Wait, seems most people prefer pity party subjectivity, and an inane, insane obsession with 'racism' and 'slavery.' These ignoramuses on the Left will do us great harm. They will bring down civil society and democracy. They know not what they reap.
Just an incidental point about "Caste": Wilkerson cites the Gallup poll about how, in 1958, only 4% of Americans approved of black/white intermarriage. But she never cites any of the followup Gallup polls showing an extraordinary reversal of this attitude, so that by 2021, 94% of Americans approve of black/white marriage. Her book is published in 2020, so the 2021 statistic wasn't available to her, but all of the intervening polls were available--and she never references them. If caste is as determinative as she claims, if black Americans have indeed been tarred since the beginning with the brush of low-caste stigma, then surely this would show up as a continuing refusal of high-caste whites to marry black people. But the stigma dissolves. The black untouchables, in intermarriage terms, turn out not to be untouchable at all. This is merely one of the places where Wilkerson's explanatory schema simply doesn't work.
I will address only the section on Trayvon Martin. There is an aspect which I have never seen discussed. The corruption at the trial. I use the term "corruption" because the judge violated basic judicial principles to make certain Zimmerman was found not guilty. Whether the judge behaved in this fashion was due to anti-Black prejudice is irrelevant. It is more likely because Zimmerman's father was a judge, but again her motives are not relevant.
At the time, I copied down her judge "charge to the jury," to which the prosecution never objected indicating collusion between prosecutor and judge, which is very common -- at least here in California. I apologize that my retrieval system is inadequate for me to quickly find her instructions to the jury, but I recall the gist.
The judge ignored the law on which the case was tried -- which did not include anything about stand your ground or Zimmerman's being in fear of his life. Hence, neither the prosecution nor the defense addressed these issues during the trial. Thus, including any refer to either defense was judicial malpractice. Because the violation was so egregious, I call be judicial corruption.
The judge's jury instructions started with the defense of stand your ground - fear of his (Zimmerman's) life. That is 100% backwards. To present the defense first pollutes the jurors' minds. Their first job as jurors was to decide whether the prosecution had proved its case beyond a reasonable doubt, but when the jury is told to focus only on the defenses, which were not part of the trial, they are being told to acquit. The attorneys always have the right to object to jury instructions, but this prosecutor remained silent. That was either malpractice or collusion.
When one looks at the jury's composition, one sees that that prosecution and the judge seated a jury which lacked the mentality to exercise independent reasoning. The jurors were not anti-Black nor malicious as far as I could tell, but they lacked the backgrounds, training and education to think for themselves. Attorneys are seasoned in objecting to such jurors.
When the jury instructions discussed the law in favor of finding the defendant guilty, they were grossly inadequate and secreted in the middle of jury instructions. Those are the first instructions because the prosecution has the burden of proof.
The few facts which made it into the trial show that Zimmerman was guilty of at least manslaughter and perhaps second degree murder.
While I've never seen a public discussion how this corrupt judge and this prosecutor colluded to acquit Zimmerman, I seriously doubt the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo, would have become a cause celebre without Zimmerman's acquittal. Michael Brown was a thug. He was shot for three reasons: (1) Unlike his friend, he did not get on the sidewalk, (2) he was much larger than a kid his age, (3) he charged at the officer. We know the #3 for a fact since he was shot in the top of his head as his head was down as he charged at the officer. Brown's behavior and not his race was the actual and proximate cause of his death.
One may speculate with good cause about the nature of the Ferguson PD towards Blacks and whether it created a hostile situation in the community based on race so that those in the community with less internal behavior controls would make horrible decisions. I say that adolescence, which I think last under age 25, is a form of mental illness, but that changes nothing. Objectively, the officer was confronted with a large, hostile man charging at him.
A lasting social problem has resulted from the corrupt Florida trial of Zimmerman and BLM's response in Ferguson. Reasonable people could not conclude that Michael Brown was shot because he was Black. By objective standards, the officer did nothing wrong.
