Except, actually, he did, or rather his physiology did. Modern medicine has long sought to attribute the higher rates of disease in African-Americans relative to white Americans to genetics. But it turns out that sub-Saharan Africans do not have high rates of high blood pressure, diabetes, and heart disease, while African-Americans have the highest rates of those conditions of all ethnic groups in the United States.
The Nigerian man now in America was living this, too. “My father lived to ninety years old,” the man said. “He had no high blood pressure until the last day of his life.
“I just went to the doctor, and he tells me I have high blood pressure and early signs of diabetes,” he said. “And I am just fifty-four. The effects of spending my entire adult life as a black man in this country are making me sick forty years ahead of my own father back in Nigeria.”
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The friction of caste is killing people. Societal inequity is killing people. The act of moving about and navigating spaces with those whom society has trained us to believe are inherently different from us is killing people, and not just the targets. Studies are showing that prejudice itself can be deadly.
Neuroscientists have found that harboring this kind of animus can raise a person’s blood pressure and cortisol levels, “even during benign social interactions with people of different races,” wrote the neuropsychologist Elizabeth Page-Gould. Prejudice itself can be deadly. These physical reactions can put the person at greater risk for stroke or diabetes or heart attacks and premature death.
A study of white Americans who scored high on a measure of automatic prejudice, meaning the degree to which they associate certain ethnic groups with negative stereotypes at the level of the unconscious, found that when they were put into situations where they were, for example, to be interviewed for a job by an African-American or to have social interaction with Latinos, they perceived the people of a different ethnicity as a threat, even in a safe laboratory setting.
The threat they perceived as a result of their prejudice set off their body’s alarm system. Their panic produced automatic physiological responses as would occur if they were in combat or confronting an oncoming car—restricted blood flow to the heart, the flooding of the muscles with glucose as the body releases cortisol, the hormone useful in the rare moment when one might need to escape danger, but damaging to the body on a regular basis. The combination of reduced blood flow, constrictions to the circulatory and digestive systems, and the breakdown of muscle by cortisol can lead to life-threatening damage to the heart and the immune system and to death before one’s time.
Even the briefest exposure is all it takes to activate the body’s response. Among whites, the sight of a black person, even in faded yearbook photographs, can trigger the amygdala of the brain to perceive threat and arm itself for vigilance within 30 milliseconds of exposure, the blink of an eye, researchers have found. When whites have a bit more time for the conscious mind to override the automatic feeling of threat, the amygdala activity switches to inhibition mode. When whites are prompted to think of the black person as an individual, imagine their personal characteristics, the threat level falls.
This shows that it is “possible to override our worst impulses and reduce these prejudices,” wrote the psychologist Susan Fiske. But to do so in a meaningful way requires forethought, an awareness of the unconscious biases passed down through the generations, and the chance for people different from one another to work together as equals, on the same team, with shared goals that “require cooperation to succeed,” Fiske said. Outside of sports and the military, American society provides few such opportunities.
This leaves many Americans at risk without knowing it. As they go about their days interacting with co-workers, neighbors, contractors, or other ordinary people perceived as unlike themselves, they can be in danger of worsened health and premature illness due to the threat signals triggered by the person’s own unaddressed prejudice.
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On the other side of the caste system, scientists have connected a key indicator of health and longevity—the length of human telomeres—to one’s exposure to inequality and discrimination, primarily focusing on the telomere lengths of African-Americans.
A telomere is a repeating sequence of double-stranded DNA at the end of a chromosome. The more frequently a cell divides, the shorter the telomeres become, wearing out the cell in a process that public health scientist Arline Geronimus, in her pioneering 1992 work, termed weathering. It is a measure of premature aging of the cells, and thus of the person bearing those cells, and of the early onset of disease due to chronic exposure to such stressors as discrimination, job loss, or obesity.
These studies initially focused on the accelerated aging of the telomeres of African-Americans. But expanded research is finding that this kind of cell damage results from one’s exposure to social inequity and difficult life conditions, rather than merely one’s race and ethnicity. Thus, the telomeres of poor whites, for example, are shorter than those of wealthier whites, whose resources might better help them weather life’s challenges.
The opposite is true for people in the lower castes in America. Socioeconomic status and the presumed privilege that comes with it do not protect the health of well-to-do African-Americans. In fact, many suffer a health penalty for their ambitions. “Middle class African American men and women are more likely to suffer from hypertension and stress than those with lower incomes,” wrote the sociologist George Lipsitz. The stigma and stereotypes they labor under expose them to higher levels of stress-inducing discrimination in spite of, or perhaps because of, their perceived educational or material advantages.
