robert gordh
29 min readAug 2, 2021

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More Deadly than Caste:

3 Tiers of Racist Ideology

Bob Gordh

I’ve been reading and pondering two recent books about race: Caste, by Isabel Wilkerson, and Afropessimism, by Frank B. Wilderson III. Though their authors’ last names differ by just a single letter, the two books could hardly be more different. Together, they’ve prompted me to do some theorizing on the nature of racist ideology, which, since I’m focusing on racism in the United States, I consider synonymous with White Supremacist ideology. Moreover, I will focus primarily on ideology that rationalizes anti-black racism, while keeping in mind that other kinds of racism also exist and cause great harm. I will propose a 3-tiered theory of racist ideology, which builds on, yet challenges, both Wilkerson’s and Wilderson’s perspectives.

A major purpose served by ideology is to legitimize power relations within a political system. Thus, racist ideology serves, at least in part, to rationalize and legitimize domination of non-whites by whites. I will call the building blocks of this ideology claims — false claims. Let me explain why I am using the word “claims” rather than the word “beliefs.” There is something unsettling about the notion of beliefs that serve a purpose. It is useful, I think, to distinguish between reason-based beliefs and motive-based beliefs. A reason- based belief has no purpose. I believe someone is at the door because our family dog Thor is barking. I have no motive or purpose for believing someone is at the door. I just believe it because it seems true, for whatever reason. A motive-based belief is different. I believe something because it serves my perceived self-interest to do so. I might believe, for instance, that I am a generous person (even though I’m not) in order to protect my self-esteem. But in this kind of case the question arises, “Do I really believe what I believe?” It seems that I am trying to force myself to believe something, which can never fully work, because the forcer is the same person as the forced. The deceiver is the same as the deceived. There is bad faith here. I am lying to myself. I suggest that if reason-based beliefs are beliefs in a strong sense, motive-based beliefs are beliefs only in a weak sense.

Let us return to racist ideology. Is it composed of racist beliefs? And if so, are these beliefs weakly are strongly held? I believe that some people do honestly (and of course mistakenly) hold some racist beliefs based on the evidence they have at their disposal. They believe in a strong sense. On the other hand, since racist ideology serves the purpose of rationalizing racist ideology, this ideological system as a whole must tilt toward being a collection of falsehoods that are not really beliefs at all except in a weak sense. Another way to say this is to say that racist ideology consists more of lies people tell both themselves and others than of honest mistakes.* It is worth noting that the fact that a belief is believed weakly does not imply that it will be defended weakly. In fact, I suspect that the most fiercely defended beliefs are often those that are only weakly believed but very strongly motivated. In what follows, I will talk about people subscribing to racist claims, generally leaving open the question of whether they believe in these claims in a strong sense or only in a weak, motivated sense.

One further point needs to be made, however, in order to avoid a false dichotomy: Not all subscribers to racist beliefs actually believe them in either a strong or a weak sense. I am speaking of those whom Ibram X. Kendi calls “producers of racist ideas.” Some people simply and cynically make up racist claims and spread them as far and as wide as they can. A case in point involves the current right wing, racist attack on the newest boogey man: Critical Race Theory. The chief launcher of the attack, Christopher Rufo, seems to brim with pride, in recent tweets, over his ingenuity in inventing the “problem” of “Critical Race Theory,” pretty much out of whole cloth:

We have successfully frozen their brand — “critical race theory” — into the public conversation and are steadily driving up negative perceptions. We will eventually turn it toxic, as we put all of the various cultural insanities under that brand category.

The goal is to have the public read something crazy in the newspaper and immediately think “critical race theory.” We have decodified the term and will recodify it to annex the entire range of cultural constructions that are unpopular with Americans.

Racist ideology rationalizes racist policies and behaviors that implement the policies. What motivates the policies and behaviors? There are any number of answers: desires for wealth, for power, for status, for self-esteem, for protecting or bolstering one’s group identity, even for the sadistic pleasure of inflicting pain. Any of these can be the motives for subscribing to the racist claims that do the rationalizing. My concern here, though, is not mainly to investigate these motives. My chief aim is rather to examine the kinds of ideology that have been found necessary to rationalize often atrocious racist policies and behaviors. The ideology does not motivate the policies and behaviors, but it permits them and even valorizes them and hence makes them more likely to happen and to persist. It also prohibits opposition to the racist policies and behaviors. Thus, it strives to discredit anti-racist thinking. Ideology is influential. People live by ideology, and they sometimes die for it or because of it.

