"Caste", "Keep Sharp"

[fiefoe]

Isabel Wilkerson's recasting of the racial question is somewhat helpful but doesn't offer a way out. The audiobook was narrated by Robin Miles, who fittingly also did the Broken Earth series.

• Scientists then identified what had afflicted the Siberian settlements. The aberrant heat had chiseled far deeper into the Russian permafrost than was normal and had exposed a toxin that had been encased since 1941, when the world was last at war. It was the pathogen anthrax, which had killed herds of reindeer all those decades ago and lain hidden in the animal carcasses... The anthrax, like the reactivation of the human pathogens of hatred and tribalism in this evolving century, had never died. It lay in wait, sleeping, until extreme circumstances brought it to the surface and back to life.
• Few problems have ever been solved by ignoring them. Looking beneath the history of one’s country is like learning that alcoholism or depression runs in one’s family
• A caste system is an artificial construction, a fixed and embedded ranking of human value that sets the presumed supremacy of one group against the presumed inferiority of other groups on the basis of ancestry and often immutable traits, traits that would be neutral in the abstract but are ascribed life-and-death and-death meaning in a hierarchy favoring the dominant caste whose forebears designed it. A caste system uses rigid, often arbitrary boundaries to keep the ranked groupings apart, distinct from one another and in their assigned places.
• The hierarchy of caste is not about feelings or morality. It is about power—which groups have it and which do not. It is about resources—which caste is seen as worthy of them and which are not, who gets to acquire and control them and who does not. It is about respect, authority, and assumptions of competence—who is accorded these and who is not.
• Race does the heavy lifting for a caste system that demands a means of human division. If we have been trained to see humans in the language of race, then caste is the underlying grammar that we encode as children, as when learning our mother tongue. Caste, like grammar, becomes an invisible guide not only to how we speak, but to how we process information, the autonomic calculations that figure into a sentence without our having to think about it.
• More than a century and a half before the American Revolution, a human hierarchy had evolved on the contested soil of what would become the United States, a concept of birthright, the temptation of entitled expansion that would set in motion the world’s first democracy and, with it, a ranking of human value and usage. It would twist the minds of men as greed and self-reverence eclipsed human conscience to take land and human bodies that the conquering men convinced themselves they had a right to.
• The Africans were not cited by age or arrival date as were the Europeans, information vital to setting the terms and time frame of indenture for Europeans, or for Africans, had they been in the same category, been seen as equal, or seen as needing to be accurately accounted for. Thus, before there was a United States of America, there was the caste system, born in colonial Virginia. At first, religion, not race as we now know it, defined the status of people in the colonies. Christianity, as a proxy for Europeans, generally exempted European workers from lifetime enslavement. This initial distinction is what condemned, first, indigenous people, and, then, Africans, most of whom were not Christian upon arrival, to the lowest rung of an emerging hierarchy before the concept of race had congealed to justify their eventual and total debasement.
• The creation of a caste system was a process of testing the bounds of human categories and not the result of a single edict. It was a decades-long sharpening of lines whenever the colonists had a decision to make.
• It was in the making of the New World that Europeans became white, Africans black, and everyone else yellow, red, or brown. It was in the making of the New World that humans were set apart on the basis of what they looked like, identified solely in contrast to one another, and ranked to form a caste system based on a new concept called race. It was in the process of ranking that we were all cast into assigned roles to meet the needs of the larger production. None of us are ourselves.
• But caste does not allow us to ignore structure. Caste is structure. Caste is ranking. Caste is the boundaries that reinforce the fixed assignments based upon what people look like. Caste is a living, breathing entity. It is like a corporation that seeks to sustain itself at all costs.
• Caste is insidious and therefore powerful because it is not hatred, it is not necessarily personal. It is the worn grooves of comforting routines and unthinking expectations, patterns of a social order that have been in place for so long that it looks like the natural order of things.
• become the Nuremberg Laws, the first topic on the agenda was the United States and what they could learn from it. The man chairing the meeting, Franz Gürtner, the Reich minister of justice, introduced a memorandum in the opening minutes, detailing the ministry’s investigation into how the United States managed its marginalized groups and guarded its ruling white citizenry.
