Super-Trafalgar

Firstly, my apologies to everyone on here who has sent me messages who I've not responded to. My excuses are laziness, apathy & not feeling like thinking about hot, sexy thoughts. The three are interlinked, plainly. I've also been doing a lot of reading, streaming old comedies, watching YouTube videos, and eating many packets of biscuits. Sometimes I do some work. 

The last book I read is "Caste: the origins of our discontents" by Isabel Wilkerson, and as I was reading about it, I knew that eventually I would need to write something about it on here. 

(Advance warning: this is not going to be hot and sexy. It's going to be the extreme opposite of that. If you want hot and sexy, then definitely feel free to not read this.) 

There are many things to say about the book, which, if you've been reading the news lately you might already have heard. (Oprah, for instance, has made it her choice for her book club and called it the most important choice yet and sent 500 copies of it to governors and mayors and CEO's throughout the land.) But the first and most obvious thing to hit you just a few paragraphs in is that the author can really, really write. Like really write. If you read and like my words - or any of the many, numerous and more talented authors on here - then she can do that, but a hundred times better. But whereas my words might hold you and make you feel aroused and horny and humiliated, hers will grip you and make you feel disturbed and angry and sad and horrified. She's a Pulitzer-prize winning journalist, by the way. So that's probably why.

The book is primarily about the treatment of people designated as "Blacks", primarily in the USA. I say 'primarily' because it is also about the treatment of those people designated as "Untouchables" in the caste system in India as well as those people designated as "Jews" by the Nazis. It's also about everyone else who, when they live in a caste-based society are slotted into other arbitrary categories which are rated higher than those at the very bottom of the pile. So, yes, it's about those people designated as "White" who get assigned to what the author calls the "Dominant Caste", as well as those in-between, who have to scramble and ingratiate themselves with the dominant caste to try and make sure their position in the caste hierarchy is not right at the bottom.

Do you get why I needed to write about this book on here yet?

She distinguishes between the concepts of "Caste" and "Racism." She explains how the two are not the same; that Caste is the underlying mechanism whereby you take some completely arbitrary aspect of a person and use that to classify people into lower caste or upper caste. Racism is a particular means of implementing a Caste system, where the arbitrary characteristic chosen was the color of your skin. For the Indian Caste system it was a complex mix of family, profession and other factors. For the Nazis it was genetic history.

She then goes on to define what she calls the 8 pillars of caste: the features of all caste systems which both define them as well as "make them work." 

1. The Laws of Nature/Divine Will. Every caste system makes up some story to justify why the Dominant caste is superior to the subordinate caste. (For Blacks, it is was because they were the descendants of Ham. For Indians because the highest caste, the Brahmins, were one step removed from God. For the Nazis it was because the Aryans were the racially purest and best.)

2. Heritability. You are born into your Caste, and that is where you stay for the rest of your life. It is an immutable factor of your existence. If you are at the bottom, that's where you are for now and evermore, as will your children be, and as will their children be, for ever and ever, amen. You are inferior and nothing you do, nothing you can do, that will make you not so.

3. Control of Marriage and Mating. If you are in the lower caste, then you cannot marry out of it, or have any sort of sexual relations with those above you - except if those above you want to rape you, that is. This is really just an extension of the previous point: if you're lower caste, you and your children will always be. White women who voluntarily had sex with a black man were flogged. Black men who so much as looked at a white women in the wrong way were liable to be lynched. And while white men, in theory, should not have had sex with black women, the reality was they could rape black women at will with zero fear of punishment. (And any children born as a result were still designated as in the lowest caste.) 