The pattern applies to another marginalized group, Mexicans in America. It turns out that poorer Mexican immigrants have longer telomeres, meaning healthier, younger cells, than better-off Mexican-Americans. Poorer Mexicans are likely to be newer to this country and to cluster together in closer support networks. Their isolation from the mainstream and the language barrier could inadvertently insulate them from the discrimination that more affluent Mexicans may face as they navigate the caste system on a daily basis. Those who were born in the United States or have lived in the country for many years would have greater exposure to the damaging effects of stereotyping and stigma.
All of these groups appear to be paying a price when they step outside of the roles assigned them in the hierarchy. “High levels of everyday discrimination contribute to narrowing the arteries over time,” said the Harvard social scientist David R. Williams. “High levels of discrimination lead to higher levels of inflammation, a marker of heart disease.”
People who face discrimination, Williams said, often build up a layer of unhealthy fat, known as visceral fat, surrounding vital organs, as opposed to subcutaneous fat, just under the skin. It is this visceral fat that raises the risk of diabetes and cardiovascular disease and leads to premature death. And it can be found in people of all ethnicities based on their experience of discrimination.
“Black women experience higher levels of discrimination than white women do,” Williams said. “But when white women experience discrimination, the effects are the same. So discrimination leading to higher levels of visceral fat, that is true for African-American women and for white women. When whites report higher levels of discrimination, their health is also hurt. It really says something about the nature of human interaction.”
When it comes to life expectancy, middle-aged and less educated white Americans are experiencing a downward trend, as we have seen. But people of color at the bottom of the caste system, who bear the brunt of societal stigma, still have an overall lower life expectancy than their white counterparts at every level of education, according to Williams.
The average white American at age twenty-five is likely to live five years longer than the average African-American. While white high school
dropouts have a lower life expectancy than their more educated white counterparts, they live three years longer than African-American high school dropouts. And white college graduates live four years longer than African-American college graduates.
Thus, people of color with the most education, who compete in fields where they are not expected to be, continually press against the boundaries of caste and experience a lower life expectancy as a result. The more ambitious the marginalized person, the greater the risk of what evolutionary biologist Joseph L. Graves calls “the out-of-place principle of social dominance.” Graves found that hypertension rates of blacks and whites are roughly the same when affluent African-Americans are deleted from the equation. The caste system takes years off the lives of subordinate-caste people the more they find themselves in contention with it.
“There is a black tax that we pay that hurts our health, and the gap is larger among the college-educated than it is among high school dropouts,” Williams said. “We still carry that burden, to engage in a heightened vigilance, which means you’re careful of how you look, how you appear, how you dress.”
Williams had a friend, a middle-class black businessman, who would never leave the house in the sweats and sneakers that his white neighbors wore without a moment’s thought. He couldn’t afford to. He took great care whenever he left the house, and it took more time and more forethought for even the most casual errand.
“If his wife needed a gallon of milk and he needed to run to the supermarket to get that gallon of milk, he would run into the house to get a jacket and tie,” Williams said. “It was his way of trying to minimize the likelihood that he’s going to be perceived as criminal because he’s a young black male. That is what we live with, and it is taking a toll on our lives.”
It seems that people in the dominant caste know in their bones that the playing field tilts toward the group they happened to have been born to. Years ago, back in the 1990s, the political scientist Andrew Hacker posed a theoretical question to his white undergraduates at Queens College in New York. He asked them how much they would have to be paid to live the next fifty years as a black person. The students thought it over and came back with a figure. Most said they would need $50 million—$1 million for every year that they would have to be black. They felt they would need it, he said, to “buy protection from the discriminations and dangers white people know they would face once they were perceived to be black.”
Part Six
BACKLASH
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
A Change in the Script
The greatest departure from the script of the American caste system was the election of an African-American to the highest office in the land. History has shown that there would be consequences to this disruption of the social order, and there were. What follows is not an analysis of the presidency of Barack Obama, but rather a look into the caste system’s response to his ascension and the challenges it would place in his path.
First, to break more than two centuries of tradition and birthright, it would take the human equivalent of a supernova—a Harvard-trained lawyer, a U.S. senator from the land of Lincoln, whose expertise was the Constitution itself, whose charisma and oratory matched or exceeded that of most any man who had ever risen to the Oval Office, whose unusual upbringing inclined him toward conciliation of the racial divide, who famously saw the country as not blue states or red states but as the United States, whose wife, if it could be imagined, was also a Harvard-trained lawyer with as much star power as her husband, who, together with their two young daughters, made for a telegenic American dream family, and who, beyond all this, ran a scrupulous, near-flawless campaign, a movement really. It would take an idealist, who believed what most Americans would have sworn was impossible, for a black man to make it to the White House.