I propose that racist ideology has at least 3 significant tiers. I am open to the existence of others. I will call the three I have in mind disinformation, casteism, and nullification. In some ways these tiers reinforce each other and therefore work together. In some ways, however, they contradict each other. Let us begin.

Tier One: Disinformation

Tier one consists primarily of a vast array of false claims that have been promulgated and widely subscribed to for hundreds of years to the effect that the characteristics of White people and the characteristics of non-White people make the White “race” superior to the others. Perhaps the biggest false claim is that there is even any such thing as a racial group. I am assuming that we all agree that “race” itself, like the word “unicorn” refers to something that doesn’t exist (except as a social construct.) Since the superiority/inferiority thesis that is essential to this tier rests primarily on faulty empirical information, I will, for short, call this tier “disinformation.” The category of disinformation includes everything from garden variety stereotypical claims like “Black people are lazy” and “White people are highly intelligent” to elaborate scientific (or pseudoscientific) theories about the “innate” characteristics of hierarchically arranged “races.” Ibram X. Kendi’s book Stamped from the Beginning, provides an impressively informative chronological guide to the most influential of the racist claims that have disfigured American thinking about “race.”

One piece of disinformation that has been, and is still, particularly damaging to Black people is the myth that Black people, in contrast with White people, are especially prone to criminal activity. In The New Jim Crow, Michelle Alexander describes an experiment that illustrates how severely White people’s views tend (at least in 1995, and I highly suspect, still) to be distorted by their subscription to this myth:

A survey was conducted in 1995 asking the following question: “Would you close your eyes for a second, envision a drug user, and describe that person to me?” The startling results were published in The Journal of Alcohol and Drug Education. Ninety-five percent of respondents pictured a black drug user, while only 5 percent imagined other racial groups. These results contrast sharply with the reality of drug crime in America. African Americans constituted only 15 percent of current drug users in 1995, and they constitute roughly the same percentage today [2010]. Whites constituted the vast majority of drug users then (and now), but almost no one pictured a white person when asked to imagine what a drug user looks like. The same group of respondents also perceived the typical drug trafficker as black. (103)

Both Alexander (in The New Jim Crow) and Khalil Gibran Muhammad (in The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America) have written brilliantly about the criminalization of Black people in American thinking about race. I will not try to add to their insights on that hugely complicated and hugely important topic here. What I would like to do is to share a few thoughts, partly borrowed from these two scholars, on how greatly White Americans tend to underestimate White criminality.

By the 1890’s, Muhammad tells us, politicians and intellectuals, including social scientists, all over the country, North and South, were fearfully preoccupied with the so-called “Negro Problem.” This, of course, was only 25 years or so after alleged emancipation. The question of the day was, “Now that these Black people have been freed, what are we to do with them?” Central to this question, moreover, was another question: “What are we to do about the pronounced criminal tendencies of Black people?” It is impossible to overstate the bogus and hypocritical nature of this line of thinking. White people, during slavery, have been raping and torturing and hideously exploiting Black people for centuries, and the criminality of Black people is the issue of the day? Give us a break!

And then, of course, there are thousands of Black people secretly murdered during Reconstruction and beyond, and there are thousands murdered publicly in spectacle lynchings, and so on and so forth. Rather than multiply examples, let me just pose this overall question about American history: Have Black people been more sinned against, or more sinning?

Here are a few additional subtopics that I think we might ponder as we think about White criminality:

— The genocide of Native Peoples

— The incredible history of police illegality. I am thinking not only of the myriads of examples of police violence and brutality, especially toward Black people, but also of the long and complex history of police corruption.

— The history of white-collar financial crime, conducted almost entirely by white people, which has devastated thousands and thousands of lives.

— The history of decisions about war-making, made mainly by white politicians, including U.S. presidents, often rationalized by lies, that have caused the unnecessary deaths of millions of human beings, both American and non-American.

— Assassinations of foreign leaders. Support for right wing death squads in Latin America.

— The thousands of drug crimes White people have committed with impunity because, as Alexander points out, “when police go looking for drugs, they look “in the hood.”

— The untold number of additional crimes white people would have committed, had they lived under conditions Blacks have been forced to live under by various aspects of racism

(discrimination in jobs, education, and housing, to name a few).

