{"id":2088,"date":"2020-09-01T14:01:49","date_gmt":"2020-09-01T20:01:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/nicolettearts.com\/?p=2088"},"modified":"2020-11-27T10:11:46","modified_gmt":"2020-11-27T17:11:46","slug":"me-role-in-the-caste","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/nicolettearts.com\/me-role-in-the-caste\/","title":{"rendered":"My Role in the Caste"},"content":{"rendered":"<div class=\"content\">\n<p>White\/Caucasian, Asian\/Pacific Islander, Latino, African-American or Decline to State? At first, I responded to my new optometrist\u2019s medical history form by checking that familiar first box: White\/Caucasian.<\/p>\n<p>Moments later, that choice began to rankle. What relevance could one\u2019s race have to double vision?<\/p>\n<p>The issue wasn\u2019t personal relevance. I suddenly wondered whether the checklist might be one of those pernicious, knee-jerk habits that enable systemic racism. I would have checked \u201cwhite\u201d without qualm had I not been reading Isabelle Wilkerson\u2019s book, \u201cCaste: The Origins of Our Discontents.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Reading this book has completely altered my worldview.<br \/>\nIn this deeply-researched work, Wilkerson, a Pulitzer Prize winner, paints a masterful portrait of an unseen phenomenon: how the U.S. has been shaped by a hidden caste system, a rigid hierarchy that leaves a painful imprint on people of color.<\/p>\n<p>Whatever box I check won\u2019t inconvenience me. I\u2019m packaged like white on rice, at first glance an obvious member of the \u201cdominant caste\u201d. But anyone checking one of those OTHER boxes \u2014 especially an African-American \u2014 might well suspect that the categorization would lead to nothing but trouble.<\/p>\n<p>There are some medical reasons for asking about biological background. Cystic-Fibrosis, Tay-Sachs disease and Sickle Cell Anemia show up statistically more often in folks whose ancestors came from specific parts of the world.<\/p>\n<p>The risk of carrying a BRCA gene mutation that causes breast and ovarian cancer is 10 times greater for women of Ashkenazi Jewish descent than for the general population. A few years ago, a medical researcher was puzzled to find BRCA-1 mutations in clusters of breast cancer patients in Colorado\u2019s San Luis Valley. The patients were Catholics, women from Latino families that settled in the San Luis Valley 8-10 generations ago. They were certain they had no Jewish ancestry. But digging back, the researcher found that their families had descended from conquistadors traveling with the de O\u00f1ate expedition of 1598. Jews \u2014 who had converted to Catholicism to save their lives at the time of the Spanish inquisition \u2014 had joined de O\u00f1ate\u2019s expedition to get as far from Spain as humanly possible. They hid their Jewish roots even in the New World, even from their descendants.<\/p>\n<p>While the odds of getting some diseases can correlate with biological inheritance, race has nothing to do with it. Last year, scientists with the Human Genome project released a position paper noting that all humans share 99.9 percent of their DNA. They stated, \u201cRace does not provide an accurate representation of human biological variation\u2026 Instead, the Western concept of race must be understood as a classification system that emerged from, and in support of, European colonialism, oppression, and discrimination. It does not have its roots in biological reality\u2026\u201d<\/p>\n<p>In other words, it\u2019s not race that determines U.S. health outcomes; it\u2019s racism. For example, American Public Media\u2019s research lab recently crunched numbers to discover that in Missouri, Wisconsin and Washington, D.C., African-Americans are six times more likely to die of COVID-19 than whites. Blacks die three times more often than whites while giving birth. By contrast, a study of 1.8 million hospital births in Florida found that for an African-American mother, having a Black doctor cut the newborn mortality rate in half.<\/p>\n<p>It\u2019s not that white doctors are intentionally racist. These days, virtually no one admits to the Bull-Connor kind of racism, uses the N-word, or even espouses separate (but unequal) facilities. Doctors no longer believe that Black babies don\u2019t feel pain. It\u2019s been roughly 50 years since public outcry shut down the Tuskegee experiment, in which white doctors \u201cscientifically studied\u201d African-American men dying of syphilis while providing no treatment at all.<\/p>\n<p>But given this country\u2019s history, we\u2019ve all grown up with an internalized ranking based on race, a caste system keyed to skin color. As Wilkerson explains, \u201cAs we go about our daily lives, caste is the wordless usher in a darkened theater, flashlight cast down in the aisles, guiding us to our assigned seats for a performance\u2026\u201d Caste \u201cis about respect, authority and assumptions of competence \u2014 who is accorded these and who is not.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>\u201cRace, in the United States,\u201d Wilkerson writes, \u201cis the visible agent of the unseen force of caste.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Factually, I am not \u201cCaucasian.\u201d Visually, I\u2019m not really white. My ancestors hailed mostly from the British Isles, not the Caucasus Mountains near Turkey. If I were a Sherwin-Williams paint chip, I\u2019d be Pumpkin Pie Oh My! In printing terms, I\u2019m Pantone #7508.<\/p>\n<p>In this country, whiteness has been an evolving social construct, as a century-old Supreme Court case illustrates. In 1915, Japanese-born Takao Ozawa filed for U.S. citizenship under the Naturalization Act of 1906, which allowed \u201cfree white persons\u201d to naturalize. Ozawa argued that because his skin was a whiter shade of pale than Pantone #7508 folks like me, Japanese people should be properly classified as \u201cfree white persons\u201d. The Supreme Court turned thumbs down.<\/p>\n<p>Curiously, many of my ancestors were, for a time, not considered white. In the 1850\u2019s, the Irish were considered \u201cmulattos\u201d.\u00a0 The papers of Ben Franklin and other founding fathers draw a distinction between Germans and \u201cwhites\u201d; before 1919, only Germans of Saxon lineage were considered white.<\/p>\n<p>I suspect that my grandfather Slusser, an attorney, the father of four and too old for the draft, enlisted to escape anti-immigrant sentiment at the start of WWI. He was the eighth generation of Slussers born on American soil. He spoke no German; his family had long since struck the bargain of dropping all traces of ethnicity to become \u201cjust white\u201d.<\/p>\n<p>When asked about my own ethnicity, I have unthinkingly said, \u201cI don\u2019t have any. I\u2019m just white.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>What that answer really reflects is the bargain historically offered to light-skinned immigrants: assimilate, act like a WASP, and you can join the dominant caste.<\/p>\n<p>On deeper reflection, that might be a deal with the devil. On moral grounds, I\u2019d rather cast my lot with the human race \u2014 or at least \u201cdecline to state\u201d participation in the evils of caste.<\/p>\n<p>&lt;&lt;&lt;&gt;&gt;&gt;<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<p>This column was originally published in the <a href=\"https:\/\/www.soprissun.com\/2020\/08\/26\/seeking-higher-ground-my-role-in-the-caste\/\">Sopris Sun newspaper on August 26, 2020<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>White\/Caucasian, Asian\/Pacific Islander, Latino, African-American or Decline to State? At first, I responded to my new optometrist\u2019s medical history form by checking that familiar first box: White\/Caucasian. Moments later, that [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[47,12,56],"tags":[59],"class_list":["post-2088","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economic-inequality","category-human-rights","category-racial-justice","tag-racism"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p8fSNd-xG","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/nicolettearts.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2088","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/nicolettearts.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/nicolettearts.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nicolettearts.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nicolettearts.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2088"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/nicolettearts.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2088\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2096,"href":"https:\/\/nicolettearts.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2088\/revisions\/2096"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/nicolettearts.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2088"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nicolettearts.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2088"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nicolettearts.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2088"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}