Caste of Characters

In America capitalism trumps all, and why wouldn’t it? This is a way to ensure that everyone has a chance at the American dream. If you work hard, you will succeed…is something that somebody given every advantage in life would say. The truth is, America is set up in a class system with ceilings that, while breakable, in rare cases, are still by no means fragile. Let’s face it- you’re more likely to succeed if you come from money. We have a class system that’s as well defined as the Indian caste system. To give a brief background of the caste system, Hindu people were and are divided up into five separate castes, which are (in order of prestige): Brahmins, Kshatriyas, Vaishyas, Shudras, and Untouchables. You can only move up castes once you are reincarnated, but you can move down by choosing to marry below you.  We have our own versions of Brahmins, Shudras, and Untouchables, right here in the U.S.

Brahmins are at the top of the pyramid when it comes to both caste and class (the two pretty much go hand in hand). In India the Brahmins are the high priests, the respected, the elite. The Brahmins are those who define the system, and have built it to work for them. Do you see where I’m going with this yet? America’s upper class, or one percent, has all of the same societal structures set for them as do the Brahmins. Also being respected and elite, the wall street types are practically immune to any sort of harm. Even in the wake of the “Occupy Wall Street” movement, our American Brahmins remained untouched (in the good way). The real kicker? Within a caste, a person’s level is based on their degree of caucasian-ness. Although this rule isn’t written in stone anywhere for the United States, it still persists. In this year’s Forbes 400, there was only one black person on the whole list. Race and socioeconomic status are both factors when assigning either a caste or class to somebody. The current one percent of the United States almost perfectly mirrors, in the societal aspect of things, the Brahmins in India.

Shudras are the servants to all those in castes above them (Brahmins, Ksatriyas (warriors), and Vaishyas (merchants/landowners). When I think of the analogous group to the Shudras, my mind keeps on coming back to working class immigrants. I feel like this subgroup of people is given a disproportionate amount of servant-like tasks. Whether it be cleaning people’s gross feet at a nail salon, cleaning up after people, or serving food from behind a glass counter, they are forced to take up the tasks that nobody else would do for the sake of survival. I don’t mean to say that only working class immigrants are working these jobs, but those who don’t fit into that subgroup make up the exception, not the rule. Some may say that the reason they work these jobs is because they are willing to do more for less money. While that may be true in some cases, that is a ridiculous generalization. Too often is it that an undocumented immigrant is actually paid less than the minimum wage and can’t do anything about it because they are under threat of being reported to immigration. They are literal slaves to capitalism, ergo, much like the Shudras are servants to those above them.

There are of course, those below the Shudras as well. The Untouchables are a group in the caste system that are considered the low-lifes, so low, in fact, that they are damned to untouchable-ness for all of eternity, unable to advance up the system for every reincarnation like those above them. When I think of a group confined to such an undesirable status, I think of our homeless population. Growing up in the city, I was always told to not give money to the homeless. It for some reason is universally assumed that homeless people are homeless because of drug abuse, as if that’s the only way to have a bad financial situation. Giving money to a homeless person is practically paying for their bad habits, apparently. Not only was I told to not give money to them, but not to speak to them, look at them, or pretty much acknowledge their existence in any way, shape, or form. Make them invisible. They have no monetary worth anyways, aren’t that and invisibility analogous? They were and still widely are considered “untouchable”.

In the land of empty promises of better tomorrows backed up by the myth of meritocracy lies a truth that is left seemingly unacknowledged. It should be embarrassing how strikingly similar our economic system is to a caste system, considering our founding principals. Nevertheless, our flawed economic system soldiers on, with the “Brahmins” on Wall Street, the Shudras working in a chain hotel (or something like that) under threat of deportation, and the untouchables on our park benches. In a way, the caste system is even kinder, because there is at least a promise of getting bumped up for everyone other than the untouchables. In the United States, while the promise of Brahminhood exists, it is an unrealistic promise the majority of the time.

Why Word Choice Matters

America has a funny way of ignoring its history. There are people on one end of the spectrum trying to justify it, while the other, more populous end of the Spectrum simply tries to help by ignoring the scars that the people of the past have left on our soil. This end of the spectrum is full of people who say things along the lines of anything from “Oh, I don’t see race” to “We’re now living in a post-racial society, look at our president!” This type of thinking attempts to correct the past by obscuring its legacy, even though it clearly still exists. A contentious subject along these lines  is the idea of “black culture” and appropriation of it. The idea of “black culture” as it has been taught to us by the media, causes more harm than good by encouraging circular thinking as well as encouraging the notion that “white is right”.