Before moving on, I will pause to reply to the following possible counter-argument: “You make some good points about history, but let’s look at the present. Surely, you’ve got to admit that there is currently a real problem with violent crime in inner-city, predominantly Black neighborhoods?” I want to let Michelle Alexander be my guide in replying to this question:

Although African Americans do not engage in drug crime at significantly higher rates than whites, black men do have much higher rates of violent crime, and violent crime is concentrated in ghetto communities. Studies have shown that joblessness — not race or black culture — explains the high rates of violent crime in poor black communities. When researchers have controlled for joblessness, differences in violent crime rates between young black and white men disappear.

The crucial point here is that Black people, as Black people, have no special tendency toward violent crime. Unemployed people have that tendency (204). The words “Black” and “crime” need to be completely decoupled in the public mind. As Nathaniel Cantor declared back in 1930, “There is no more sense in speaking of the Negro criminal, than of referring to Presbyterian spaghetti” (Muhammad, 243).

Another kind of false claim also belongs to the disinformation tier. “The United States is a land of equal opportunity” is one such claim. Ostensibly racially neutral, this claim nevertheless has racist implications. Obviously, Black people are not faring as well economically or in a host of other ways as White people in this country. But if opportunity is equal, then there must be something wrong with Black people (innate qualities, cultural norms, or whatever) that explains their failure to thrive. (The claim, by the way, that our society affords equal opportunity is also part of the ideology of capitalism. The two ideologies overlap in any number of ways, as do capitalism and racism themselves.) “We now live in a post-racial society,” “Everyone stands equal before the law,” “Personal responsibility is the key to success,” “America is uniquely qualified to be the moral leader of the world,” and a host of other so-called patriotic statements, also qualify as racist disinformation because they simply erase the experiences of non-white people in this country and because they enable subscription to explicitly racist claims.

What about plain old ignorance? Technically, ignorance is not disinformation. Nevertheless, ignorance works hand in hand with disinformation because it provides no grounds for resisting disinformation. Suppose that I am told that all Americans have equal opportunities to succeed, I see that Black people are struggling, and I have no knowledge whatsoever of the historical reasons that explain why Black people are struggling. Under these circumstances I am easy prey for racist disinformation about the characteristics of Black people. This is why people who want American children to grow up as racists want both to indoctrinate them with false claims and to shield them from true claims about the history of race in this country.

Tier Two: Casteism

The second tier, casteism, is the subject of a best-selling book, Caste, by Isabel Wilkerson. Wilkerson differentiates between racism and casteism:

Any action or institution that mocks, harms, assumes or attaches inferiority or stereotype on the basis of the social construct of race can be considered racism. Any action or structure that seeks to limit, hold back, or put someone in a defined ranking, seeks to keep someone in their place by elevating or denigrating that person on the basis of their perceived category, can be seen as casteism. (Wilkerson 70).

I, on the other hand, see casteism — specifically racial casteism, for there are other kinds of casteism as well — not as something distinct from racism, but as a component of racism. Roughly, at least, what she is calling racism is what I am calling tier one racist ideology, and what she is calling casteism is what I am calling tier two racist ideology. It seems odd to me not to consider racial casteism part of racism. Still, I think my disagreement with Wilkerson at this point is primarily a matter of semantics. (I also have a more substantive difference with her, but I will come to that later.) So what is the difference between what I am calling the two tiers? Tier one is about characteristics; tier two is about place. Disinformation makes false claims that attribute better and worse characteristics to people of different racialized groups. Caste assigns to people of different racialized groups higher and lower positions in a hierarchy.

I agree with Wilkerson that because tiers one and two, or what she is calling caste and race “are so interwoven in America, it can be hard to separate the two.” (70) Indeed, it might seem that, at least from a racist point of view, the two should perfectly complement each other, that they should fit together like hand and glove. I have devised the following little skit, however, not only to illustrate the difference between the two but also to show that they don’t fully mesh with each other, that instead they exist on disparate epistemological and ontological planes. (The skit has no pretensions of being realistic but is rather trying its best to make certain conceptual points.)

Setting: A small Southern town around mid-20th Century

Characters: Newcomer and Oldtimer, both White men

Newcomer: Hey, I’m new in town and I’m looking for a church to attend this Sunday. Do you have any suggestions?

Oldtimer: Why, yes, I attend the First Baptist Church down at the corner of Main Street and Robert E. Lee Avenue. Why don’t you come join us? We’d love to have you!

N: Well, thank you. I might just do that. I did want to mention that I have two friends that I’d like to invite to join me.

O: Oh sure, the more the merrier!

N. Excellent. They are great guys. They are both professors over at Carver College.

O: Oh, uh, um . . . . Are they Black or White?

N: Oh, they are both Black. That’s not a problem, is it?