The same scenario repeated itself in Los Angeles, where Keenan Darnell Anderson likewise brought upon himself his death. I've viewed all the video tapes very closely and the police did nothing wrong. Unlike Michael Brown, Anderson did not die until hours later at the hospital and he died of an enlarged heart and cocaine use, according to an autopsy report. People equate the first degree murder of George Floyd with Anderson's death, although the police behavior in the two incidents was the opposite. In LA, the police were trying to protect Anderson from himself as he was running incoherently in the middle of an extremely busy intersection in West LA. Officer Derek Chauvin committed a slow 9 minute murder for the entire world to see while many people were telling him to stop. In addition, George Floyd died at the scene and whether he had taken any drugs was legally irrelevant. Also, it did not matter if he had been Pretty Boy Floyd (1904-1934), there was no legal justification for Chauvin's conduct. However, Mayor Karen Bass is a strong ally of BLM and refuses to cross them. Thus, she fails to stand for the truth that the LAPD not only did nothing wrong in the Anderson case, but the officers did everything right.
The fact, which Woke left refuses to admit, is that our institutions are predatory where power to harm is accepted and often promoted without regard to the race of the victim. The Woke left and the conservative right make it impossible to have the needed discussion of predatory abuse. Instead, both sides focus only on race which results in nonsense discussions since race is not the problem. Predation is the problem and naturally Blacks will be abused -- everyone is abused. As long as the Woke pretend that only Blacks are harmed, Whites who know that they are also horribly harmed will always be at odds with the Left. That is exactly how the head honchos want it -- extremists on the Left and extremists on the Right fighting with each other so that there is never an honest discussion of our predatory institutions.
I saw Origin last week and had a discussion with some friends afterward.
My biggest complaint is about the ultimate utility of this idea. I have mixed feelings about the central thesis, but even if we were to accept the idea that we should think of America as having a caste problem instead of a race problem what would that change?
There are multiple scenes in the movie where Wilkerson lays out her argument and finishes by saying "see it's not race, it's caste!" and then everyone is impressed. I wanted someone to ask, "ok, what's next?" Was anyone supportive of Jim Crow and Dalit oppressions and Nazi-ism who now feels they are wrong thanks to this reframing?
Should we oppose affirmative action because it tends to only "lift up" the wealthiest black americans and/or foreign students who never experienced american structural racism? That's the first example I could think of of a policy that benefits specific races while entrenching class power. I think it's a reasonable extrapolation, but this would be a very different film and would be received very differently if it tried to make that argument.
Of course, what the white person in my group of friends said was that Wilkerson/DuVernay's point is that race in America is a SUBSTITUTE for caste. That is, we should still enact race-based policy, but understand that race is just a kind of caste.
Now, I think this is correct about their intent, but it just brings me back to my original question: So what? We just keep everything the same but silently understand that when we say race we mean caste?
One might respond to this that the idea is to just build global connections and see the struggles of the oppressed around the world as part of one unifying struggle. This is certainly implied by the ending of the film. But again, I don't really need this thesis to have sympathy for Jews, Dalits, Black Americans, or anyone else. Whether it is the same structure causing harm to them or three separate ones, my attitude does not really change.
I don't think the film is without merit. The individual anecdotes and historical scenes drawn from the book are quite moving and really could just stand on their own. But the actual argument felt lacking in a number of important ways.
Dalits are not two thirds of the population in India. Scheduled castes are about 25% and scheduled tribes, about 9%. While more than half the population does qualify for reservations, they do so under the Other Backward Caste category (OBC). And OBCs are not Dalits; they were never subjected to untouchability and did not work as manual scavengers.
Data. Facts. Objectivity. Context. Comparison.
Wait, seems most people prefer pity party subjectivity, and an inane, insane obsession with 'racism' and 'slavery.' These ignoramuses on the Left will do us great harm. They will bring down civil society and democracy. They know not what they reap.