The term “appropriation of black culture”, in this instance, strikes me as a hegemonically imposed way of saying “acting black” without any backlash. So when I hear that a popular singer, for instance, “appropriated black culture”, I hear it as “acted too black for a white person”. However, on the flip side, most people consider it wrong to say something like “He was black, but he didn’t act/speak/dress etc like a black person.” I can’t help but find the irony in these types of situations. In the former, you are assigning a culture to a group whose culture has been taken away from most of them. By that I mean that many black people are in the states as a result of slavery, and therefore can’t trace what the culture of where they came from was/is. Ergo one would have to base their perception of “black culture” purely on internalized notions and stereotypes. In the latter, you are saying that one group of people can not be reduced to certain universally definitive actions. The people who always try to be politically correct in this vein of the race issue wind up not practicing what they preach, since by doing one thing, it automatically makes the other action lose its credibility.

The type of thinking mentioned above not only is circular, but goes against its original intention by furthering the notion that “white is right”. For example, when a white artist releases a music video clad in baggy sweatpants and snapbacks, they are immediately attacked for “appropriation of ‘black culture’”. Which essentially means they acted like a black person. In some cases, a lot of cases actually, black people are praised by the media, which is ran mostly by white men for not acting the way we have perceived black culture as. This praise is a more implicit way of saying “You didn’t act like your stereotype, gold star!” While I consider it wrong to utilize any stereotype for personal gain, whether it be acting a certain way in a music video, or telling certain jokes, I see a big problem with taking that stereotype and defining it as a part of a group of people’s culture. This just provides more grounds for the “white is right” assumption because the majority of stereotypes for black people are negative (I almost used “happen to be” instead of “are”, but it’s not a force of nature, this is a result of centuries of institutionalized racism…anyways, I digress). If we are taking these stereotypes and assigning them the misnomer of “black culture” it just makes it easier to put black people in a negative box, since accodring to the dictionary culture literally means “the beliefs, customs, arts, etc., of a particular society, group, place, or time.”

I don’t mean to take away the struggle of racism from black people, or discourage people from talking about it, since that’s the first step to making a difference. I suppose my main critique is the language of the issue, since in my eyes the word choice hinders progression significantly. It does this by encouraging the compartmentalization of a group of people (“black culture”) but not to the point that we can explicitly acknowledge it to make a change. That is to say, you can accuse white people of acting black fairly explicitly, the only cloudiness around it being that you can say they “appropriated black culture”, and since you used a fancy, politically correct word, it’s okay, furthering my point from earlier that political correctness is a hegemonic tool. However, if you equally as explicitly accuse a black person of acting white, by means of negating their blackness, a less politically correct way of achieving th same goals, it’s met with much harsher criticism. Basically, what I’m trying to say is until we can change the language to speak about this more explicitly, stereotypes will live on as strongly as ever.

Is it bad that I wore a dress today?

Until recently, I had always considered myself fairly well-versed in the realm of gender. It seemed fairly straightforward: Different genders get treated differently, and that’s bad. It’s always been perplexing to me that feminism was so widely discussed as an issue rather than an obvious statement of facts. “Women should get paid more for the same work” seemed like a given,other than a few sexist bigots trying to justify why that shouldn’t be so. What I have since learned is that it’s so much deeper than what we can see with our naked eye. I had never thought about why gender needed to be as binary as sex, and to be honest I still have trouble wrapping my head around the two’s being separate, since I have been trained to think of them as the same thing. I have been conditioned to think, dress and act (whatever that means), as a girl (a complete construct) and then had that ownership handed back to me by being conditioned so early that it stopped being a conscience choice, but rather, just what I’m comfortable in.

This thought makes me want to throw away my dresses, chop of my hair (to name a few “girly” things that I like to have) and say “Take that media, who’s conforming to your norms now? Haha!”But by then the damage would have already been done anyways, and even if I did that, I know I wouldn’t be comfortable in my own skin. I would like you to take the word damage with a grain of salt, as I don’t consider myself damaged for wanting to be a little “feminine”. Although, there are people, most people actually, every day whom are in environments where sex must equal gender, and are genuinely uncomfortable conforming to the norms that have been set for them. That’s why I don’t think the media is the be all and end all of brainwashing. Because there are people who were exposed to the same sort of attempted indoctrination as I was, and are still have genders that don’t match up with their biological sex, then it is possible to transcend from the ideas that the media puts forward. I don’t mean to say that people who are trans, non binary, gender fluid, etc are some sort of omnipotent beings. I just mean to say that there are certain things that some people’s body’s do that are more powerful than the media, which in turn eliminates the notion that who we are is solely what we consume. However if you don’t have a strong hormonal inclination towards being in a body that you aren’t in, becoming the product of what you consume is a much easier trap to fall into.

Although, it’s very hard to conform to just one standard consumable product. We as humans, although we are subliminally told to strive for it, cannot possibly achieve total androgyny. Men are told to be simultaniously: Strong, athletic, sensitive, funny, hard working and caring. Women are told to be simultaniosly: Strong, but not too strong that it’s intimidating, and still be cute, caring, but not too overly sensitive because it’s annoying enough that they get their periods, funny, but not funny enough that people think you’re smart, smart; but agin, not so much that it’s intimidating-nobody likes a know it all, and hard working, but never hard working enough to be in charge of men, because we all know that if she tries to do her job she’ll be naggy. It’s impossible to do so many of these at once, and I do believe it’s harder for women to be all of these things because they all come with conditions. Very often women will have the same idea of their perfect man. Not to say that men are all the same, but that the standards set for all of them them are much easier to attain than those set for women, at least in my experience. The perfect woman, on the other hand, can never be described because so many contradictions exist in her expectations.

