SERMON – CASTE
Rev. John T. Crestwell, Jr.
February 27, 2022
Readings are from the book Caste: Origins of Our Discontent by Isabel Wilkerson
Reading 1. Divine Will
“Before the age of human awareness, according to the ancient Hindu text of India, Manu, the all-knowing, was seated in contemplation, when the great men approached him and asked him, “Please, Lord, tell us precisely and in the proper order the Laws of all the social classes as well as of those born in between.” Manu proceeded to tell of a time when the universe as we know it was in a deep sleep, and the One “who is beyond the range of senses,” brought forth the waters and took birth himself as Brahma, the “grandfather of all the worlds.” And then, to fill the land, he created the Brahmin, the highest caste, from his mouth. Kshatriya (Shu-ah-tree-uh) from his arms. The Vaishya (Vay-sh-ya) from his thighs, and, from his feet, the Shudra, the lowest of the four varnas, or divisions of man, millennia ago and into the fullness of time. The fragment from which each caste was formed foretold the position that each would fill and their placement, in order, in the caste system. From lowest to highest, bottom to top: The Shudra, the feet, the servant, the bearer of burdens. The Vaishya (Vay-sh-ya), the thighs, the engine, the merchant, the trader. The Kshatriya (Shu-ah-tree-uh), the arms, the warrior, the protector, the ruler. And above them all, the Brahmin, the head, the mouth, the philosopher, the sage, the priest, the one nearest to the gods. “The Brahmin is by Law the lord of this whole creation,” according to the Laws of Manu. “It is by the kindness of the Brahmin that other people eat… Unmentioned among the original four varnas were those deemed so low that they were beneath even the feet of the Shudra. They were living out the afflicted karma of the past, they were not to be touched and some not even to be seen. Their very shadow was a pollutant. They were outside of the caste system and thus outcastes. These were the Untouchables who would later come to be known as Dalits, the subordinate caste of India.” -Wilkerson, Isabel. Caste (Oprah’s Book Club) (pp. 101-102). Random House Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
Reading 2. Divine will: Book of Genesis:
“Noah became a man of the soil. His sons were Shem, Ham, and Japheth, who would become the progenitors of all humanity. One season, Noah planted a vineyard, and he later drank of the wine of the fruit of the vineyard. The wine overtook him, and he lay uncovered inside his tent. Ham, who would become the father of a son, Canaan, happened into the tent and saw his father’s nakedness and told his two brothers outside. Shem and Japheth took a garment and laid it across their shoulders. They walked backward into the tent and covered their father’s nakedness. Their faces were turned in the other direction so that they would not see their father unclothed. When Noah awoke from his wine and found out what Ham had done, he cursed Ham’s son, Canaan, and the generations to follow, saying, “Cursed be Canaan! The lowest of slaves will he be to his brothers.” The story of Ham’s discovery of Noah’s nakedness would pass down through the millennia. The sons of Shem (Asian humans), Ham (African humans), and Japheth (Caucasian humans) spread across the continents, Shem to the east, Ham to the south, Japheth to the west, it was said. Those who decreed themselves the descendants of Japheth would hold fast to that story and translate it to their advantage. As the riches from the slave trade from Africa to the New World poured forth to the Spaniards, to the Portuguese, to the Dutch, and lastly to the English, the biblical passage would be summoned to condemn the children of Ham and to justify the kidnap and enslavement of millions of human beings, and the violence against them. From the time of the Middle Ages, some interpreters of the Old Testament described Ham as bearing black skin and translated Noah’s curse against him as a curse against the descendants of Ham, against all humans with dark skin, the people who the Europeans told themselves had been condemned to enslavement by God’s emissary, Noah himself.” Wilkerson, Isabel. Caste (Oprah’s Book Club) (pp. 102-103). Random House Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
Last week I shared that we live in a reality where all of us are victims of psycho-social programming that is, in many ways, destructive; that our current structures are based on immoral foundations; that the foundation is cracked and faulty which means it will need major constructive repairs. Re-education and reprogramming are what’s needed about the history, structure and nature of the “made up” story of race we have learned because we have all been programmed to see “them” versus “us” or that “we” are better than “they” are; and to see black and brown bodies as the ultimate racial other. I said that this is THE GREAT WORK we must all do so that humanity can manifest its greatness and experience true freedom from all mental and physical tyrannies in the mind that manifest in the material world.
Today I want to go back to the origins of our discontent with the help of author Isabel Wilkerson and her fantastic book “Caste”. Her scholarship will help us on this journey…
You heard read the old Hindu story of how the caste system began. It was justified through an epic story of the creation of humanity. It is codified as a holy story and it has lived for over 3000 years as the social order in India. Stories are powerful, and humans can justify almost anything. We must always be mindful about the stories we tell ourselves about others as they can have generational ramifications as you already know.
