his cheeks, a wrenching emotion out of sync with the circumstances. He was wearing a fedora that seemed of another century. He did not have the carefree look of a child nor the affectionate cheer of someone offering hugs to strangers.
A white police officer responded to the sign and hugged the boy. The photograph went viral, shown on every television network. It comforted many in the dominant caste to see this gesture of compassion and grace. Here was a black child wanting to hug someone from a group that had been in contention with young black males in the months before this encounter. They were moved by the way the boy hugged the officer long and deep, as if clutching him for dear life.
What was disturbing about that picture could only be seen if one applied the same standards of human behavior to subordinated people as to others. Few black mothers, or mothers in general for that matter, would insist that their sons, and especially their black sons, go over and hug a police officer or any stranger they didn’t know. And few children would willingly do so. The boy’s face showed far more than discomfort but a despair of someone older than he appeared to be.
The world would not know the tragedy beneath that moment until years later. Two white women in Minnesota had adopted the boy, Devonte Hart, and five other black children from Texas, receiving more than $2,000 a month from the state for doing so. Over the course of ten years, the women essentially held the children captive, keeping them isolated in remote locations, withholding food from them.
They used them as props to attract a social media following with staged videos of the children forced to dance and sing for their captors. Off-camera, the women beat the children with belts and closed fists and held one girl’s head under cold water as punishment after the women found a penny in the girl’s pocket. When the children sought help and food from neighbors and teachers, the women defaulted to caste stereotypes, told the other adults not to feed them, that the children were playing the “food card,” that they were lying, that they were “drug babies,” whose birth mothers, they told people, were addicted while pregnant.
Authorities in multiple states inquired into reports of abuse but seemed unable to protect the children. Even after one of the women pleaded guilty in Minnesota in 2010 to misdemeanor assault of one of the daughters, the children remained in their custody. After that, whenever anyone got close enough to intervene, the women pulled the children out of school and moved to a different jurisdiction. They were able to rely on both the patchwork of disconnected social service agencies and their own caste privilege—the presumptions of competency and the benefit of the doubt accorded them—to evade state investigations and to deflect the children’s pleas for help.
That day in November 2014, they posted pictures of Devonte hugging the police officer and got adulation from people all over the world. People saw what they wanted to see and not the agony in the face of a twelve-year-old boy who had the body of an eight-year-old due to starvation, his hug, on some level, a bid to be rescued. People saw a picture of black grace when what the world was actually looking at was an abused hostage.
On March 26, 2018, with caseworkers closing in, the two women put the children in their SUV and drove off a cliff in Northern California along the Pacific Coast Highway, killing themselves and the children they had held captive. Blindness to the depth of pain in the boy’s face, the latitude granted these white saviors to abuse children seen as throwaways, the collective desire to solve tribal wounds with superficial gestures of grace from the wounded—all of these things contributed to this tragedy and haunt many of us still. We were all witness to a crime that ended in horror.
* * *
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Years before, in 2015, nine black parishioners were massacred in a Charleston church, and the families of the victims almost immediately extended forgiveness to the unrepentant white killer of their loved ones. It was an act of abiding faith that captivated the world but was also in line with society’s expectation that the subordinate caste bear its suffering and absolve its transgressors.
Black forgiveness of dominant-caste sin has become a spiritual form of having to be twice as good, in trauma, as in other aspects of life, to be seen as half as worthy.
“White people embrace narratives about forgiveness,” wrote the essayist and author Roxane Gay after the massacre, “so they can pretend the world is a fairer place than it actually is and that racism is merely a vestige of a painful past instead of this indelible part of our present.”
The act of forgiveness seems a silent clause in a one-sided contract between the subordinate and the dominant. “Black people forgive because we need to survive,” Gay wrote. “We have to forgive time and time again while racism or white silence in the face of racism continues to thrive. We have had to forgive slavery, segregation, Jim Crow laws, lynching, inequity in every realm, mass incarceration, voter disenfranchisement, inadequate representation in popular culture, microaggressions and more. We forgive and forgive and forgive and those who trespass against us continue to trespass against us.”
