The Psychology of the American Caste System

The Psychology of The American Caste System 

By Naomi Williams 

Published November 3, 2020

What The Hell is A Racial Hierarchy?

I think it’s pretty self explanatory — a social understanding of what races are ‘superior’ to one another. Scientifically, we’ve asserted that there is no correlation between the racial hierarchy of the world and the genes of those races. White people are not at the top of the hierarchy because they’re genetically better than people of colour. Historically, the so-called genetic superiority of white people was used to justify their long standing placement at the top of society. Eugenics, they called it. Now, eugenics didn’t really boom in popularity until the 1900s, but the idea that people had organised themselves into certain cohorts within a society and each of those cohorts had different amounts of sociopolitical power had long been recognised. When looking back into history, we can see very obvious social classes in each well documented society. 

It’s almost as if humanity cannot exist without these classes. We create them subconsciously, and they always end up looking the same regardless of the society in which they were created. Isn’t it so odd that humans came up with these arbitrary rules that every other human had to follow, lest they be shunned from the other humans? How did our tiny little neolithic brains even manage to come up with ideas of culture, or hierarchy, or even developed societies? Humans are very odd creatures, in the grand scheme of things, but our brains have been developed in such a way that humanity cannot exist without these things. If our existence is determined by the creation of a society, then the creation of society is not a large milestone in retrospect. Society and culture cannot exist without one another, they are the manifestations of each other. It’s like the age-old riddle, “Which came first, the chicken or the egg?” You can argue whichever you please, because there is no right answer. The right answer doesn’t even matter. In this manner, we can also see that a hierarchy cannot exist without a society, but a society cannot be formed in full without a hierarchy. 

We cannot say for certain which of the three keystones came first, but that they probably erupted into humanity around the same time, and therefore they are the  keystones of the human existence on this planet. This idea of culture, society and hierarchy is also purely anthropologic — this is a species specific phenomenon. But that’s just the basics. If none of them came first, and none of them came last, it is fair to assume that they are not learned behaviours of the human population, but innate sociologic & neurologic connections we have been wired to make. And if none of them came first, how did we end up with a hierarchy based on race that has permeated everything we know of today? How did we get to the point where everything revolved around race? 

Examining of Race As A Social Construct

Here’s the thing, most stuff is a social construct. 

Money, race, gender, childhood, even our expectations of education. All of it was constructed by the society in which we live. Race was constructed by society. Because there is a lack of substantial genetic differentiation between races, it can be thought that race was created by humans as a means of classification. This differs heavily from what most of the world has been taught — there is a collective misunderstanding that “each race is a discrete group of people defined by specific genetic and biological differences.” In America, our understanding of race and the subsequence placement of races on the hierarchy, is fuelled by this. But, scientifically, it’s just wrong. Dr. Samuel Morton conducted extensive research to prove that there were substantial biological differences between the races. But this was in the early 19th century, and most of the world already had an unconscious bias against people of colour. His biased findings were then used as post-era justifications for the American slave trade and genocides of people of colour across the globe. 

Over time, science has unequivocally demonstrated that race is not real in a biological sense. It isn’t even a good metric of diversity. While race was ‘invented’ to show differences between people, it has only ever been used as a tool of oppression and violence. Subjugation based on race is nothing more than a way for the people who created the hierarchy to continue to be at the top of the hierarchy. But saying that race isn’t real doesn’t magically fix all the issues that stem from racial discrimination. Social constructs still have very tangible repercussions in this society. It’s like saying you don’t see colour — by choosing to look past skin tone, you choose to look past patterns that directly impact these people.  Albeit race not actually existing, we cannot ignore race based issues. As an American, these race based issues translate back to our well acknowledged systemic inequalities. 