What’s not said in this mythical Hindu account, as Wilkerson noted, was the lowest caste—the OUTCASTS—they were beneath the feet. The Dalits—the untouchables who handled the lowest level jobs in society like picking up dead carcasses, or feces, or garbage. They were the unclean and impure—and the darkest hued people in the culture. The caste system was outlawed in India in 1950 but the tradition continues even as it is continually protested.
In America, we had a different but similar religious narrative “The curse of Ham” or Canaan that got us in this precarious racialized caste state. For a long time—hundreds of years—our white forebears—the clergy, merchants and farmers alike—the power structure—used the Holy Bible—stories in the Old Testament (in Genesis and Leviticus) to rationalize othering, slavery and the brutality of black bodies. It’s in the the New Testament too: Ephesians 6:5 “Slaves obey your earthly masters”. Ironically, Paul’s letter to the Ephesian Christians was teaching that life is hard but persevere and live with virtue. In other words, if you are a slave, “be a good slave”. This scripture was also used to justify the subjugation of black and brown bodies. Unfortunately, religion is full of hypocrisy. As the metaphorical “head” of God, it seems that religion (the priestly caste) is often at the head of nearly all the problems we face in society. Someone cynically said to me “show me a problem the church is trying to solve that it didn’t first start.” These spokespersons for God or the gods have too often been full of bias and pettiness. That is why I love spirituality but not religion so much. That’s why it’s important for us as a part of this faith tradition to walk our talk. What we teach and co-create as Unitarian Universalists is so important. Our narratives and stories we promulgate can and do become a part of the very fabric of how we function, morally, as human beings.
But what is caste? I have not defined it. Let’s use Isabel Wilkerson’s wise words. She said this:
“Caste is the granting or withholding of respect, status, honor, attention, privileges, resources, benefit of the doubt, and human kindness to someone on the basis of their perceived rank or standing in the hierarchy… Caste is insidious and therefore powerful because it is not hatred, it is not necessarily personal. It is the worn grooves of comforting routines and unthinking expectations, patterns of a social order that have been in place for so long that it looks like the natural order of things.” Wilkerson, Isabel. Caste (Oprah’s Book Club) (p. 70). Random House Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
She continues: “Caste, on the other hand, predates the notion of race and has survived the era of formal, state-sponsored racism that had long been openly practiced in the mainstream. The modern-day version of easily deniable racism may be able to cloak the invisible structure that created and maintains hierarchy and inequality. But caste does not allow us to ignore structure. Caste is structure. Caste is ranking. Caste is the boundaries that reinforce the fixed assignments based upon what people look like. Caste is a living, breathing entity. It is like a corporation that seeks to sustain itself at all costs. To achieve a truly egalitarian world requires looking deeper than what we think we see. We cannot win against a hologram.” Wilkerson, Isabel. Caste (Oprah’s Book Club) (p. 69). Random House Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
As a black man who grew up in Southeast Washington, DC I had a rank, class and caste. I have managed to become an upper middle-class person through my education, a lot of support, love, and luck. I have been fortunate. But I can never truly escape my caste because of my skin color. Wilkerson says that caste has 8-pillars or factors that hold it together. You have to read the book to get the details. But very quickly: divine will (religious justification); heredity privileges (an unearned privilege which people don’t like to give up); mating rules and taboos (that is you marry your ‘kind’ and at the same level as your station); purity vs pollution (that is—you have been programmed to see that white is clean and black is dirty or unclean); occupational hierarchy (who is seen as unworthy based on the type of work that is done); dehumanization (exploiting those who are not seen as not fully human due to their status); terror enforcement (the cruel means to keep it all in their place); which leads to perceived superiority and inferiority as a result of the first seven pillars. Each of these deserves their own sermon… This is hard stuff to fathom.
