Week 225: How America invented castes, Western depictions of Islam v Hinduism
04/06/2024 - Modern Hindu Content
Welcome to Eternal Path! This week we feature: how America invested castes, Western depictions of Islam v Hinduism, and an aesthetic!
Sociology Highlight: Americans Inventing Caste
As we’ve mentioned in many previous issues, one of the main canards used against Hindus, especially in the West, is the notion of “caste”, where Hindus are made to answer for an extremely inaccurate and warped understanding of the theoretical varna system. Americans pretend that the country is a den of social mobility, and many crusade against caste, pretending to have enlightened views and pretending to fight so-called “systems of oppression”. A reminder that the word “caste” in English encompasses both the Sanskrit terms varna and jati.
TL:DR - America also has functioning castes, essentially has its own “untouchable” castes mired in multigenerational poverty, and on top of that is ravaged by broken families, violence, and drug problems amongst its underclass, making it functionally worse than even the craziest excesses of caste in South Asia.
The reality is that varna is arguably more prevalent in America than in India. The National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) defines assortative mating as “the process by which people of similar backgrounds, such as educational attainment or financial means, select a partner.” These statistics, from the Brookings Institute show that Americans largely engage in assortative mating across similar educational lines.
Now what exactly is a jati? The way Puri Shankaracharya talks about it (in Hindi) is as a group where roti-beti (bread and daughter) relationships exist. Essentially a jati is a group that breaks bread with one another and marries members of its ingroup. Now if people with a bunch of similarities are marrying each other and socialize with each other, they’ve essentially formed their own caste. However, it doesn’t stop there. It passes down to their kids.
Now kids following in the footsteps of their parents with regards to profession and largely marrying their peers, this is starting to sound eerily like castes.
One might argue that university professors are brahmin equivalents in American society, and over half of the top university professors have parents who have a Ph.D. However its not just at the top of the social stack where assortative mating and children following in their parents footsteps is visible; its arguably more clear in the underclasses of America. Large swathes of urban black America experience intergenerational poverty, while much of white rural America is also following in that directions, both groups ravaged by drugs. So America has also reinvented dalits in a sense. Additionally, social mobility has declined considerably in America and income inequality is skyrocketing.
Let’s summarize what we learned here:
America has essential castes of folks where people largely marry those similar to them
Children often follow in the professional footsteps of their parents in America
Intergenerational poverty is endemic among the various American underclasses
Social mobility is declining, ossifying the American “castes”
America’s underclasses face much more violence and drugs, and have far less options for spiritual succor than those in India
Action: So next time someone accuses Hindus of being evil casteists, point these uncomfortable facts out and ask why a rich industrialized country invented an even stupider caste system on their own?