4. Purity versus Pollution. The Dominant caste was deemed to be pure, divine and beautiful whereas the subordinate caste was diseased, disgusting, corrupt and ugly. For an Untouchable to come into contact in any form with those of the Brahmin caste was to be avoided at all costs: the lowest caste had to walk between 12 and 96 steps away from the upper castes. They had to wear bells to alert others that they were in the vicinity so no inadvertent contact might be made with them. They had to use a branch to brush away traces of their footsteps on a path. Jews were not allowed on public beaches so as to not pollute the waters for everyone else. Blacks were segregated into different schools, toilets, neighbourhoods, backs of busses. They did not share water coolers. They did not go into swimming pools which were used by whites, (and, in fact, there were no swimming pools for blacks, because why would there be? During the civil rights era, counties would often fill swimming pools with concrete so whites did not have to share pools with blacks.)

Caste dealt with "mixed blood" in various ways. In some senses, amongst the lower castes, having some "higher" blood mixed in with theirs elevated them. A lighter colour made you superior to a darker colour. The Nazis Nuremburg Laws deemed you Jewish if you had more than 50% Jewish ancestry and stripped you of Reich citizenry. Only if you were 1/8 Jewish or less would you be considered a full citizen. Louisiana classified your blackness/whiteness as far as 1/64ths. Virginia considered you Black if you had just “a single drop of black blood in you.”

Fun fact: the concept of "White" vs "Black" was invented in the USA. It has no basis in reality. The so-called scientific nomenclature of "Caucasian" is utter bollocks based on some anthropologist whose "favourite" skull was discovered in the Caucasian mountains in Russia. It was modified, over time, according to circumstances. Italian immigrants to the US, for instance were ot considered White, bizarre at that might seem now. Japanese? Indian? Take a guess.

Fun fact: The Nazis studied the race laws in the States in order to work out what laws they could / should impose to discriminate against the Jews.

Here's a quote from the book:

The burden fell on those in the lowest caste to adjust themselves for the convenience of the dominant caste whenever in contact with white people. An African-American man who managed to become an architect during the nineteenth century had to train himself “to read architectural blueprints upside down,” wrote the scholar Charles W. Mills, “because he knew white clients would be made uncomfortable by having him on the same side of the desk as themselves.” 

Well into the twentieth century, a panic could afflict people in the dominant caste if ever a breach occurred. A frantic white mother in civil-rights-era Mississippi yanked her young daughter inside one day, held her over the kitchen sink and scrubbed her little hand with a Brillo pad as if both their lives depended on it. The girl had touched the hand of a little black girl who was working on the family’s land. The mother told her never to touch that girl’s hand again, though that was not the term she used. 

“They have germs,” the mother said. “They’re nasty.” The mother’s fury frightened the little girl and brought her to tears as they stood there, bent over the sink. And the daughter’s tears brought the mother to tears over the manufactured terror she had allowed to consume her and over the box that she realized in that moment had imprisoned her for all of her life. 

This was a sacred prohibition, and it was said that, into the 1970s, the majority of whites in the South had not so much as shaken the hands of a black person. 

Wilkerson, Isabel. Caste (pp. 129-130). Penguin Books Ltd. Kindle Edition. 

5. Occupation: The lower caste do the shitty, menial jobs. In a real sense, that was the initial primary purpose of the Caste system in the first place. No-one wants to do the hard, shitty jobs so let's get someone else to do them instead - preferably while they paid nothing to do it. Conversely, that's then turned around and taken as further evidence, if any were needed, that this is all that those in the lower position are capable of doing, and this is what they were put on earth to do.

Thus, caste did not mean merely doing a certain kind of labor; it meant performing a dominant or subservient role. “There must be, then, a division of labor where the two races are employed, and menial labor is commonly supposed to be the division assigned to Negroes,” Doyle wrote, “and he must look and act the part.” 

A black man in the 1930s was on his way to pay a visit to a young woman he fancied, which occasioned him to go into the town square. There, some white men approached him and “forced him to procure overalls, saying he was ‘too dressed up for a weekday.’ ”

Wilkerson, Isabel. Caste (p. 136). Penguin Books Ltd. Kindle Edition. 

