Context and Nuance: Part Three

Having said something about race, I will now turn to the concepts of caste, class and ethnicity. These intersect with race in complicated ways, but we need to unpack the individual parts and try to get a shared understanding of them before we try to put them back together.A caste is a socially constructed category that is strictly inherited, and assigns people to differential status. The caste system of India is well known. Historically, people inherited quite specific occupations, including priest, warrior, and waste collector. People whose caste assigned them to menial jobs were otherwise despised and ritually unclean. But European feudalism wasn ' t all that dissimilar although the categories were broader. You had nobility, free commoners who were generally artisans or merchants, and serfs. In the United States, obviously, enslaved Africans constituted a caste, as did formerly enslaved African-Americans in the post-war years, particularly in the former Confederate states. This status has gradually eroded -- e.g. African-Americans can now be admitted to Harvard or elected Governor -- but of which a substantial legacy remains and in the minds of some people is still fully operative.Class is a more fluid category. It is not strictly inherited but most people stay more or less in the class to which they were born. People like rags to riches stories but they are highly unrepresentative. Marx defined class in relation to ownership of the means of production, but capitalism has e...
Source: Stayin' Alive - Category: American Health Source Type: blogs