So now what can we do? In a world where sex equals gender, and it’s impossible to escape this notion. I myself have been told that sex isn’t gender a dozen times, and don’t fully grasp what that means. As David Foster Wallace might have pointed out, I’m too deep in the water and now I can’t tell what it is. And if we continue to live in this binary world, despite all being multifaceted beings ourselves, we have to confirm to the standards on one end or the other. I don’t have a solution for this problem, as the changing of the world is not analogus to the flipping of a switch. We need a domino, something to cause a chain reaction to reform how we, as a whole, perceive gender. And this domino? Based on the increase of posts on social media itself about gender’s being a spectrum and other gender related issues, I’d say it’s already fallen. Now all we have to do, is help continue to facilitate the tiles.

Act Your Age

Ever since we are old enough to comprehend our surroundings, even subconsciously, we are relayed a message time and time again, that your age is definitive of you as a person. Of course, there are certain things that we lack the cognitive skills for ( ie to say that all newborns can’t talk isn’t really a stereotype as much as a reality). But we are consistently told to act our age, ask a grown up, “you’re a kid, go play outside”, “you are being such a teenager right now”, and other sentiments with the same implication:our ages define who we are. As teenagers, sentiments with the same underlying message are pounded into our heads with much more vigor and repetition.  Age allows for an excuse not just for us to not reach our full potential, but gives reasoning for others to confine us in that box as well.

If a teenager is rude or angsty, often they will be accused of “acting like a teenager.” Often times the assumption made about this generation of teenagers is that we are lazy, spoiled, and dangerous. While the question of mediation and society is analogous to the chicken and the egg, it wasn’t until very recently that teenagers below eighteen stopped fighting in the military. Which is to say that they had no footsteps to follow in for their behavior patterns other than the media. The media fed them behavior patterns to follow, the teenage population obliged, and the media capitalized on their behavior and continued to exaggerate it. This cycle is still continuing today, with even more vessels of media to choose from.

Social media provides us, teenagers especially, with a seemingly rational means by which to justify their actions. Social media eliminates the middleman from the equation. People are much more inclined to do something if peers are doing it rather than an actress on a screen. And when the picture of the sophomore girls posing with enough liquor to kill a two hundred pound man, or a long rant about their “annoying parents” each get seventy-eight “likes”, that sends the message to other teenagers loud and clear. Soon enough, a sufficient amount of teenagers are acting out and posting with red solo cups for it to become the stereotype that defines your age. These stereotypes make it really easy for some teenagers to fall into a pattern, blaming their distasteful acts, whatever these may be, on their age rather than their character. This is not to say that all teenagers are like this, but that the fact that we as a society have evolved to believe that teenagers are such a different group from adults that they must be isolated to these stereotypes only encourages it.

Regularly, conversations can be heard amongst parents about how they aren’t ready for their children to be teenagers, and likewise when other parents say they have teenagers, parents express their pity more than anything else. Granted, some could come from the sadness of having to watch your child slowly pull from the nest, but the majority of the time the conversation is more geared towards how hard teenagers are to deal with. I don’t mean to place the blame of stereotype perpetuation on just parents, other teenagers work to put each other in this framework just as much. As a teenager surrounded by these stereotypes, it can be really easy to feel as though you’re superior to other teenagers when you don’t acquiesce to these assumptions. For example, the assumption is that teenagers are lazy, so when you pull an all nighter studying for a test, you feel special because according to the media, that’s not something teenagers are expected to do on their own accord.

So I’ve presented you, dear reader, with a problem in the form of a question. The problem is (if we so please) how do we, the elusive teenagers ourselves, escape this mindset? The simple answer would be to just unplug. The unmediated mind is the untarnished mind, right? Wrong. As convenient as it may be, it’s not as simple as that. No matter how much we try and restrain now, a lot of what we know about human behavior we picked up from the media and now can’t just let go of it. The bits and pieces that we pick up define who we are. Also, not experiencing media directly in no way means one is immune to it’s indirect influence, whether by parents, peers, teachers, et cetera, you will be mediated one way or another. But that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Some media is necessary for connecting. The kids who grew up completely unmediated (by which I mean no or extremely limited access through anyone or thing) have a reputation for having a harder time connecting. My only beef with being mediated is when the negative light it sometimes sheds on me affects me personally. An example of this would be if I am trying to gain the trust of somebody who has been mediated to believe that he should distrust teenagers. While I am aware that I act in a way that is reflective of the media, and vice versa, I don’t really mind, nor do I feel any inclination to pull away or feel cheated that it has shaped who I am.