When a Black women rings your doorbell you automatically give her your laundry because you assume she's the hired help come to collect it, not your next door neighbour who has come to welcome you to the classy, upmarket neighborhood you’ve just moved into.

6. Dehumanisation and Stigma. In order for the Dominant caste to feel that it was OK to treat the subordinate caste as shit, first they need to stop thinking of them as human, or, in any way similar to them. They're animals or worse than animals. 

Held hostage in labor camps in different centuries and an ocean apart, both Jews and African-Americans were subjected to a program of purposeful dehumanization. Upon their arrival at the concentration camps, Jews were stripped of the clothing and accoutrements of their former lives, of everything they had owned. Their heads were shaved, their distinguishing features of side-burns or mustaches or the crowns of lush hair, were deleted from them. They were no longer individuals, they were no longer personalities to consider, to engage with, to take into account. 

During the morning and evening roll calls, they were forced to stand sometimes for hours into the night as the SS officers counted the thousands of them to check for any escapees. They stood in the freezing cold or summer heat in the same striped uniforms, with the same shorn heads, same sunken cheeks. They became a single mass of self-same bodies, purposely easier for SS officers to distance themselves from, to feel no human connection with. Loving fathers, headstrong nephews, beloved physicians, dedicated watch-makers, rabbis, and piano tuners, all merged into a single mass of undifferentiated bodies that were no longer seen as humans deserving of empathy but as objects over whom they could exert total control and do whatever they wanted to. 

They were no longer people, they were numbers, a means to an end. Upon their arrival at the auction blocks and labor camps of the American South, Africans were stripped of their given names and forced to respond to new ones, as would a dog to a new owner, often mocking names like Caesar or Samson or Dred. They were stripped of their past lives and identities as Yoruba or Asante or Igbo, as the son of a fisherman, nephew of the village priest, or daughter of a midwife. 

Decades afterward, Jews were stripped of their given and surnames and forced to memorize the prison numbers assigned them in the concentration camps. 

Millennia ago, the Untouchables of India were assigned surnames that identified them by the lowly work they performed, forcing them to announce their degradation every time they introduced themselves, while the Brahmins, many quite literally, carried the names of the gods. 

In the two more modern caste systems, at labor camps in central and eastern Europe and in the American South, well-fed captors forced their hostages to do the heaviest work of inhuman exertion, while withholding food from those whose labors enriched the captors, providing barely enough to sustain the human metabolism, the bare minimum for human subsistence. 

The Nazis approached human deprivation as a science. They calculated the number of calories required for a certain task, say, chopping down trees and digging up stumps, and fed those laborers one or two hundred calories fewer as a cost savings and to keep them too weak to fight back as they slowly starved to death.

Beyond all of this, the point of a dehumanization campaign was the forced surrender of the target’s own humanity, a karmic theft beyond accounting. Whatever was considered a natural human reaction was disallowed for the subordinate caste. 

During the era of enslavement, they were forbidden to cry as their children were carried off, forced to sing as a wife or husband was sold away, never again to look into their eyes or hear their voice for as long as the two might live. They were punished for the very responses a human being would be expected to have in the circumstances forced upon them. Whatever humanity shone through them was an affront to what the dominant caste kept telling itself. They were punished for being the humans that they could not help but be.

Wilkerson, Isabel. Caste (pp. 142-144). Penguin Books Ltd. Kindle Edition. 

7. Terror and Cruelty as a means of Control. We know all about this one, don't we, people? I won't say anything more.

8. Inherent superiority versus inferiority. Over and above and written through all of the caste system is the notion that there are those who are superior are in the dominant caste, and those who are inferior are in the bottom caste. 

For those of you still reading, I think you all know why I'm writing about this book on here now. It's because we know about this caste system inside and out. It's our playpen, it's what we dabble in and concern ourselves with. These eight pillars of caste, apart from maybe the bits about heritability and the control of marriage, are all second nature to us; we understand it perfectly. And we understand that racism is different from Caste; the notion of Caste is bigger. We can use the colour of your skin as one means of differentiating (and hence raising up or down) one person from another. But equally we can use gender, or class, or lately, as a fun twist, political affiliation. 