• Grant published a rabid manifesto for cleansing the gene pool of undesirables, his 1916 book, The Passing of the Great Race, the German edition of which held a special place in the Führer’s library. Hitler wrote Grant a personal note of gratitude and said, “The book is my Bible.” Hitler had studied America from afar, both envying and admiring it, and attributed its achievements to its Aryan stock. He praised the country’s near genocide of Native Americans and the exiling to reservations of those who had survived.
• The state of South Carolina, right after the Civil War, explicitly prohibited black people from performing any labor other than farm or domestic work, setting their place in the caste system.
• The hand of government in the lives of white citizens has often been made invisible and has left distortions as to how each group got to where they are, allowing resentments and rivalries to fester. Many may not have realized that the New Deal reforms of the 1930s, like the Social Security Act of 1935 (providing old age insurance) and the Wagner Act (protecting workers from labor abuse), excluded the vast majority of black workers—farm laborers and domestics—at the urging of southern white politicians.
• Cotton Mather was a Puritan minister and lay scientist in Boston and had come into possession of an African man named Onesimus. The enslaved African told of a procedure he had undergone back in his homeland that protected him from this illness. People in West Africa had discovered that they could fend off contagions by inoculating themselves with a specimen of fluid from an infected person. Mather was intrigued by the idea Onesimus described. He researched it, and decided to call it “variolation.” ... During the 1721 outbreak, Mather tried to persuade Bostonians to protect themselves with this revolutionary method, but did not anticipate the resistance and rage, the “horrid Clamour,” that arose from Bostonians... Only one physician, Zabdiel Boylston, was willing to try the new method. He inoculated his son and the enslaved people he owned. In the end, the epidemic would wipe out more than 14 percent of Boston’s population.
• It is in keeping with caste protocols that, of the few officers who have been prosecuted for police brutality in recent high-profile cases, a notable number of them were men of color—a Japanese-American officer in Oklahoma, Chinese-American officer in New York City, and a Muslim-American officer in Minneapolis. These are cases in which men of color pay the price for what upper-caste men often have gotten away with. This phenomenon runs across levels of marginalization. The supervisor of the officers at the chokehold death of Eric Garner was a black woman. The people hardest on women employees can sometimes be women supervisors under pressure from and vying for the approval of male bosses in a male-dominated hierarchy in which fewer women are allowed to rise. Each of these cases presents a complicated story that presumably dismisses race or sex as a factor, but one that makes perfect sense, and maybe only makes sense, when seen through the lens of a caste system.
• In fact, the most potent instrument of the caste system is a sentinel at every rung, whose identity forswears any accusation of discrimination and helps keep the caste system humming.
• In 1941, as the United States prepared to enter the Second World War, the Davis and Gardner team emerged with perhaps the most comprehensive study to date of the American caste system. The volume was 538 pages long and titled Deep South: A Social Anthropological Study of Caste and Class. It described the layers of social classes within the two major castes in America—white and black people.
• consigning the Davis and Gardner book to the footnotes. Deep South was published in 1941 and has long been overshadowed by the two earlier works produced by scholars from the dominant caste. The Davis and Gardner project seemed to meet the same fate of marginalization as the subordinate caste that they had studied.
• Paige was well past his peak when he finally got his shot at the majors. At forty-two, he was the oldest rookie in baseball, old enough to be his teammates’ father. Still, at one of his first starting games in the big league, fans stormed the turnstiles to see him play at Comiskey Park. There, he pitched a 5–0 shutout for Cleveland over the Chicago White Sox, helping Cleveland make it to the playoff,
• Hitler’s motorcade winds past people who are not just hurling confetti but are so tightly packed together that they themselves look like mounds of confetti thrown by the wind. Soldiers have to hold back the smiling, crying women, as would happen at Beatles concerts a generation from this moment. The roar of the crowd is not recognizably human but the rolling crash of ocean waves that recede and then batter the shore again.