O: Well, uh, yes, I’m afraid that is a bit of a problem. You see, we are a White church. We don’t actually allow Black people to attend our services.

N: Oh, really? Can you tell me why that is?

O: Well, we believe that the two races should be kept separate to the degree possible not only in church but in every other area of life.

N. Ok, but why?

O: Because the White and Black races have entirely different characteristics, with the characteristics of White people being superior in every way. To name just one example, white people are much more intelligent.

N: Ah, so it’s a matter of having standards?

O: Exactly.

N. Well, I’d like to have a talk with you some time about the overall characteristics of Black people and White people, but in this case that shouldn’t matter: My two friends are definitely extremely intelligent, and they have the advanced degrees from prestigious universities to prove it. I wonder though. I assume I will need to take some sort of intelligence test to show that I am qualified. Is that something I could stop by the church and take care of during the week?

0: Of course not! That’s the whole point of having a White church! If you are White, you don’t need to qualify! In fact, that’s the whole point of having Whiteness in general. It’s like being in a club, a club that grants its members many privileges. And the beauty of it is that as long as you are White, you don’t have to qualify for membership, no matter what your characteristics are. And of course, Black people, no matter what their characteristics — no matter how intelligent they are or whatever — can’t qualify and therefore are not entitled to the privileges. That’s the way God made the world.

___________________________________________________________________

Notice that the old-timer at first bases his case for segregation on tier one arguments — arguments grounded in the alleged characteristics of the Black and White “races.” This argument breaks down, however, because his racist generalizations simply do not accord with empirical reality. At that point, he departs from the plane of empirical reality and evokes a supernatural origin of, and approval for, a kind of immaterial system of assigned places within a hierarchy. His thinking now belongs to the second tier of racist ideology, the tier of racial caste. Does the old-timer have a reason-based belief in caste? Probably not, but he has exceedingly strong motives for believing. He subscribes to casteist claims, therefore, and he lives according to them.

Unfortunately, casteism has more than just racist White Protestant theology to bolster its false claims. One of the most influential ideas in the last two thousand plus years of philosophic and scientific thinking is the idea of the Great Chain of Being. According to this idea, the origins of which pre-date Aristotle, the world essentially is, and is meant to be, a gigantic caste system. Everything that is partakes of hierarchy. The heavenly bodies are arranged hierarchically. The motion of matter on earth can be explained hierarchically: The element earth naturally moves towards its appointed place near the center of the earth (which is also the center of the universe); water seeks its appointed level; air its level, etc. Everything has its appointed place. The Great Chain idea is not only descriptive but prescriptive: Within human society, for instance, the king should be on top, the peasants at the bottom, and various intermediate groups in between. In this view of the world, the only alternative to hierarchy is chaos. Shakespeare’s Macbeth is a powerful expression of the fear of chaos that pervades wholesale investment in hierarchy.

Now of course the intellectual landscape has changed a great deal since Shakespeare’s time. With mechanistic Newtonian physics, hierarchy no longer explained matter in motion. With the kind of anti-monarchical thinking involved in the American and French Revolutions, and with the anti-capitalist thinking pioneered by Karl Marx and others, hierarchy no longer held absolute sway in the realm of political thinking, though it was far from abolished. Darwinian biology ruined the notion of fixed hierarchical levels in the realm of living things, (though it left open the idea of evolution toward higher levels). And yet, ideas as big as the Great Chain of Being idea don’t simply go away quickly and easily, and rarely do they go away completely: They continue to exert an influence.

It is worth noting that the idea of the Great Chain of Being is not inherently racist. One could believe in the Chain while assigning all humans to the same level of the hierarchy of life. However, the Chain idea did encourage scientists and philosophers to look for hierarchy. And during an age in which Europeans needed hierarchical ideas to justify enslaving and in other ways exploiting non-Europeans, it comes as no surprise that they “found” what they were looking for. And so, as Ibram X. Kendi relates in Stamped from the Beginning,

Carl Linnaeus, the progenitor of Sweden’s Enlightenment . . . took the lead in classifying humanity into a racial hierarchy for the new intellectual and commercial age. In System Naturae, first published in 1735, Linnaeus placed humans at the pinnacle of the animal kingdom. He sliced the genus Homo into Homo sapiens (humans) and Homo troglodytes (ape) and so on, and further divided the single Homo Sapiens species into four varieties. At the pinnacle of the human kingdom reigned H.sapiens europaeus: very smart, inventive. Covered by tight clothing. Ruled by law.” Then came H. sapiens americanus (“Ruled by custom) and H. Sapiens asiaticus (“Ruled by opinion”). He relegated humanity’s nadir, H.Sapiens afer, to the bottom, calling this group “sluggish, lazy . . .[c]rafty, slow, careless. Covered by grease. Ruled by caprice,” . . . . (82)

Notice that Linnaeus’s descriptions rely on, and help to create, both the first and the second tiers of racist ideology. Unfortunately, both tiers are still alive and kicking.