Systemic inequality is how we ended up in a place that makes everything about race. Everything, and I mean everything, can be related back to race. The foods we eat, the medicine we’re prescribed, our perceptions of money and time. This is a phenomenon that’s limited to America, because despite rising numbers of race based hate, we are still one of the most diverse countries in the world. There is no true American culture. American society is the amalgamation of multiple subcultures that come from ethnicity. Ethnicity is real, it is tangible and there are biological differences between ethnicities. So why do we choose to differentiate based on race, rather than our actual differences? 

Racism vs Ethnocentrism 

Race is based on colour. In the sense of a hierarchy, race is just easier. If we look at the reasoning for a hierarchy in the first place, it’s just an impersonal way for people higher on the power pyramid to  know exactly how to treat people lower on the pyramid. Perceptions of race and their placement on a hierarchy is determined by the preconceived notions placed on them within their society. Ethnicities are more complicated. When people talk about the Atlantic Slave Trade, there are always a few people who butt in with the comment, “well, black people sold other black people!” They’re not inherently wrong with this, black people did sell other black people — but they weren't selling people of the same ethnicity. Race based conflicts are relatively new, in actuality. We didn’t see the emergence of a global racial hierarchy until America’s racial hierarchy. In fact, Britain and the United States are the fathers of racism as we know it today. But ethnocentrism has existed forever. We can’t call conflicts between African tribes racial disputes — they’re all black. We can’t call conflicts between the Irish & the British racist, because they’re both white. Some regions of the world have always used ethnic identifiers rather than racial ones, because everyone looks the same to the eyes of an outsider. 

The Middle East is a prime example for a region that relies heavily on ethnic identifiers, but what in the world even is an ethnic identifier? Very specific phenotypes that belong to very specific regions of the world. How Italians look slightly different from Sicilian people, or the differences between Russians in Moscow versus Russians in Vladivostok. Noses are used as the common ethnic identifiers, and they beat out eyes in the arena of biometrics, because noses vary the most due to the theory of evolution. The idea that the ethnocentrism is older than racism reinforces the belief that we invented racism within society as a means to strengthen our hierarchy. 

Yeah Okay, What Does Psychology Have To Do With It? 

We’ve asserted that society, culture, and hierarchy are keystones of human society, and since they erupted into humanity simultaneously, they are evidence of sociological & neurological beginnings of humanity as whole. I failed to define what a ‘sociological beginning’ even is. Here’s the thing: I don’t know. Anthropologists don’t know. Psychologists, historians, neurologists, none of us know. I think it’s a vague phrase to describe the ways in which humanity has built itself up in ways we cannot comprehend in our modernity. There are many ways in which these keystones have been created by humanity’s collective subconscious, I am not here to explore how the human brain (which is a pile of meat fuelled by electric slime, mind you) created these hierarchies, societies or cultures — I am here to elaborate upon the human brain’s ability to produce chemicals that reinforce our ideas of these things. How did we create cultures across the globe, and they all have the same characteristics? How is the American Racial Hierarchy an amalgamation of the world’s views on different ethnicities, and how did Americans manage to hijack an entire global way of ethnocentric thinking? 

I have to differentiate between societies and cultures, as a reminder: A society is a group of people, who practice a culture. We do not know which of the two came first. There is one main chemical that allows for these societies we’ve developed to become navigable, and it’s Oxytocin. For a while, Oxytocin was branded as a female hormone responsible for the overwhelming love a mother has for their child, but it is so much more. Like in grade school, when you knew one girl was a horrible person, but everyone loved them? That gut instinct, or how you got excited when they finally got exposed? That was oxytocin at work. Or when you could tell whether or not you’d have to lead a group project? Oxytocin. When you felt envious of a person because they were receiving more praise than you? Also oxytocin. It’s responsible for about every social interaction we have, because it’s the chemical that gives us the ability to navigate social interactions. We wouldn’t have society without oxytocin. That’s a neurological beginning. We can blame modern medicine (and sexism) for not knowing the extent to which oxytocin has permeated our understanding of society, hierarchy and culture. 