Secondly, his opponent, a beloved and aging war hero from Arizona, a wise and measured moderate Republican in a party that had grown more conservative, ran a less-than-energetic campaign and made several misjudgments, the most significant of which was choosing an unpredictable former governor of Alaska, a woman prone to gaffes and to quirky, word-salad misstatements, as his running mate.
Then, in the months leading up the election, a once-in-a-generation financial catastrophe descended on a country that seemed on the brink of financial ruin under the Republican administration then in power. Wall Street firms collapsed before our eyes, and the value of American homes, the primary source of many citizens’ wealth, plunged in value, leaving millions of voters underwater.
In October 2008, a few weeks before the election, envelopes arrived in the mailboxes of millions of American households, mailings that became inadvertent leaflets in favor of the Democrat: the quarterly 401(k) statements that showed losses of as much as 40 percent of people’s savings in the last year under the Republican president. By that November, some 12 million homeowners owed more on their mortgages than their houses were worth in what was now being called the Great Recession, among the worst economic downturns since the Great Depression.
People in the dominant caste who might have been on the fence about taking a chance on an African-American candidate were looking at massive losses with no end in sight. Hope had been Obama’s mantra during times that badly needed it. A record tide of people from the lower and middle castes, people who swelled with pride and whose votes now felt like a mission, came out for him, and, along with just enough dominant-caste voters who believed in him, too, swept Obama into the White House. The world was so joyous that a committee in Norway awarded him the Nobel Peace Prize within months of his inauguration. “Only very rarely has a person to the same extent as Obama captured the world’s attention,” the Nobel committee said, “and given its people hope for a better future.”
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Over the course of American history, the idea of a black man in the Oval Office was virtually unthinkable. But from a caste perspective, and beyond his own personal gifts, his singular origin story was one that the caste system would be more willing to accept, if any. His growing up in Hawaii, the son of an immigrant from Kenya and of a white woman from Kansas, was free from the heaviness of slavery and Jim Crow and the hard histories of regular African-Americans. His story did not trigger the immediate discomfort in the dominant caste, unlike those of everyday black people, who, if you scratch their family trees long enough, you run into a sharecropper cheated at settlement or an ancestor shut out of a neighborhood because of redlining, people for whom these injustices were not history, but their own or their foreparents’ actual lives.
Rather, his origin story freed people in the dominant caste from having to think about the unsavory corners of American history. They could regard him with curiosity and wonderment and even claim him as part of themselves, if they chose. They could perhaps feel a connection to his mother and to his mother’s mother, who tragically died just before Election Day. Both women were from the dominant caste and would not get to see how very far he would go in this world. The Delaware senator who would become his running mate, though, seemed to be speaking, however awkwardly, for some others in the ruling majority. “You’ve got the first sort of mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy,” said Joe Biden. “I mean, that’s a storybook, man.”
After the election, white Americans in both parties extolled the progress the country had made in the past generation, relieved to be able to say that racism was a thing of the past. “We have a black president, for heaven’s sakes,” they would say, by way of example. The fact is, though, this was a development that the majority of the dominant caste was not truly in a position to claim. The majority of white voters did not support him in either of his presidential bids. He had star power and a way with babies and pensioners, but no matter how refined and inspirational, well-spoken and conciliatory he was, Obama’s victory did not occur because most voters in the dominant caste had become mo
re open-minded and enamored of him. As with other recent Democrats running for president, he won despite the bulk of the white electorate.
Even as they proclaimed a new post-racial world, the majority of white Americans did not vote for the country’s first black president. An estimated 43 percent went for him in 2008. Thus, a solid majority of white Americans— nearly three out of every five white voters—did not back him in his first election, and fewer still—39 percent—voted for him in 2012. In the former Confederate state of Mississippi, only one in ten white voters pulled the lever for Obama. For much of his presidency, he was trying to win over people who did not want him in the Oval Office and some who resented his very existence.
As a measure of the enduring role of caste interests in American politics, the shadow of the Civil War seemed to hang over the 2008 election. It turned out that Obama carried every state that Abraham Lincoln had won in 1860, an election with an almost entirely white electorate but one that became a proxy for egalitarian sentiment and for the future of slavery and of the Republic. “The cultural divides of the Civil War on racial grounds,” wrote the political scientist Patrick Fisher of Seton Hall University, “can thus still be considered to be influencing American political culture a century and a half later.”
Lyndon B. Johnson, after signing the 1964 Civil Rights Act, is said to have predicted that the Democrats would lose the South for a generation for having stood up for the citizenship rights of African-Americans. That prophecy would prove to be correct but also an understatement. The Democrats would lose more than just the South and for well longer than a generation. From that moment forward, white Americans overall moved rightward toward the Republicans as the country enacted more egalitarian policies.
Caste Page 30
