Northwestern’s Alice Kaplan Institute for the Humanities hosted a conversation about civil rights solidarity between race and caste, a hereditary and class division system in Hindu society, in Harris Hall Wednesday evening.
The institute hosted Carnegie Mellon University history Prof. Nico Slate, NU Bergen Evans history Prof. Daniel Immerwahr and associate English Prof. Ivy Wilson.
Slate began the conversation by sharing historical examples of Indian people expressing solidarity with African American struggles in the U.S. He mentioned Jyotirao Phule’s book “Gulamgiri,” whose title translates to slavery in Hindi. Slate said this draws the event’s theme of comparing race and caste.
However, Slate said the connection between race and caste is often “lopsided.” He said those fighting for caste equality are more engaged and informed about racism in the United States than African Americans typically are about Dalits, the lowest caste.
“Dalits learn and engage with African American struggles, not the other way around,” Slate said.
Slate said when there is African American discussion about caste, it’s often “superficial.” He mentioned Martin Luther King Jr.’s reference to himself as an “untouchable” in a sermon in 1965, a now outdated term for Dalit. Slate said King was much more interested in relations with Gandhi and nonviolence in general than he was in Dalit inequality.
Slate also said that solidarity in movements can be both exciting and dangerous — exciting because it makes movements more powerful, but dangerous because analogies between movements have the tendency to obscure other causes, he said. In this case, he said the fight for racial equality in the U.S. and its connection to the fight for decolonization in India obscures the deep-rooted problem of caste.
All speakers mentioned prominent civil rights figure and advocate for decolonization W.E.B. Du Bois in Wednesday’s conversation. Slate said Du Bois had a transnational conception of race, and often connected civil rights with workers’ rights. Wilson said that DuBois also touched on the concept of caste in his book “Black Reconstruction,” but not in a meaningful way.
“Du Bois invokes the vocabulary of caste, but doesn’t engage in the history of caste,” Wilson said.
Immerwahr offered two possible reasons for this uneven engagement. The first was inane resemblance and a desire to fight against similar problems, and the second was strategy.
It was politically beneficial for those fighting for caste equality to align themselves with any American cause, Immerwahr said, because information about the United States was so globally accessible. Thus, aligning your cause with African Americans was a good way to gain awareness.
“The U.S. is a really attractive pair to anyone,” Immerwahr said. “Even though African Americans were subordinate, they were famous.”
Slate reiterated that the potential for solidarity gets pushed out in favor of other forms of solidarity. He said the key to success is to forge solidarity on a human level, instead of just focusing on broader concepts.
He said to advance a cause, you must emulate humanism, and treat people with as much respect as possible.
“It’s hard to remember you are dealing with complicated people and not just big terms like race or caste,” Slate said. “You have to figure out ways to make it human, bring it back to some conception of the richness of human personality.”
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