Oxytocin, in the manner in which it induces envy, is the chemical behind ethnocentrism. Everything boils down to this chemical in our little tiny brains. Every war, every dispute, every person in power. The concept of power itself stems from the existence of hierarchies. In the same manner that we know oxytocin is the chemical that induces feelings of ethnocentrism, cultural sociology and cultural anthropology have tension with the idea that culture is simultaneously universal and particular. You would think it would have to be one or the other. Turns out, it’s not. The idea of cultural universals runs directly contrary to cultural relativism that was developed in response to Western ethnocentrism. Western ethnocentrism is the father to the rise in ethnocentric groups in America today. This ethnocentrism was on more of a global scale though, seeing how America felt entitled to the power we hold today after multiple victories in war. Victories in war dictated to the global hierarchy of power. But these countries, the ones that rank high on the global hierarchy, also happen to rank high in countries that have individualistic cultures. An individualistic culture is one in which the society places a desire for power, leadership, and personal success above all other things, rather than self-sacrifice for communal gain. In detailing the ways in which why America evolved to be so individualistic, there’s only one reason. 

The Cold War: Communism vs. Capitalism. When the USSR crumbled in 1991, Americans rejoiced and spread capitalism across the world. For 29 years, the US has been running capitalistic victory laps across the planet. The US economy is the basis for the world economy, therefore making us the ultimate world superpower, and that gave Americans a sense of pride for their country incomparable to any other. While human nature has always grappled with tensions between self interest and communal interest, our societies have leaned dramatically one way or the other. America evolved to lean heavily toward self-interest. 

The United States was built on the idea of the individual, the myth of what it means to be self-made, the myth of equal opportunities. As we know that equality doesn’t exist in this country, how could equal opportunity? The issue is that capitalism is not evil at it’s pure, it’s the exploitation and the corruptive nature of power that made us evil. We see nothing but self-interest and narcissism, elevated due to the pandemic we’re facing. There is no compassion in the American people. We’re stuck up and in love with ourselves. We’re shallow and indifferent. We lack empathy to misfortune and inequality. In a world where you must be in love with yourself to compete with others, everyone begins to lose sight of what actually matters. 

How Does Racism Even Happen?  

Back to America’s Racial Hierarchy. If we look at the American obsession with power, which stems from our understanding of hierarchy, which comes from Oxytocin, we see the psychological connection. Oxytocin is the chemical behind beliefs of ethnocentrism, or the idea that one’s ethnic group is more ‘pure’ than another. Oxytocin is not the chemical behind racism. There is no chemical behind racism. Unlike society, hierarchy and culture, racism was a learned behaviour. It’s thought that our ancestors developed ethnocentrism as a means to enhance group cohesion, but as hierarchies began to lean more toward colour and less toward ethnicity, racism as we know it began to exist. The American racial hierarchy is odd, because the placement of identity groups on it is arguable. Here’s how I think of it: White people are always on the top. They do not share the top of hierarchy with any other racial group, although they are minorities in 109 counties. 109 counties is not a lot, out of 3,141 but I digress. Racism, as in the kind of violent racism that white people in America commit against  other racial groups, is more of a psychological defense mechanism. Racism, unlike ethnocentrism, has no genetic or evolutionary basis but is a psychological trait associated with insecurity and anxiety. White people are racist because they understand that their throne is going to be toppled, at one point or another. They grasp for more power, because they’re actively aware they're losing a grip on power. There’s some necessary things to know about racism though, and that most preconceptions about racist Americans are inherently wrong. There are multiple stages of what you could consider the dive into racism — 