Tier Three: Nullification

Racism must go! Casteism must go! People should not be confined to allegedly pre-ordained boxes. Both racism and casteism have been and are horrible features of American racist ideology. In my terms, both tier one and tier two of racist ideology have been and are horrible and must go! On all of this I am in complete agreement with Isabel Wilkerson. My view of the composition of racist ideology differs from hers, however, in one important way: I want to recognize a third tier of racist ideology that she does not identify. I should perhaps call this difference a point of non-agreement rather than disagreement. I like to think, in fact, that if Ms. Wilkerson and I had a chance to converse, she would actually find that she agreed with me. I am optimistic about this because I feel that her book Caste contains a great deal of evidence for the existence of this additional tier. I credit a speech and a book (Afropessimism) by Frank B.Wilkerson for changing only an extremely vague and dim awareness on my part of this third tier of racist thinking into a shocking recognition.

Remember that ideology has purpose. The main purpose of White Supremacist racist ideology is to rationalize and support racist policies and practices. I contend that tiers one and two of racist ideology are not themselves, even in combination, sufficient to this task. The “problem” is that they are simply not sufficiently evil to rationalize the most heinous and unspeakably cruel of racist policies and practices. Another tier, which harbors more vicious false claims even than the first two, has therefore been needed and has in fact been an essential part of racist thinking for centuries. I will call this tier “nullification.”

Let us go back to slavery. We know that apologists for slavery relied a great deal on slanderous disinformation about Blacks along with unrealistically positive disinformation about Whites. We know, too, that these apologists used Great Chain of Being thinking to place Blacks on a lower level on the human hierarchy than Whites. It is a commonplace, too, that the enslaved were regarded as mere tools or implements — sentient tools, speaking tools, but still tools.

What Frank Wilderson has helped me to realize is that for years I have been carelessly conflating these two views of “racial” difference. I believe that Isabel Wilkerson also conflates them. But the two views are NOT the same, and it is critical to make a sharp distinction between them. The first view is casteist. The second is worse than casteist. It belongs to a third tier of racist ideology, which I will call “nullification.”

So, what is the difference between tier two (casteism) and tier three (nullification? Let us start with a useful passage from Caste:

It was in 1913 that a prominent southern educator, Thomas Pearce Bailey, took it upon himself to assemble what he called the racial creed of the South. It amounted to the central tenets of the caste system. One of the tenets was “Let the lowest white man count for more than the highest negro.”(25)

Bailey’s tenet is indeed a clear expression of casteism as I understand it. Notice that in Bailey’s formulation, any Black person ”counts” less than any white person, but the Black person does still “count” to some degree. To put it in contemporary terms, White lives matter more than Black lives, but Black lives do matter to some extent. White lives occupy the highest level of the hierarchy of worth and Black lives the lowest, but Black lives are still in the hierarchy. But if Black people are nothing but tools or implements, then they do not belong to the hierarchy at all. And that is precisely what is claimed by nullification: Blacks may be sentient, speaking beings, but they have no moral standing whatsoever. They have zero intrinsic worth and nothing at all in the way of rights. As Frank Wilderson points out, “[T]he term slave rights is an oxymoron.” (198)

Isabel Wilkerson recounts an instance in which “[an] order from the justices went out in New Hanover County, North Carolina, in the search of a runaway named London, granting that

“ ‘any person may KILL and DESTROY the said slave by such means as he or they think fit’.” (153) Now this is not casteist thinking but nullifying thinking. Wilkerson is certainly very aware of this vicious kind of thinking, but she does not distinguish it from casteist thinking. I think it is important that the distinction be made. It is easy to conflate the two, because they both hold that White people are superior to Black people and both have been used to rationalize slavery and other racist policies, practices and institutions. In that sense, they are complementary, with one just enhancing the other. But in another way, they are contradictory. Casteism says Black life has some intrinsic value. Nullification says that while Black life may have plenty of instrumental value, it has no intrinsic value.

The horrifying implication of this tier three position is that Whites can do anything they want to Blacks with complete moral impunity. And indeed, what they did want to do during the time of slavery was horrifying beyond words. Isabel Wilkerson is completely aware of this.