I hope that the author, if she ever gets to hear that she's got a review of her book on a BDSM porn site doesn't take this the wrong way; I'm not writing this because it's fun or that it might provide ways for us pervs to further amuse ourselves. And I hope any of you reading this don't get that idea yourself either, because that's not my intent. 

So what is my intent? Why spend so long on this post when I haven't been on here in over two weeks? The short answer is I don't know really. There are many reasons, some noble, some not, and some so mixed up between the two that I can't disentangle them. 

Maybe the primal reason is that, for me, reading this book raised so many strong thoughts and feelings that I felt I needed to share them with people who understood why I might be having them. The caste system, as described by the author in her book, is what we re-create here in BDSM. There are huge and important differences obviously (and thankfully) between the two, but there are vast amounts in common as well.

Somehow, and for some reason, what we do is fun and arousing, but it's mutually fun and arousing. I've not quite got my head around why that is, but I think it's just mostly because it's a way for us to hack our sexual systems in order for us to get feelings of pleasure, without inflicting any lasting harm. 

In the real caste system, it's done to provide economic and social and other forms of benefit to one side only, and at the cost of, and indeed quite often with the deliberate purpose of inflicting lasting harm. 

Here's one dark thing I can tell you that I've discovered as a Dom: inflicting pain, being cruel, knowing that you can inflict pain with impunity, knowing that you can impose your will on another for your own pleasure, is deeply satisfying. Fortunately, (and again, thankfully) I don't think I'd feel that satisfaction in the slightest if it was imposing my will on another without their full consent. But if you’ve managed to dehumanise another section of the population, managed to convince yourself that this particular set of people are inferior to you, not deserving of empathy, are somehow less than human, then I can well imagine  it would somehow feel enjoyable to take advantage of them, to lord it over them, to humiliate them. This is both disturbing and enlightening. I think most people in civilised society think that they would never, ever behave like some of those described in the book, but the truth of it is, sadly, is that given the right context, most of us would and some of us might enjoy it. 

It is July 19, 1935. They are all standing at the base of a tree in the pine woods of Fort Lauderdale, Florida. Above them hangs the limp body of Rubin Stacy, his overalls torn and bloodied, riddled with bullets, his hands cuffed in front of him, head snapped from the lynching rope, killed for frightening a white woman. The girl in the front is looking up at the dead black man with wonderment rather than horror, a smile of excitement on her face as if show ponies had just galloped past her at the circus. The fascination on her young face set against the gruesome nature of the gathering was captured by a photographer and is among the most widely circulated of all lynching photographs of twentieth-century America. 

Lynchings were part carnival, part torture chamber, and attracted thousands of onlookers who collectively became accomplices to public sadism. Photographers were tipped off in advance and installed portable printing presses at the lynching sites to sell to lynchers and onlookers like photographers at a prom. They made postcards out of the gelatin prints for people to send to their loved ones. People mailed postcards of the severed, half-burned head of Will James atop a pole in Cairo, Illinois, in 1907. They sent postcards of burned torsos that looked like the petrified victims of Vesuvius, only these horrors had come at the hands of human beings in modern times. Some people framed the lynching photographs with locks of the victim’s hair under glass if they had been able to secure any. One spectator wrote on the back of his postcard from Waco, Texas, in 1916: “This is the Barbecue we had last night my picture is to the left with the cross over it your son Joe.” 

This was singularly American. “Even the Nazis did not stoop to selling souvenirs of Auschwitz,” wrote Time magazine many years later. Lynching postcards were so common a form of communication in turn-of-the-twentieth-century America that lynching scenes “became a burgeoning sub-department of the postcard industry. By 1908, the trade had grown so large, and the practice of sending postcards featuring the victims of mob murderers had become so repugnant, that the U.S. postmaster

Wilkerson, Isabel. Caste (pp. 92-94). Penguin Books Ltd. Kindle Edition.