1. If a person feels like they lack an identity, they will affiliate with a group that will give them a sense of identity or belonging. Camaraderie, in any sense, gives people identity. There isn’t anything wrong with this, being a part of a group does not make a person racist. I feel like I need to clarify that. Most people like being a part of something that is larger than themselves so that they feel like they have a purpose, and they enjoy sharing a common goal. 
2. This becomes an issue when you start believing that your group is better than others. In terms of race, this applies to any race (reverse racism does not exist because systemically white people can never suffer from racism, but they can experience personal prejudice). In order to strengthen this sense of identity, after believing they are superior to other groups, hostile feelings towards others may develop. 
3. Here’s where things start to get bad: you lose empathy for anyone who isn’t a part of your group. You may act with love and kindness to the people with whom you are affiliated with, but anybody else can go to hell. You become cruel and heartless — this step explains why people who were Nazis reported that Adolf Hitler was the kindest person they knew. 
4. Homogenisation of individuals belonging to other groups. People are no longer individuals. They are their identity and nothing else. You stop perceiving people based on their personalities or their behaviour, but by the group in which they belong. In terms of racism, this is it. This is the judgement of people based solely off the colour of their skin. 
5. This is the most destructive and extreme of racism — projecting psychological flaws and personal failings onto other groups as a way to avoid taking responsibility for your own issues. Individuals who have strong narcissistic traits often end up here, especially if they are also paranoid. 

Ethnocentrism is not as permeable in terms of psychology — it’s a social strengthening behaviour that occurs out of resemblance, and not fear.  Ethnocentrism isn’t prevalent  in America, simply because our hierarchy is based on race and not ethnicity. There are so many different kinds of people of colour. To a racist, we’re all the same. They have such a skewed outlook on the world, there is no changing their mind. You cannot change a white supremacist’s mind. Psychologically, it just isn’t gonna happen. In the grand scheme of things, there’s a distinct racial hierarchy in America. White People, People Of Colour, and then Black Indigenous People Of Colour & Jews. It’s impossible to argue that black people are anywhere else on this hierarchy. The middle is also disputable because most other people of colour subject to a different kind of less permeable racism than black people. Now, this is not to say that other people of colour don’t face racism. They do, we know they do. But the racism that black people face in America is unique. 

The collective psychological trauma that black people have because of this racism is also a unique phenomena. One of the most common issues black people face is a subconscious fear of the police. It’s very privileged to say, “You have nothing to be scared of if you’ve done nothing wrong,” because the psychological trauma is based off of black people having done nothing wrong and still dying at the hands of the police. The way policing has evolved in America directly reinforces the systemic racial hierarchy developed when this country was born. According to Mental Health America, race based traumatic stress (RBTS) is the mental and emotional injury that comes from encounters with racial bias, ethnic discrimination, racism and hate crimes. In the US, BIPOC are statistically the most likely to suffer from racial trauma, because they live under a system that is ruled by white supremacy. In some individuals, these prolonged experiences with racism can lead to symptoms of PTSD, some which may include depression, anger, recurring thoughts, physical reactions, hypervigilance, low self esteem, and mental distractions from the trauma. While RBTS is not considered a mental disorder like PTSD, RBTS can become PTSD in BIPOC. To understand the differences between individual racism and systemic racism is to understand how the white supremacist hierarchy enables systemic racism to occur.

I include Jews in the lowest level of the hierarchy, despite many of them appearing as white-passing, because black people & Jewish people are statistically the victims of the same amount of race based hate. While it’s a different brand of inequality (antisemitism ≠ racism), it is systemic inequality nonetheless. Jewish people also have larges amounts of generational trauma, and race based traumatic stress symptoms. Both races have been persecuted for a long while, and they have too many shared experiences in their diaspora, albeit Jewish people having a higher amount of general wealth. Jewish wealth is also the result of antisemitism within the system, as Jewish people were concentrated into very few careers due to a preconceived notion that Jewish people were untrustworthy. Jewish people managed to become successful in these careers, and then were subject to a societal understanding that they had gotten their success unfairly because there were such high concentrations of Jewish people in fields like law, banking and & medicine. 