(Nothing I say here is intended to imply that she is any less aware than she should be of the horrors of American racial violence either during slavery or afterwards. It is not the violence she has missed but the additional tier of ideology that has condoned it.) Accordingly, she rightly tells us that the American slave economy (for it was an economy in which both the North and the South were entwined) was a system based on torture:

Enslavers bore down on their hostages to extract the most profit, whipping those who

fell short of impossible targets, and whipping all the harder those who exceeded them to wring more from their exhausted bodies. (46)

This practice of requiring ever more and more from each enslaved cotton field worker was known as the “pushing system.” In The Half has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of Modern Capitalism, historian Edward E. Baptist describes the primary instrument of torture that was used to push the pushing system to the max in the fields of the Deep South:

But this southwestern whip was far worse [than the cat-o-nine tails whips used in Maryland and Virginia]. In expert hands it ripped open the air with a sonic boom, tearing gashes through skin and flesh. As the overseer beat Lydia, she screamed and writhed. Her flesh shook. Blood rolled off her back and percolated into the packed, dark soil of the yard. (Baptist 120)

My point here is that it is only from the point of view of nullification that the overseer need have no moral compunction whatsoever about inflicting this kind of agony. He need not even evoke that sanctified capitalistic rationale, the profit motive. If he likes, he can inflict his brutality for the sheer sadistic joy of it. Wilkerson is aware that this happened often, and she quotes Baptist to that effect: “ ‘Whipping was a gateway form of violence that led to bizarrely creative levels of sadism.’ Enslavers used ‘every modern method of torture,’ he observed, from mutilation to waterboarding.” (46) Accountability is nowhere to be seen. “[T]he Slave’s relationship to violence,” as Wilderson puts it,” is open-ended, gratuitous, without reason or constraint . . . .” (216) This relationship to violence is underwritten, in my view, not by casteism but by the harsher third tier of racist ideology.

We must also consider the staggering level of sexual violence involved in slavery. During the time of slavery the slave breeding industry was a major sector of the American capitalist economy. After all, enslaved people were valuable tools, and the production and sale of these (instrumentally) valuable tools was big business.

Black bodies, under slavery, were of course, also notoriously available to whites for purposes of sexual pleasure, including sadistic sexual pleasure. Wilderson points out that if rape is by definition non-consensual, Black women or men could not, from the slaveholder’s point of view be raped, and that is because they were accorded no right whatsoever either to grant or to withhold consent. To see other persons as absolutely devoid of any morally relevant power to consent or not consent to what is done to them is, again, not merely to assign them to a lower caste of humanity but to assign them to the category of the non-human.

As we all know, when slavery was officially abolished (except for incarcerated persons), open-ended, gratuitous, unconstrained violence against black people did not cease. Public, carnival lynchings were perhaps the most hideously extreme example. No doubt there were a number of layers of motivation for these ghoulish practices. In part, no doubt, as Wilkerson points out, they were intended to terrorize black people into submission to the caste system. Wilkerson’s descriptions of the almost euphoric responses to these events of many of those who attended them also suggest communally sadistic motivations. Whatever the motives, the ideological rationalizations for these atrocities could not have been mere casteist claims. More utterly dehumanizing, tier three nullifying claims were surely needed. One does not rationalize participation in such orgies of violence simply by claiming that the victims were lower on the human hierarchy than the perpetrators. Instead the victims must be seen as having no place at all in the human hierarchy.

Perhaps the most infamous official U.S. government espousal of anti-Black nullification is to be found in the Supreme Court’s Dred Scott Decision of 1857. Dred Scott, who had been an enslaved person in the South, sued to become officially free after he had been brought to Missouri, where slavery was illegal. The court decided not only that Scott could not have his freedom, but also that he had no legal standing even to sue for it. Roger Taney, Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, went on to make the blanket declaration that “the Negro has no rights that a white man is bound to respect.” No rights! None whatsoever! The implication, as James Cone points out in The Cross and the Lynching Tree, is “[T]hat to be black meant that whites could do anything to you and your people, and that neither you nor anyone else could do anything about it.”( 7 ) The implication, in keeping with the nullification tier of racist ideology is not just that Black lives matter less than White lives but rather that Black lives don’t matter at all.

The Dred Scott Decision was supposedly voided by the Thirteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. And yet, over the years, tragically, Black Americans have had many, many reasons to suppose that Taney’s horrifying pronouncement is still the law of the land. Nowhere is this more evident than with respect to the criminal (in)justice system, including the police, the courts, and the system of jails and prisons.

