Progress is being made on SB 403, a California bill to prohibit caste discrimination, despite the protests and opposition of upper-caste people of South Asian descent. However, I’d argue that African Americans who are descendants of U.S. enslaved people should find a stake in this legislation.
There is an argument to be made for African Americans who are descendants of antebellum slaves to claim a stance against caste discrimination. The slave status had a unique impact upon the immediate generations of those enslaved as well as their descendants, even to the present. Those who are descended from antebellum slaves cannot claim descent from willful immigrants who switched their prior nationalities to embrace that of the U.S. citizen. They also cannot claim to be indigenous, aboriginal or autochthonous in their historical ties to the land claimed by the United States. Instead, their ties to this nation are rooted exclusively in the enslavement of their ancestors on this land.
Race, including biases and prejudices along such lines, cannot and does not explain this status and its implications upon this community. The ADOS movement correctly claims that “lineage” from the enslaved entitles this community to specific legal consideration distinct from more recent immigrants of African, Afro-Caribbean or Afro-South American origin.
But the word lineage, arguably, does not exactly entail the historic socio-economic, political, environmental, ethical and institutional treatment of those who are of said lineage. Isabel Wilkerson’s thesis of the distinct position of the American descendant of slaves within an hierarchy of submission and exclusion as a “caste” position goes further to encompass this status position.
It is therefore of interest to those who seek continued structural transformation to eliminate and undermine this system, to allow for more race-neutral avenues to enable total socio-economic mobility for African-Americans, to embrace the legal prohibition of discrimination against perceived lower castes of society in the United States.
It would be in the interests of advocates for racial justice to also tackle discrimination on the basis of caste against the descendants of freedmen. By treating descendants of freedmen as a socio-economic caste parallel to an ethnic group, legal discussion of race can become divorced somewhat from the specific conditions visited upon these descendants as opposed to others who faced lesser acts of institutional discrimination.