The System

A lot of modern social movements involve toppling the system. American politics lean heavily right due to the Red Scare, and so most Americans have a preconceived negative notion of socialist policies in our government. The issue with this, personally, is that America already has very socialist policies that go against our very individualistic society. Public libraries, free public schools are welfare are all socialist in action. The notion that collectivism on a minor scale is bad simply because it resembles communism we so vehemently fought is an outdated ideal rooted in American narcissism. Here’s the thing: the top of the hierarchy is not going to want to dismantle a system that benefits them. They’re also the only people capable of reforming the system, to benefit everyone. From the perspective of someone at the top of a hierarchy, subordination of other people is the only way to solidify your own power, and power is the reason for all of this. A subconscious desire for power explains why the system was built in the manner it was, and how the system is not broken, but performing the way it was designed. The system subordinates. The police enforce this system. If we understand that the people who sit at the top of this hierarchy will never willingly dismantle it, we understand why the government can’t technically do anything about systemic racism. While it’s systemic, it’s heavily social.

This is a societal issue. When it comes to dismantling the governmental system in favor of one in which everyone is treated reduces the amount of power they hold. It’s kind of like economic inflation: If everyone has a million dollars, having a million dollars doesn’t matter. A million dollars will no longer be the metric for wealth. If everyone’s sitting on the top of a social hierarchy, the hierarchy ceases to exist and so does the dispersion of power. In an ideal world, this is called an equal & classless society. In our world, there is class even in a classless society. If we eradicate a hierarchy based on race, we’d just migrate to another hierarchy. One of wealth, one of faith, one of sexuality, any defining factor of one’s identity can be used to create a hierarchy — The modern world just happened to use race. We start to comprehend the phrase ‘All Cops Are Bastards’.  It’s not the cop themselves that is the bastard, but the fact that they opted to defend a system rooted in white supremacy. That is the bastardisation. It’s also a fact that the police aren’t good forms of communal safety, and they do more harm to a community than they do good. The over policing of communities of colour has everything to do with a white supremacist system that thrives off the subordination of others. Black people are 12% of the population and yet, they make up 33% of the total prison population. This data does not show that black people are more likely to commit crimes, as one might think when given this statistic, but that the overrepresentation reflects a racist attitude within the police force that translates into racist arrests and racist sentencing practices. But that’s just in terms of the prison system. 

What about police brutality? The psychological reason why most people become cops is for a sense of belonging (the same sense of belonging we see in the first step), but it also has a lot to do with the amount of power with a little bit of sacrifice. There are a number of people who enter the police force with the intention of being kind and good people, contributing to their community and wanting to do good. To people who argue that All Cops Are Bastards, this intention means nothing when their actions reinforce this racial hierarchy. To be a good cop, you must find a way to contribute to your community without giving white supremacy more strength. In hindsight, don’t these racial uprisings begin to make sense? The Black Lives Matter riots, the calls to defund the police, the push for more equal policy in government. The goal of these people is to topple this racial hierarchy, but one may call the work futile when the people at the top refuse to give up their power. In their eyes, this society cannot function without the superiors and the subordinated — The unequal distribution of societal power based on race. 

It’s Called Political Theory For A Reason 

I have a lot of issues with political theory. Having done all of this research and come to a strict understanding that humanity cannot exist on this planet without society, culture or hierarchy, it seems odd to recommend a system of governance that assures equality. Assured equality is an oxymoron. The government cannot control society unless it is totalitarian. It’s safe to say that having a totalitarian government is bad. Social safety should not be sacrificed in the name of pseudo-equality. Political theory is beautiful when it comes to becoming more aware of the world and the many ways it could work, but I am a firm believer that not every way will work. As a person of colour, I would love to eradicate the American racial hierarchy. The issue is that we will never eradicate hierarchy as a whole. We don’t know the consequences of a truly equal society. Some argue that we don’t want equality, we want equity — a fancy way to say the government should give reparations to those at the lower levels of the hierarchy. 