The Urban Dictionary captures a nullifying attitude toward Black people which, surely cannot be confined to members of the Los Angeles Police Department, in its explication of the phrase “no humans involved”:

In the 1980s of America, police in LA used to refer to the murders of prostitutes, gang members, and drug addicts (majority black and in poverty) as NHI, “No Humans Involved.” This attitude is still prevalent today.

“Put that file at the bottom of the stack. It’s just an NHI (No humans involved)” -LA Police

In Minneapolis, when Derek Chauvin murdered George Floyd, he seemed to many, including myself, to be enjoying what he was doing, and he seemed to feel no compunction in doing so. He seemed to believe that George Floyd’s humanity proposed no moral argument whatsoever against torturing him to the eventual outcome of death. It seems that Derek Chauvin, as an individual, had a nullifying view of his Black victim. It could be claimed that Chauvin’s conviction in court showed that American society rejects this view. And yet, Philip M. Stinson, in an article entitled “This Case Is an Outlier,” points out that “Less than 2 percent of the on-duty police officers who kill someone are ever charged with a crime and held accountable in courts of law.” Considering that black people are disproportionately the ones killed, this statistic comes pretty close to indicating that where police violence is concerned, Black people still have “no rights that a White man is bound to respect.” Here, as was the case during slavery time, there is impunity for the perpetrators of extreme levels of violence, even murder, when the victim is Black. Nullifying views of Black people apparently continue to function as a very disturbingly influential tier of racist ideology in the United States.

During their sojourn in what is now the United States, Black people have suffered not only from terrifying violence but also from heartless neglect. In both cases, according to Mark Lamont Hill, it is as if Black people are considered “Nobody.” He writes, in his powerfully moving book Nobody,

To be Nobody is to be considered disposable. In New Orleans, we saw the natural disaster of Hurricane Katrina followed by a grossly unnatural government response, one that killed thousands of vulnerable citizens and consigned many more to refugee status. In Flint Michigan, we are witnessing the young century’s most profound illustration of civic evil, an entire city collectively punished for the crime of being poor, black, and politically disempowered. Everyday, the nation’s homeless, mentally ill, drug addicted, and poor are pushed out of institutions of support and relocated to jails and prisons. These conditions reflect a prevailing belief that the vulnerable are unworthy of investment, protection, or even the most fundamental provisions of the social contract. As a result, they can be erased, abandoned, and even left to die. (XIX)

Interestingly, in characterizing the “prevailing beliefs” that rationalize such neglect, Hill implicitly points to examples of both tier two and tier three racist

ideology. Perhaps he feels that both are operative. Perhaps he conflates the two. After the paragraph quoted above, he writes,

Without question, Nobodyness is largely indebted to race, as White supremacy is foundational to the American democratic experiment. The belief that White lives are worth more than others — what Princeton University Scholar Eddie Glaude calls the “value gap” –continues to color every aspect of our public and private lives. (XIX)

“The belief that white lives are worth more than others” is clearly a casteist belief. Words like “Nobodiness” and “disposability,” on the other hand, connote nullification. Of course, there are cases and cases, and there are cases. Perhaps certain degrees of indifference and neglect need only casteism to “authorize” them. In such egregious cases as Katrina and Flint, however, and in many others as well, the value of human life seems to be so coldly and completely repudiated as to prove the complicity of nullification.

It seems to me that the heartbreaking story Bryan Stevenson tells in Just Mercy, wherein a Black man is very intentionally framed for a murder he did not commit and left to languish in prison for decades, until Stevenson, with the support of the Black community, is able to get him free, presents just such a case of nullification by total indifference. Moreover, the whole phenomenon of Mass Incarceration, is replete with thousands of similar stories and a similar nullifying ethos. Michelle Alexander warns us that certain changes in the American economy are tending to shift the needle in this terrifying direction:

It is fair to say that we have witnessed an evolution in the United States from a racial caste system based entirely on exploitation (slavery), to one based largely on subordination (Jim Crow), to one defined by marginalization (mass incarceration). While marginalization may sound far preferable to exploitation, it may prove to be even more dangerous. Extreme marginalization, as we have seen throughout world history, poses the risk of extermination. Tragedies such as the Holocaust in Germany or ethnic cleansing in Bosnia are traceable to the extreme marginalization and stigmatization of ethnic groups. . . . The sense among those left behind that society no longer cares for them and that the government simply wants to get rid of them, reflects a reality that many of us who claim to care prefer to avoid simply by changing channels. (207–208)