In 2018, as every week seemed to bring a new case of dominant-caste people calling the police on black people going about their daily lives, a middle-aged white woman in Brooklyn called the police on a nine-year-old boy who she said had sexually assaulted her as he passed her at the register at a corner deli. The boy said he had not done such a thing, had not touched her, and began to cry. What saved the boy from further action was the store video, which later went viral. It shows the boy passing the woman in the cr
owded deli and his bag brushing against her, unbeknownst to him as he walked by.
The woman was shamed into apologizing for the false accusation. Afterward, people wanted to know, had he forgiven her? The boy had not learned all the rules of caste yet, had not lived long enough to have read the whole script or have it completely downloaded to his subconscious. He was thinking with the still-free mind of an innocent who had not yet faced the consequences of breaking caste. “I don’t forgive the woman,” he said, “and she needs help.”
The little boy had the X-ray vision of childhood. He had not accepted the inversion of right and wrong, had not been willing to concede a privilege that should not be extracted but granted freely at the discretion of the aggrieved.
“What white people are really asking for when they demand forgiveness from a traumatized community is absolution,” Gay wrote. “They want absolution from the racism that infects us all even though forgiveness cannot reconcile America’s racist sins.”
* * *
——
One cannot live in a caste system, breathe its air, without absorbing the message of caste supremacy. The subordinated castes are trained to admire, worship, fear, love, covet, and want to be like those at the center of society, at the top of the hierarchy. In India, it is said that you can try to leave caste, but caste never leaves you. Most immigrants to the United States from India are among the most accomplished and well-to-do from their mother country, and thus few Dalits have the resources to get to America. By some estimates, Dalits are less than 2 percent of people of Indian descent in America. For those who manage to make it across the ocean, caste often migrates with them.
And so a brilliant Dalit from India, a Ph.D. at a prestigious university on the East Coast, paced and shifted his weight from one foot to the other, growing agitated, triggered, in the common parlance of early-twenty-first-century America, at the very mention of the surnames of his upper-caste countrymen. These are names that might have little meaning to most Americans but which signify rank and privilege in India. The names Gupta and Mehta and Mukherjee, common among Indian immigrants in America, are among the most revered in their homeland.
“These names,” the Dalit scholar said, shaking his head and looking down toward the carpet. “I can’t look them straight in the face. I can’t look them in the eye. I don’t know what to say. These were our masters. My grandfathers were the workers of their grandfathers. I would never be invited inside their homes. In India, they would not speak to me. Man, I could not imagine talking with them even here in America. They are of a completely different caste from me.”
He began pacing again. “The trauma to cross that line,” he said. “I have been here three years. I still do not have the confidence to talk with them.”
At the bottom of the hierarchy, the message of inferiority comes at you in whispers and billboards. It burrows into your identity. The violence and terror used to maintain the hierarchy keep you in your place without signage.
“It is a feeling of danger,” the Dalit scholar said, just the thought of upper-caste people. “They are a danger to me. I feel danger with them.”
Caste is more than rank, it is a state of mind that holds everyone captive, the dominant imprisoned in an illusion of their own entitlement, the subordinate trapped in the purgatory of someone else’s definition of who they are and who they should be.
The Dalit Ph.D. was the only one in his entire family who had a passport, the only one to ever step outside of India. The others had no passport and saw no need of a passport. “Where would they go?” he asked. The caste system had deprived them of the need or the use of a basic human trait, one’s imagination.
The first to break through from a family in a marginalized caste, he bears the weight of the dreams of everyone back home and the stigma and expectation of failure from the larger society. “If I make a mistake, my community makes a mistake,” he said. “If I fall, the community falls. I walk a very thin line.”
Back home in India, when the scholar goes into a store, they watch him and hound him like a thief, as with a black person in a store in America. He has absorbed that expectation and adjusted to it to survive. “I never ask about the quality of an item,” the scholar said. “I ask the price. If I ask the quality, they will say, ‘You can’t afford this, why are you wasting my time?’ If I say I want to see it, they will say, ‘Get out. I will call the police.’ So I come back with friends who are not Dalit, who can speak their language and get it for me.”