As I read the book, passage after passage, describing stories of such utter horror, had me putting down my kindle and imagining strange and contorted fantasies of enslaved blacks being saved by divine interventions: angels sent down to punish white slave-owners and lynch mobs.

The most heart-breaking story in the book, amongst many, was this:

... later, in December 1943, an earnest fifteen-year-old boy named Willie James Howard was working during the holiday school break at a dime store in Live Oak, Florida. He was an only child and, having made it to the tenth grade, was expected to exceed what anyone else in the family had been able to accomplish. That December, he made a fateful gesture, unknowing or unmindful of a central pillar of caste. He was hopeful and excited about his new job and wanted so badly to do well that he sent Christmas cards to everyone at work. In one Christmas card, the one to a girl his age named Cynthia, who worked there and whom he had a crush on, he signed, “with L” (for love).

It would seem an ordinary gesture for that time of the year, sweet even, but this was the Jim Crow South; the boy was black, and the girl was white. She showed the card to her father. Word got back to Willie James that his card had somehow disturbed her. So, on New Year’s Day 1944, he hand-delivered an apologetic note trying to explain himself: “I know you don’t think much of our kind of people but we don’t hate you, all we want [is] to be your friends but you [won’t] let us please don’t let anybody else see this I hope I haven’t made you mad….” He added a rhyme: “I love your name, I love your voice, for a S.H. (sweetheart) you are my choice.” 

The next day, the girl’s father and two other white men dragged Willie James and his father to the banks of the Suwannee River. They hog-tied Willie James and held a gun to his head. They forced him to jump and forced his father at gunpoint to watch him drown. Held captive and outnumbered as the father was, he was helpless to save his only child. 

The men admitted to authorities that they had abducted the boy and bound his hands and feet. They said he just jumped and drowned on his own. Within days, the boy’s parents fled for their lives. A young Thurgood Marshall of the NAACP alerted the Florida governor, to no avail. The NAACP field secretary, Harry T. Moore, managed to convince the boy’s parents to overcome their terror and to sign affidavits about what had happened the day their son was killed. A local grand jury refused to indict the boy’s abductors, and federal prosecutors would not intervene. 

No one was ever held to account or spent a day in jail for the death of Willie James. His abduction and death were seen as upholding the caste order. Thus the terrors of the southern caste system continued, carried forth without penalty. Sanctioned as it was by the U.S. government, the caste system had become not simply southern, but American.

Wilkerson, Isabel. Caste (pp. 113-115). Penguin Books Ltd. Kindle Edition. 

It you're not crying by the end of that passage or else imagining scenes of bloody and torturous retribution against the guilty and those guilty of acquitting them ...  then I don't know what to say.

No, I don't condone actual torture in real life. And to be honest, many of my retribution fantasies did not involve torture at all, just honest to goodness apologies and repayments from the oppressors to the oppressed; those in the dominant caste would be stripped of what they had stolen and made to kiss the feet of the oppressed, crying in shame as they did so, begging forgiveness for what they had wrought, asking what they could possibly do to make it better. 

The book doesn't offer up any explicit solutions as to how we can "make it better" apart from a few generic ideas: 1. Acknowledge the horrible truth of what happened in the past and renounce it forever as something that should not have come to pass. 2. Realise, at a deep and abiding level, that the people to whom these horrors and injustices were perpetrated in the past were and are no different from any other people. We are all equals. 3. Recognise that those injustices from the past are still present to some extent today, and we as a people, are honour-bound to try and rectify them.

It might sound like lovey-dovey bullshit to some, but many of you people here in the bdsm community know deep-down that lovey-dovey stuff is no bullshit and has the power to heal.

I now commit this post to the server, and hope it doesn't choke on it.