Frank B. Wilderson sees what I am calling nullification as inextricably bound up with American slavery and its legacy, and he see this extreme — or rather absolute — form of dehumanization as targeting Black people uniquely. Here is a portion of Wilderson’s argument for this view:

[A]nti-Black violence murders, destroys, subjectivity (eviscerates the capacity for relationality), whereas misogynistic and anti-Semitic violence, along with the genocide of indigenous people, exploits and alienates subjectivity without obliterating relational capacity. . . . The difference between someone dying and something dying cannot be analogized. (163)

Given Wilderson’s position on this point, it is not surprising that he calls what I am calling nullification “anti-blackness.” However, because I don’t concur with his position, I have chosen another term, namely nullification, for tier three. Although I do not wish to argue the point at length, I believe that groups other than Blacks can also be subjected to the radical dehumanization of nullification. Consider this passage about a German concentration camp from Caste:

During the morning and evening roll calls, they [the prisoners] 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 watchmakers, rabbis and piano tuners, all merged into a single mass of undifferentiated bodies (my italics) 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. (143)

I am struck by the similarity between the part of Wilkerson’s passage I have italicized and a statement by Wilderson: “Black people form a mass of indistinguishable flesh in the collective unconscious, not a social formation of interests, agendas, or ideas.” (162). I do not wish to assert equivalence between the holocaust in Germany and slavery in the U.S. I do maintain, though, that American blacks, German Jews, and many other groups, too, have at one time or another been treated like non-persons, and that their oppressors have rationalized this treatment with radically nullifying ideological claims.

Let me return now to my focus on anti-Black (in a general sense, not in a specifically Wildersonian sense) racist ideology. I hope to have established, with considerable help from Wilderson, that if tiers one and two of racist ideology — disinformation and casteism — played roles in rationalizing American slavery, so too, did tier three — nullification. Moreover, nullification, it seems to me, far from being just an add-on to the other two, was the most powerful of the three, the one that most essentially defined the dreadful ethos of the slave holding culture. Unless we understand this, and unless we understand that nullification remains a powerful player in American “race” relations up to the present day, we are likely to make some of the following errors (no doubt, among many others). We are likely

— to underestimate the full horror of slavery

— to underestimate the extent to which, in a very real sense, slavery still exists

— to underestimate the moral strength of the call for reparations

— to underestimate the dangers to which Black people are subject in their daily lives

— to underestimate the sheer mean-spiritedness and desire to humiliate that characterizes much of police interaction with black youth

— to underestimate the probability that black people in jails or prisons will be subjected to torture (which includes solitary confinement)

— to underestimate the probability that Black people in jails or prisons will be subjected to sexual abuse by guards

— to underestimate the moral necessity of dismantling police unions, which seem bent on securing for police officers a level of impunity for violence against Black people that rivals that of Southern slave holders

— to underestimate the moral strength of the overall call to abolish our present criminal justice system and replace it with something qualitatively different and infinitely better

— to underestimate the prevalence and malevolence of organized hate groups

— to underestimate the sheer indifference of many White Americans toward Black suffering

This list, of course, is far from complete.

I will close with a kind of metaphor that Isabel Wilkerson likes (perhaps too much). Nullification is a particularly deadly strain of the virus of racism. It is more dangerous than casteism. If we identify and acknowledge it, we will have a better chance of defeating it.

  • I suspect it is because he is aware of the various ways in which a belief can be held that Ibram X. Kendi, when he writes about racist ideology in both Stamped from the Beginning and How to Be an Anti-racist, never refers to the units of the ideology as racist beliefs but always as racist ideas. One may or may not really believe an idea in one’s mind. One may believe it or merely entertain it. “Ideas” is thus a cleverly chosen term.

Works Cited

Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Color Blindness. New York: The New Press, 2010.

Edward E. Baptist, The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American

Capitalism. New York: Basic Books, 2014.

James Cone, The Cross and the Lynching Tree, Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 2011.

Marc Lamont Hill, Nobody: Casualties of America’s War on the Vulnerable, from Ferguson to Flint and Beyond. New York: Atria Books, 2016.

Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America. New York: Bold Type Books, 2016.

How to Be an Anti-Racist. New York: One World, 2019.

Khalil Gibran Muhammad, The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America.

Philip M. Stinson, This Case Is An Outlier

Frank B. Wilderson, Afropessimism. New York: Liveright Publishing Corporation, 2020.

Isabel Wilkerson, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents. New York: Random House, 2020.

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