• Society builds a trapdoor of self-reference that, without any effort on the part of people in the dominant caste, unwittingly forces on them a narcissistic isolation from those assigned to lower categories. It replicates the structure of narcissistic family systems, the interplay of competing supporting roles—the golden-child middle castes of so-called model minorities, the lost-child indigenous peoples, and the scapegoat caste at the bottom.
• Thus, when under threat, they are willing to sacrifice themselves and their ideals for the survival of the group from which they draw their self-esteem. The social theorist Takamichi Sakurai wrote bluntly: “Group narcissism leads people to fascism. An extreme form of group narcissism means malignant narcissism, which gives rise to a fanatical fascist politics, an extreme racialism.”
• It was no accident that my caste radar worked more efficiently when there was a group of people interacting among themselves. Caste is, in a way, a performance, and I could detect the caste positions of people in a group but not necessarily a single Indian by himself or herself. “There is never caste,” the Dalit leader Ambedkar once said. “Only castes.”
• “The first moral duty is resignation and acceptance,” wrote the social anthropologist Edmund Leach of the expected behavior of the lowest caste in India. “The individual gains personal merit by fulfilling the tasks which are proper to the station into which he has been born…
• The ancient code for the subordinate caste calls upon them to see the world not with their own eyes but as the dominant caste sees it, demands that they extend compassion even when none is forthcoming in exchange, a fusion of dominant and subordinate that brings to mind the Stockholm Syndrome.
• That day in November 2014, they posted pictures of Devonte hugging the police officer and got adulation from people all over the world. People saw what they wanted to see and not the agony in the face of a twelve-year-old boy who had the body of an eight-year-old due to starvation, his hug, on some level, a bid to be rescued.
• Graves found that hypertension rates of blacks and whites are roughly the same when affluent African-Americans are deleted from the equation. The caste system takes years off the lives of subordinate-caste people the more they find themselves in contention with it. “There is a black tax that we pay that hurts our health, and the gap is larger among the college-educated than it is among high school dropouts,”
• Seen from a caste perspective, Clinton perhaps suffered from a version of the Bradley Effect—inflated... This is what happened to Los Angeles mayor Tom Bradley when he ran for governor of California in 1982. That would have made an inability to rise above the margin of error a harbinger of a tough Election Day.
• You will emphasize the inherited characteristics that rank higher on the caste scale. In the voting booth, many people make an autonomic, subconscious assessment of their station, their needs and wishes, and the multiple identities they carry (working class, middle class, rich, poor, white, black, male, female, Asian, Latino). They often align themselves not with those whose plight they may share, but with those whose power and privilege intersect with a trait of their own. People with overlapping self-interests will often gravitate toward the personal characteristic that accords them the most status. Many make an existential, aspirational choice. They vote up, rather than across, and usually not down.
• Well into the twentieth century, heirs to the Confederacy built a monument with Lee, Stonewall Jackson, and Jefferson Davis carved in granite, bigger than Mount Rushmore, in Stone Mountain, Georgia.
• as if a field of chiseled coffins of varying heights, stand in formation, separated by just enough space for people to walk between them and to contemplate their meaning. The stones undulate and dip toward the center, where the ground hollows out, so that when a visitor reaches the interior, the traffic noise dies away, the air grows still, and you are trapped in shadow, isolated with the magnitude of what the stones represent. This is the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe who perished during the Holocaust.
• The stumbling stones force the viewer to pause and squint to read the inscription, force the viewer to regard the entry doors the people walked through, the steps they climbed with their groceries and toddlers,

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Dr. Sanjay Gupta offers a lot of reassurances and encourgements -- exactly what I dislike in such books. I'd rather be scared straight, thanks.

• While they all talked about the great strides we have made in awareness, astonishingly there was no clear agreement on how to best treat a concussion, a condition diagnosed millions of times every year in the United States.
• Thus, as you read the article, your memory actually changes by both adding new information and finding a new place to put that information. At the same time, you’re giving yourself a different way to link the new information with older, now slightly modified information. It’s complicated, and probably not at all how you have previously thought about your memory. But it is important to know that memory is fundamentally a learning process—the result of constantly interpreting and analyzing incoming information. And every time you use your memory, you change it.