I have come to the stark realisation doing this work that leftist political theory has no weight in the modern world. In moderation, these policies work. There is a level of irony within American politics, in which the larger (older) populous is afraid of the repercussions of socialism simply because they inhaled anti-communist propaganda during the cold war, and even still. The disdain for communism & socialism in America is directly related to making sure nothing threatens the hierarchy of race in this country. Of course an equal society sounds ideal to those being subordinated, but it sounds like a loss of power that the powerful could not stand. The right-leaning political arena in which the United States dabbles in originated from the knowledge that any left-leaning mass ideology would dismantle the hierarchy in which our power lies in. No matter which way it tries to be spun, America relies on this hierarchy to exist. Without slavery, the United States would not be the leading economic power. When people say that this country was built on the backs of black people, they are not exaggerating. And so we cannot dismantle the hierarchy, no matter how badly we want to — dismantling our hierarchy will be the death of America. The death of America is the death of the world. 

I mean that in a literal sense, as much as a metaphorical one. This hierarchy is what enables American capitalism to thrive. Our economy was built on the exploitation and segregation of people of colour. The legacy of slavery, the Jim Crow era, and even the New Deal are still the largest contributors to racial socioeconomic inequality today. We still see the undervaluing of workers of colour, translating into a belief in young children of colour that they aren’t worth anything. In the black diaspora, it’s a common understanding that this country does not care about us. We don’t need to be anything more than what we have to be. This is a hierarchy in which it is impossible to climb the ranks, and when a white person insinuates that being successful is the key to avoiding racism, they’re being racist in essence. The system was designed to subordinate black people. We have to work twice as hard to get half as far. By undervaluing our work, you exploit us, and make yourselves more money with no intention of distributing it. There is a reason why the wealth gap between white people and black people is so horrifyingly large. Eradicating our hierarchy stops the people at the top from exploiting the people at the bottom, and therefore our idea of capitalism would cease to exist. America is not America without this inequality. Capitalism is inequality.

So, What Now? 

It’s election day. We’re eleven months into a pandemic. We’re six months into this national unrest. I don’t know what’s next. Some people think the country is fine. Some think we need to fix certain aspects of it. Some people think it needs to be torn down and built again. Voting won’t fix this. I don’t know if this can get fixed. When the foundation of the world is built on inequality, do you sacrifice everything for your own moral superiority? Is there not a larger issue? Fixing the government won’t change the society in which we live. There’s so many colliding perspectives, so many voices, every single one of them gets drowned out. Who should we be listening to? It’s obvious politicians have been corrupted by the power we put in their hands, so what is the point in pushing for them to do us good. I think we have to do the good on our own. We can’t change the system using the system. We can’t demolish the hierarchy if we’re on the bottom of it. The age of revolutions is over. I’ve explored why the United States has evolved in the way it did, but does that even matter? The matter of the fact is, unless you’re at the top of the hierarchy, this sucks. Acknowledging how bad this system is but choosing to not give even the tiniest of energy into it’s reformation makes you no better than the people who built the system.

I think Americans are good people, at the core. We are benevolent and powerful beings, controlled by a country that doesn’t care about us. The American people are capable of so much more than we know. Despite only knowing individualism, or the hierarchy we’ve created, people adore us more than people hate us. To make ourselves better, all we need is empathy. There’s a reason our unrest coincides with our mishandling of the pandemic — when given the time to become aware of the world, all of a sudden your populous is enraged. It’s easy to control a distracted country. Pay attention. Have some empathy. It will change the world. All you need to have is an open heart, or at least an open mind. In the end, it isn’t about race — it’s about being proud to be from a country that cares about you. The most embarrassing thing about being American is knowing the people in power have never, and will never, care for those lower in rank. 

It’s November 3rd. What do the next four years have in store for us? Hopefully, something better. 

Americans deserve better. 

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