March 26
GUEST: Phillip Martin, Senior Investigative Reporter for WGBH News, talks about his new series, Caste In America, that delves into the prejudice and discrimination that continues to the present day in India as well as the United States and Canada.Phillip Martin
Phillip is interested in caste, and he decided to do a report on caste prejudice in India and two Western countries, the United States and Canada. In the process, he catalogued how society's racist views often dictate how badly an underclass is treated. To make matters worse, some politicians see prejudice as a way to achieve power, essentially by inciting hate and false narratives of racial superiority.
Our conversation brought us to a discussion of other caste systems that operate in much the same way. Blacks in America are a caste, and the discrimination and violence directed towards them has gone on for centuries. Palestinians are the underclass in the Holy Land. And where caste in India is a recognized phenomenon, caste in the US and Palestine is always explained away or even hidden from view. Perhaps the empire does not want its citizens to understand the racism that is always at the root level of coups, invasions and occupations.
Phillip Martin is an African American reporter. I suspect that he understood the caste system very well, even before his first trip to India. Only whites in the US claim ignorance.