But caste is a bit different from racism. Listen to Wilkerson’s nuance…
“What is the difference between racism and casteism? Because caste and race are interwoven in America, it can be hard to separate the two. Any action or institution that mocks, harms, assumes, or attaches inferiority or stereotype on the basis of the social construct of race can be considered racism. Any action or structure that seeks to limit, hold back, or put someone in a defined ranking, seeks to keep someone in their place by elevating or denigrating that person on the basis of their perceived category, can be seen as casteism. Casteism is the investment in keeping the hierarchy as it is in order to maintain your own ranking, advantage, privilege, or to elevate yourself above others or keep others beneath you. For those in the marginalized castes, casteism can mean seeking to keep those on your disfavored rung from gaining on you, to curry the favor and remain in the good graces of the dominant caste, all of which serve to keep the structure intact. In the United States, racism and casteism frequently occur at the same time or overlap or figure into the same scenario. Casteism is about positioning and restricting those positions, vis-à-vis others. What race and its precursor, racism, do extraordinarily well is to confuse and distract from the underlying structural and more powerful Sith Lord of caste. Like the cast on a broken arm, like the cast in a play, a caste system holds everyone in a fixed place. Wilkerson, Isabel. Caste (Oprah’s Book Club) (pp. 70-71). Random House Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
Caste is the hierarchy and racism equals the structure. Hierarchy and structure—like “kissing cousins”. But what is the real story on how got here with this evil system? I have a theory…
I preached about this not long ago… The real story is agrarian. It’s about the growth of agriculture and humans emerging from tribes into nation-states and naturally dividing the divisions of labor to get the work done. Alpha leaders (some toxic) using their intellect and cunning and time and the eventual emergence of religious hierarchy, and time and eventually no one wants to do the menial labor. “Somebody’s got to do it!” So, the weak are preyed upon and eventually forced to do the jobs no one wants; and over time (human intelligence and cunning and leadership by sociopaths lead to more war and battles—lots of new weapons and guns, germs, more empire-building—and we have gotten stuck with a story built by tyrants that prey upon the weakest among us. That’s my theory. And it is this theory that gives me pause about where we are today as a society.
I was picked on a lot as a kid and because of that, I deeply dislike tyrannical behavior. In my mind, this is how the world was made using made-up stories and faith-based justifications and preying on the ‘least of these’. Wolves preying on sheep. When I look at this war with Russia and Ukraine—I see yet another example of the use of FORCE instead of the true POWER which is love and collaboration. When will these despots and tyrants not be allowed to lead? The people have to demand better and not fear them!
What is caste and racism for me? It represents taking advantage of natural systems of collaboration to control people, places, and things for one’s own benefit. Caste and racism exist because of people’s out-of-control narcissism so that the few can control the many. It’s not the pyramid of duties that is corrupt. It’s not the divisions of labor, rather it’s what we do to the people. So, we must keep debugging the system. We’ve got to keep going inside the program.
For example, when someone tells you that this school or neighborhood or whatever is better for you… It may be, but what they are really saying to you is that there are no black people there and the deeper message is that we are safer away from them because “we are better and deserve better than them.” When you buy into this you are edifying one of those toxic pillars I mentioned. And it’s just not true. Black is not untouchable. It’s very touchable! Black is soft and deep. Black is real and grounded, soulful, funny, and authentic. Black is beautiful! Hallelujah!
So, what can we do Rev. John? I agree but this feels inexorable. The hierarchy and system are insidious indeed but be committed to truth. Divisions of labor as I said are not evil. How we treat people at each level of the system is the issue. All work has worth, value, and dignity. All workers deserve equity and fairness, access to education and healthcare, and safe communities to live in. And those who are at the top (the head) must use their power to create a new story that embraces instead of erases and use our power to contain those forces at the head of the beast that wish to control human free will. That is part of our job as UUs…. To be the change…
What else can you do? Be committed to the re-education process to grow your soul. But especially after today, my hope is that you SEE black and brown people and all those placed in lower castes in a different more fair, and compassionate light. Notice them and understand their suffering. When in a relational meeting, with people of all hues, practice breaking the spell by seeing the image of god—the Imago Dei—in them. When in the grocery store try to see the full humanity in the workers. When the yard guy comes over to do your lawn—see them and converse with them and pay them more than they ask. When you come across a homeless person look at them, see them, and give from your heart if that is what you want to do. And, of course, we must continue to speak out against the system and call attention to this immoral social construct. Noticing is half of the battle. When we notice, we shift our thinking and when enough of us shift mental consciousness since humans are one connected organism—we change the material world a little bit at a time. You can be the change. The world we have is the world we have collectively created. We created this world through religious myths based on notions of superiority and we can change this world with new more inclusive stories based on the enduring principle of love. When we change the narrative, we change the reality. It’s just that simple. And just that hard. Sister, Isabel Wilkerson gets the final words today:
“We are not personally responsible for what people who look like us did centuries ago. But we are responsible for what good or ill we do to people alive with us today. We are, each of us, responsible for every decision we make that hurts or harms another human being. We are responsible for recognizing that what happened in previous generations at the hands of or to people who look like us set the stage for the world we now live in and that what has gone before us grants us advantages or burdens through no effort or fault of our own, gains or deficits that others who do not look like us often do not share. We are responsible for our own ignorance or, with time and openhearted enlightenment, our own wisdom. We are responsible for ourselves and our own deeds or misdeeds in our time and in our own space and will be judged accordingly by succeeding generations.” Wilkerson, Isabel. Caste (Oprah’s Book Club) (pp. 387-388). Random House Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
May it be so. Amen.