Thank you for this.
Excellent challenge of the intellectual and emotional laziness plaguing far too much of modern-day analysis!
All of reality is never a single story. Thank you for perceiving the nuance and complexity in human life.
Just an incidental point about "Caste": Wilkerson cites the Gallup poll about how, in 1958, only 4% of Americans approved of black/white intermarriage. But she never cites any of the followup Gallup polls showing an extraordinary reversal of this attitude, so that by 2021, 94% of Americans approve of black/white marriage. Her book is published in 2020, so the 2021 statistic wasn't available to her, but all of the intervening polls were available--and she never references them. If caste is as determinative as she claims, if black Americans have indeed been tarred since the beginning with the brush of low-caste stigma, then surely this would show up as a continuing refusal of high-caste whites to marry black people. But the stigma dissolves. The black untouchables, in intermarriage terms, turn out not to be untouchable at all. This is merely one of the places where Wilkerson's explanatory schema simply doesn't work.
I will address only the section on Trayvon Martin. There is an aspect which I have never seen discussed. The corruption at the trial. I use the term "corruption" because the judge violated basic judicial principles to make certain Zimmerman was found not guilty. Whether the judge behaved in this fashion was due to anti-Black prejudice is irrelevant. It is more likely because Zimmerman's father was a judge, but again her motives are not relevant.
At the time, I copied down her judge "charge to the jury," to which the prosecution never objected indicating collusion between prosecutor and judge, which is very common -- at least here in California. I apologize that my retrieval system is inadequate for me to quickly find her instructions to the jury, but I recall the gist.
The judge ignored the law on which the case was tried -- which did not include anything about stand your ground or Zimmerman's being in fear of his life. Hence, neither the prosecution nor the defense addressed these issues during the trial. Thus, including any refer to either defense was judicial malpractice. Because the violation was so egregious, I call be judicial corruption.
The judge's jury instructions started with the defense of stand your ground - fear of his (Zimmerman's) life. That is 100% backwards. To present the defense first pollutes the jurors' minds. Their first job as jurors was to decide whether the prosecution had proved its case beyond a reasonable doubt, but when the jury is told to focus only on the defenses, which were not part of the trial, they are being told to acquit. The attorneys always have the right to object to jury instructions, but this prosecutor remained silent. That was either malpractice or collusion.
When one looks at the jury's composition, one sees that that prosecution and the judge seated a jury which lacked the mentality to exercise independent reasoning. The jurors were not anti-Black nor malicious as far as I could tell, but they lacked the backgrounds, training and education to think for themselves. Attorneys are seasoned in objecting to such jurors.
When the jury instructions discussed the law in favor of finding the defendant guilty, they were grossly inadequate and secreted in the middle of jury instructions. Those are the first instructions because the prosecution has the burden of proof.
The few facts which made it into the trial show that Zimmerman was guilty of at least manslaughter and perhaps second degree murder.
While I've never seen a public discussion how this corrupt judge and this prosecutor colluded to acquit Zimmerman, I seriously doubt the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo, would have become a cause celebre without Zimmerman's acquittal. Michael Brown was a thug. He was shot for three reasons: (1) Unlike his friend, he did not get on the sidewalk, (2) he was much larger than a kid his age, (3) he charged at the officer. We know the #3 for a fact since he was shot in the top of his head as his head was down as he charged at the officer. Brown's behavior and not his race was the actual and proximate cause of his death.
One may speculate with good cause about the nature of the Ferguson PD towards Blacks and whether it created a hostile situation in the community based on race so that those in the community with less internal behavior controls would make horrible decisions. I say that adolescence, which I think last under age 25, is a form of mental illness, but that changes nothing. Objectively, the officer was confronted with a large, hostile man charging at him.
