There’s a woman named Isabel Wilkerson, who has a Pulitzer, making the rounds of the smarter parts of the podosphere and associated media, because this is how you sell your thought projects now, especially now; see also “pandemic“.

The essence of her current treatise is that we’re better off seeing the so-called race issue in this country in terms of a caste system. I was predisposed to be convinced, and so I was.

A few highlights.

Caste is a much older concept than race, the latter being only a few hundreds of years old.

There are (or at least certainly were) no people in Africa who identify as ‘black’, just as there were no Indians, much less Native Americans, before Columbus starting fucking that all up. Before they got put on slave ships, they would think of themselves in terms of tribes too.

‘Black’ (read colored, Negroid) as an identifier was invented in the newish world, and particularly, in the American part of the Americas, not as a scientific matter, but as a way of marking off the brahmins from the untouchables. Which, Wilkerson says, it largely still does, flying under the radar of the civil rights movement and the first black president and other historical oddities to a place where nothing much has changed.

Whiteness is also a peculiarly Anglo-Murican invention. People coming over from Ireland were just Irish in shorthand, until the American caste system was forced to confront whether they were ‘white’ or not. Same for those debauched and not quite Aryan Southern Mediterraneans–were Italians really all that white, or too swarthy and olive-complected to qualify?

At some point a Japanese citizen went to court to prove he was Caucasian, because, he said, he was more pale than a Greek, right? So … white, right? His argument wasn’t about race. It was about what caste he was entitled to belong to, in this deeply insane system of ours.

There’s lots more, including some fun stuff about how this country’s system was studied in depth by the Nazis, as they tried to figure out how to define what a Jew was. The actual Nazis, for Christ’s sake, decided that the American “one drop of blood” standard was just a little too out there for them to get on board with.

Now it might sound like I’m deviating from the path I’m on about the story I have to tell, but it ties in, or will, eventually.

I’ve never been one to fill out EEOC forms with anything but Decline-to-State, because I believe that race is just a made up thing. A fiction. A blue eye or a sickle cell here or there, we are all made of the same stardust arranged the same way.

One time at the high point of my professoring status, we got a new computer system that had all kinds of data about who we all were. Since I was very close to the data process, I filled out my own form and left the race question with a null value.

Some time later I noticed that I’d been shifted to the White category.

So I called up the suspected (and in fact guilty) meddler and gave her an earful. She was extremely conservative and just about openly racist. I explained to her in stern words that race was a made-up thing, and that no one but me had the power to identify myself as This One or That One or Asian and Pacific freaking Islander. In her subculture I’m sure this made me a ‘race traitor’ or worse, but I did insist successfully that she change it back to No Value.

At the very end of the conversation I told her that I wasn’t messing with her–that I took the question with intense seriousness. And by way of making that point, I told her that I wasn’t going to fight with her over the fact that the system only allowed for two genders, and that I could stay listed as an “M”, for now. But that someday she might come around to the enlightened position that the gender binary was almost as fictive as the whiteness conundrum. What if we had a ‘Native’ student who genuinely identified as two-spirit? Would we tell them to shut up and live with our own classification? Could she not see how institutionally oppressive that was?

Spoiler alert. No she couldn’t.

But the point was made, well enough for the purpose and time.

Just as I pray it has for this purpose, on an August fifth seven years later. As another half step in the journey.

***

If you want to say you’re black, Hispanic, LatinX, Chicana full stop, do it.

If you’re Elizabeth Warren and you want to call yourself a little Indian Princess, go ahead, but never imagine there won’t be consequences for your preening, even if it’s true that your grandmother’s grandmother was a quarter Cherokee or whatever the hell. The same for every half-bright cowboy/cowgirl chief walking around in turquoise and squash-blossom as human litter on the streets of Taos.

If you want to say that you sexually identify as an Apache Attack Helicopter, yep fine. Anybody with a sense of Internet culture will know that you’re a decidedly pale and unintelligent college boy making sophomoric cliche’ fun of all identity politics in general and trans people in particular, and that the whole question threatens your artificially elevated position in the caste strata. That you’re making an insecure, nervous, and self-serving joke about it that can’t help but sound mean-spirited, because underneath the ha-ha-ha and the lolz, it is.

I am not, nor have I ever been, a card-carrying multiculturalist. I’m even old-school enough to think that most identity politics is a false flag operation, and that most of us would be better off thinking in terms of the class struggle. I choke on my beer watching otherwise intelligent women carry water for criminals like Hillary and Pelosi, mainly or completely because those particular criminals also claim status as female.

But I didn’t grow up being told I was black (or just a woman), with all the low-caste baggage that comes with a label somebody else slapped on my ass. So I have no real right to blather on about what you should think or do or call yourself, especially if you did grow up thus disadvantaged and de-privileged by your own society and maybe your own people.

Maybe you’re trying to fight back.

More power to you; so say we all.