It is for that reason that he stood there in the lobby of a high-end hotel after a dinner near campus and pointed to his shoes, his leather-clad sneakers. He bent down and pressed the empty toe box of his sneakers. “These shoes I bought,” he said, “they are not my size. They are too big for me. I bought them because I did not want to trouble the salesman. I did not have the confidence to ask for another size. So I bought what he gave me.”
He, like subordinate-caste people wherever there is caste, has had to create an entire protocol to protect himself from insult. “If I go into a store and stay thirty minutes, I have to buy something,” he said. “I have so many things that I was afraid to return.”
Dalits have suffered brutal assaults for caste infractions, forbidden even today in the rural precincts from walking the same roads as the dominant caste. A family in the Vellore district was forced to carry a deceased loved one along the back roads to reach the funeral pyre. The men had to lower the body, wrapped in cloth and leaves, by a rope from a bridge, the body dangling on descent, as the men below stretched their arms up to receive it. They had been denied access to public roads that they would have been seen as polluting.
They do what they must to avoid further insult.
“For us, it is dignity,” he said. “If I go someplace, they might say, you can’t afford this, you are wasting my time. So when I go to a restaurant, I don’t want to take up the waiter’s time. They might attack us, and then they say that we are hostile, when for us it is a matter of dignity. Our dignity is under assault.”
He once accompanied two white American women to a store and was astonished at their behavior. “They took up the owner’s time and did not buy anything,” he said. “I could not imagine doing that.”
The fear runs deep within his soul.
I asked him, “Is this fear of anticipated rejection or the actual rejection itself?”
“It is the former caused by the latter,” he answered.
“What would help you feel better in these situations?” I asked him.
“What I need is to feel better inside my own skin,” he said.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Shock Troops on the Borders of Hierarchy
At the dinner hour on a nineteenth-century steamboat in the antebellum South, the caste ritual went as follows: At the first bell, the white passengers were seated with the captain for their meal. After they finished, the second bell rang for the white crewmen—the engineers, the pilot, the servants. Only after all of the white people on board, of every class and status, completed their meals would the third bell ring, and the black crewmen, slave or free, be permitted to eat.
A problem arose, however, if there happened to be free black passengers in their midst. Free blacks paid their fare and were on paper in the same category as the white passengers. They were likely middle-class, but what mattered was that they were lowest caste. And historically, caste trumps class.
It was taboo for blacks and whites to sit, stand, or eat in the same space at the same time or even to use the same utensils. So they were not going to eat with their white counterparts or with the white crewmen who were presumably lower in class than they.
But there was more to it than that. Free blacks were an affront to the caste system, always brushing against its borders. By their very existence, moving about as equals to the dominant caste, having the means to enter spaces considered the preserve
of their betters, and having had the ingenuity to gain their freedom and to walk around in it, they threw the entire caste belief system into question. If people in the lowest caste had the capacity to be equal, why were they being enslaved? If they were smart enough to do something other than pick cotton or scrub floors, why then were they picking cotton and scrubbing floors? It was too mind-twisting to contemplate.
After the dinner service was cleared away and everyone else aboard had eaten and retired to their cabins or posts, the small group of black passengers, all women in this case, were permitted to eat in the pantry, “standing at the butler’s table.”
From the start of the caste system in America, people who were lowest caste but who had managed somehow to rise above their station have been the shock troops on the front lines of hierarchy. People who appear in places or positions where they are not expected can become foot soldiers in an ongoing quest for respect and legitimacy in a fight they had hoped was long over.
* * *
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Public conveyances and recreational spaces have been the soundstage for caste confrontation precisely because they bring together in a confined space, for a limited time and purpose, groups that have historically been kept apart. They become test tubes of caste interaction, with its written and unwritten codes, its unspoken but understood rules of engagement.
In 2015, the members of a black women’s book club were traveling by train on a wine tour of Napa Valley. They were laughing and chatting as were other tourists, given the nature of the outing and what all the passengers had been imbibing. But they alone seemed to attract the notice of the maître d’. “When you laugh,” the maître d’ told them, “I see it on the [other] passengers’ faces.” Soon the train stopped, and the black women, some of them senior citizens, were ejected and met by police, “as if we were criminals,” they later said.
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