• Because memory calls on an expansively distributed network and coordinates those interactions through slow-frequency, thrumming rhythms called theta waves, neuroscientists are finding ways to stimulate key regions in the brain with noninvasive electric currents to physically synchronize neural circuits, akin to an orchestra conductor tuning the strings section to the wind.
• (Studies show that as your hippocampus shrinks, so does your memory; studies also show that a higher waist-to-hip ratio—ahem, carrying extra weight—equates with a smaller hippocampus.
• It is worth highlighting a few more specifics because chronic inflammation associated with aging (“inflamm-aging”) is at the center of virtually all degenerative conditions, from those that increase one’s risk for dementia, such as diabetes and vascular diseases, to those that are directly brain related, such as depression and Alzheimer’s disease.
• Without proper tools in the dusty, desert tent, I took the bit from a Black & Decker drill and sterilized it. I placed a sterile glove on the drill itself, and then used it to open his skull and provide room for his swollen brain. After that, I dissected through the outer layers of the brain, found the blood clot and shrapnel, and carefully removed it. I still needed to cover his brain in some sterile fashion, otherwise he would have been at risk of meningitis, possibly encephalitis, and most likely he would not have survived. So I fileted open an IV bag and used the inside of it to re-create the outer layer of his brain, because it was the only thing truly sterile inside that dusty tent.
• The other six senses are also processed in the brain and give us more data about the outside world:
  Proprioception: A sense of where your body parts are and what they’re doing.
  Equilibrioception: A sense of balance, otherwise known as your internal GPS.
  Nociception: A sense of pain.
  Thermo(re)ception: A sense of temperature.
  Chronoception: A sense of the passage of time.
  Interoception: A sense of your internal needs, like hunger, thirst, needing to use the bathroom.
• While spending time in nature or green spaces has long been recommended to improve mental well-being, we now understand what that aroma of the forest is really doing for our bodies and brains. You needn’t travel to a far-off forest; you can do well by yourself just by digging in the dirt of your own garden or visiting a local park. I have always loved the ancient Indian concept of creating a harmonious 100-year life by spending the third stage (around the ages fifty to seventy-five) living in a forest as part of a contemplative, tranquil lifestyle called vanprastha (life as a forest dweller). Some research has found that walking in nature, as opposed to walking in urban environments, may help people manage stress, calm rumination, and regulate emotion.
• While you may be able to get the active ingredients isolated and even synthesized, real food is made up of a multitude of molecules, and we have only begun to scratch the surface in defining what they all do. Some seemingly inert molecules may help the active ingredients travel through the body, acting as vehicles. Other molecules may help unlock receptors, allowing the molecules to activate their targets. As I mentioned earlier, it is referred to as the entourage effect and helps explain why real food is always going to be a better option than a supplement.
• Dr. Gary Small (he’s the one who endorses flossing), he suggested the “triple threat”: Take a walk with a friend or neighbor and have a conversation about what worries you. The combination of the exercise, in-person interaction, and talking through your anxieties is a wonder drug to the brain. Dan Johnston at BrainSpan added a good point about the foundation of relationships in general: “You have to have a good brain to have good relationships.”
• Given that digestion begins in the mouth, juices or smoothies—even super-healthy ones—don’t get absorbed as well because they pass through the stomach and first part of the small intestine before digestion really begins. As a result, you are not getting the “good stuff” out of food as easily.
• Benadryl—the popular antihistamine many of us have in our medicine cabinets and also find in over-the-counter cold remedies and sleep aids—owes its main ingredient to an anticholinergic: diphenhydramine. But here’s what’s increasingly a concern: This class of drugs may also increase a patient’s risk of dementia by more than 50 percent. And it’s estimated that 20 to 50 percent of Americans age sixty-five and older take at least one anticholinergic medication.
• All told, roughly 60 million Americans are caring for someone with Alzheimer’s disease. That’s more than twice the number of people living in Texas.