Stetson University issued the following announcement on Oct. 15.
In 1959, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. traveled to India and wanted to see the so-called “Untouchables,” members of the lowest caste relegated to lives of dirty work, poverty, humiliation and violence.
He visited high school students whose families had been Untouchables. The principal introduced him, saying, “Young people, I would like to present to you a fellow untouchable from the United States of America.”
King was floored that the term would be applied to him, writes Isabel Wilkerson in her New York Times bestseller, “Caste: The Origins of our Discontents.” The civil rights leader had flown in from another continent and dined with the Indian prime minister. But King realized that, as a Black person in America, it was indeed true.
Caste isn’t a term usually applied to the United States. Yet, “[t]he caste system, and the attempts to defend, uphold, or abolish the hierarchy, underlay the American Civil War and the civil rights movement a century later and pervade the politics of twenty-first-century America,” she writes.
“As 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. The hierarchy of caste is not about feelings or morality. It is about power – which groups have it and which do not.”
The Pulitzer-Prize winning author will give the keynote address on Values Day on Tuesday, Oct. 19, speaking about her book and answering questions. The virtual talk will be on Zoom from 6-7 p.m. and is open to students, faculty, staff and alumni. Cultural Credit will be available.
Values Day is an annual tradition at Stetson that brings together the community to discuss and share the institution’s core values. Classes for undergraduates are canceled for the day, and offices close to allow staff and faculty to participate in workshops and activities. The deadline to register is Monday, Oct. 18, at 5:30 p.m.
This year’s theme is “Building Cultures of Empathy and Respect: A day of reflection and action focusing on how we build a community that embraces empathy and respect.”
“Values Day is not bound by discipline or major,” said Savannah-Jane Griffin, executive director of Community Engagement and Inclusive Excellence, who oversees Values Day. “It lends itself to the liberal-learning experience, where you can choose, looking at the content of the day, and pick out things that really interest you. The goal is to engage with individuals that you might not have otherwise engaged with.”
They start with outdoor yoga and Tai Chi at Hulley Tower, and continue with exhibits and activities at the Hand Art Center, duPont-Ball Library and Gillespie Museum.
Students can earn up to six Cultural Credits by attending any of nine events, plus receive free Values Day swag and Schmancy Ice Cream Pops at the Global Citizenship Fair on the Stetson Green from noon to 2 p.m. See the full schedule for Values Day.
Also at noon, Wilkerson’s book will be discussed at Stetson R.E.A.D. (Reflect, Engage, and Affirm Diversity), led by Rajni Shankar-Brown, PhD, professor and Jessie Ball duPont Endowed Chair of Social Justice Education. Registration is limited to 60 people and a boxed lunch will be provided.
In the afternoon, 22 workshops are available on topics ranging from empathy to the environment and healing the area’s history of racial terror lynchings, which includes four lynchings of African American men between 1891 and 1939 that have been documented to date.
In her book, Wilkerson says she spent nearly two decades studying the Jim Crow era in the South. She wrote a 600-page bestseller, “The Warmth of Other Suns,” about the Great Migration of Blacks from the South. But never once did the word racism appear in the narrative.
“After spending fifteen years studying the topic and hearing the testimony of the survivors of the era, I realized that the term was insufficient. Caste was the more accurate term,” she explains in her second book, “Caste: The Origins of our Discontents.”
The American South is the birthplace of this caste system, beginning in the 1600s after the arrival of the first Africans enslaved for life in “forced labor camps that were politely called plantations,” she writes. At the top of the caste system are European Americans, the primary beneficiaries, while African-Americans are dehumanized at the bottom.
The similarities to India’s caste system were noted even before the Civil War by an abolitionist and U.S. senator, and by white supremacists in the early 1900s. One popular eugenicist praised India’s upper classes for preserving the purity of their blood through a regulated system of castes. “In our Southern States, Jim Crow cars and social discriminations have exactly the same purpose,” Madison Grant wrote in a 1916 bestseller.
Dismantling America’s 400-year-old caste system won’t be easy. It does not need new laws. Instead, it will require people to acknowledge these past injustices, recognize their presence today and work toward resolution.
“Our era calls for a public accounting of what caste has cost us, a Truth and Reconciliation Commission, so that every American can know the full history of our country, wrenching though it may be,” she writes. “The persistence of caste and race hostility, and the defensiveness about anti-black sentiment in particular, make it literally unspeakable to many in the dominant caste.
“You cannot solve anything that you do not admit exists, which could be why some people may not want to talk about it: it might get solved.”
Original source can be found here.
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