A lasting social problem has resulted from the corrupt Florida trial of Zimmerman and BLM's response in Ferguson. Reasonable people could not conclude that Michael Brown was shot because he was Black. By objective standards, the officer did nothing wrong.
The same scenario repeated itself in Los Angeles, where Keenan Darnell Anderson likewise brought upon himself his death. I've viewed all the video tapes very closely and the police did nothing wrong. Unlike Michael Brown, Anderson did not die until hours later at the hospital and he died of an enlarged heart and cocaine use, according to an autopsy report. People equate the first degree murder of George Floyd with Anderson's death, although the police behavior in the two incidents was the opposite. In LA, the police were trying to protect Anderson from himself as he was running incoherently in the middle of an extremely busy intersection in West LA. Officer Derek Chauvin committed a slow 9 minute murder for the entire world to see while many people were telling him to stop. In addition, George Floyd died at the scene and whether he had taken any drugs was legally irrelevant. Also, it did not matter if he had been Pretty Boy Floyd (1904-1934), there was no legal justification for Chauvin's conduct. However, Mayor Karen Bass is a strong ally of BLM and refuses to cross them. Thus, she fails to stand for the truth that the LAPD not only did nothing wrong in the Anderson case, but the officers did everything right.
The fact, which Woke left refuses to admit, is that our institutions are predatory where power to harm is accepted and often promoted without regard to the race of the victim. The Woke left and the conservative right make it impossible to have the needed discussion of predatory abuse. Instead, both sides focus only on race which results in nonsense discussions since race is not the problem. Predation is the problem and naturally Blacks will be abused -- everyone is abused. As long as the Woke pretend that only Blacks are harmed, Whites who know that they are also horribly harmed will always be at odds with the Left. That is exactly how the head honchos want it -- extremists on the Left and extremists on the Right fighting with each other so that there is never an honest discussion of our predatory institutions.
👏🏾👏🏾👏🏾
I saw Origin last week and had a discussion with some friends afterward.
My biggest complaint is about the ultimate utility of this idea. I have mixed feelings about the central thesis, but even if we were to accept the idea that we should think of America as having a caste problem instead of a race problem what would that change?
There are multiple scenes in the movie where Wilkerson lays out her argument and finishes by saying "see it's not race, it's caste!" and then everyone is impressed. I wanted someone to ask, "ok, what's next?" Was anyone supportive of Jim Crow and Dalit oppressions and Nazi-ism who now feels they are wrong thanks to this reframing?
Should we oppose affirmative action because it tends to only "lift up" the wealthiest black americans and/or foreign students who never experienced american structural racism? That's the first example I could think of of a policy that benefits specific races while entrenching class power. I think it's a reasonable extrapolation, but this would be a very different film and would be received very differently if it tried to make that argument.
Of course, what the white person in my group of friends said was that Wilkerson/DuVernay's point is that race in America is a SUBSTITUTE for caste. That is, we should still enact race-based policy, but understand that race is just a kind of caste.
Now, I think this is correct about their intent, but it just brings me back to my original question: So what? We just keep everything the same but silently understand that when we say race we mean caste?
One might respond to this that the idea is to just build global connections and see the struggles of the oppressed around the world as part of one unifying struggle. This is certainly implied by the ending of the film. But again, I don't really need this thesis to have sympathy for Jews, Dalits, Black Americans, or anyone else. Whether it is the same structure causing harm to them or three separate ones, my attitude does not really change.
I don't think the film is without merit. The individual anecdotes and historical scenes drawn from the book are quite moving and really could just stand on their own. But the actual argument felt lacking in a number of important ways.
Dalits are not two thirds of the population in India. Scheduled castes are about 25% and scheduled tribes, about 9%. While more than half the population does qualify for reservations, they do so under the Other Backward Caste category (OBC). And OBCs are not Dalits; they were never subjected to untouchability and did not work as manual scavengers.
https://www.pewresearch.org/decoded/2021/06/29/measuring-caste-in-india/