Recent posts
Brown. H, 2022, Book review: "Caste; the lies that divide us by Isabel Wilkerson", Reformulation 55, p. 51-53
Over the last few years I have had the great pleasure of being involved with colleagues locally in updating and broadening the reading list given to CAT trainees. This has meant regularly contacting the course director with references, accompanied by an impassioned case as to why each latest find should be included.
To date my wish list has included The spirit level: why equality is better for everyone (Wilkinson and Pickett 2009) and The Inner Level: How More Equal Societies Reduce Stress, Restore Sanity and Improve Everyone's Well-Being by Kate Pickett and Richard G. Wilkinson (2018) both of which lay bare the impact of inequality on a person’s life chances, inner dialogue and reciprocal roles.
Ta Nehisi Coates (2015) and David Chariandry (2018) have both provided powerful first-hand accounts of racial injustice and of how they have sought to inform and immunize their children which stand out as models for therapists about how to hear and sit with the way the world is.
Another recent recommendation was The Fat Lady Sings by Cheryl Fuller, (2017), which articulates the pervasive prejudice experienced by people who do not sit comfortably in the middle of the bell curve when it comes to their weight.
The common thread running through these accounts is that they illuminate the uneven social landscape within which reciprocal roles are embedded. But I now feel as if I were the boy who cried wolf and afraid that I have used up all my ‘go’s’ because I want to recommend another book that is profoundly moving and central to the way we understand reciprocal roles.
It is particularly pertinent in the current, long overdue reckoning that is taking place about the ways in which Black people and people of colour have been, and continue to be, mistreated and misrepresented. It is Caste: the lies that divide us by Isabel Wilkerson (2020). Ms Wilkerson writes of the African American experience by seeing race through the lens of caste. She describes how the arbitrary characteristics that have been used to construct the contested notion of race have been used to create the pyramid passed down through centuries that defines and directs politics and policies and personal interactions.
Migrants to the US from European countries could coalesce into the identity of being white while African Americans, even when no longer enslaved, were positioned as the floor below which no white man could sink. She talks about the pillars of caste, the skewed interpretation of sacred texts to justify blatant unfairness; the dehumanization of others; the prohibition of mixing and marrying and the pervasive persecution and violence.
She says that it was in this process of ranking that we were all cast into assigned roles to meet the needs of the larger production. None of us are ourselves. Her account consolidates the arguments against explaining shared psychological or social outcomes on the basis of a discredited biological essentialism. She shows that we can only account for the unequal outcomes experienced by BAME communities, including the disparities that have been exposed so starkly by the pandemic, by considering the many injuries and injustices meted out to them over time and in our time.
The book analyses the ways in which race has been used in the USA to do the heavy lifting) for a disavowed caste system. Kenan Malik has also written about how dangerous it is in the UK context to discuss race without considering class and poverty because that is the way in which poor people, are set against each other instead of being helped to unite in a stand against poverty and injustice.
Poverty is not just about stuff it is about agency, safety and freedom from indebtedness. Wilkerson describes the unacknowledged caste system in our countries as the operating system in which we are all programmed and by which we all function. She says that if race is the skin, caste is the bones of the system.
Caste solidifies inequality and sends it unchanged down generations and this sets up reciprocal roles that are laden with envy and contempt, withholding and desperation, Brown, H. (2019). In India caste has been more explicit historically and although there is a stated policy of diminishing inequality, its exclusions are still being reckoned with, reverberating down and between generations at home and in the diaspora, Gopal, P., (2013).
Teaching CAT in India with my colleague, Jessie Emilion, we explored inequality by creating a fake caste system using playing cards to deal out an arbitrary ranking, echoing the blue eyes/brown eyes experiment pioneered by Jane Elliot in US public schools in the wake of Martin Luther King’s assassination.
It must be recognized that such simulations are no substitute for, and without careful debriefing could risk trivializing, the real lived experience of disadvantaged people, but they do sometimes expose the crasser workings of social hierarchies and how they impact on our interactions and moods in a way that brings these experiences home to participants.
Given a superficial social scenario and a fake rank, participants rapidly start to move in the ‘right’ circles, seeking out others who hold similar values, the Aces exuding confidence and bonhomie while those with low numbers drift around the edge of the group feeling unimportant and looking depressed...and this happens within a very short period of time.
Replicating this in different settings we play with hiding the card so that others have to guess our rank from our performance, and we hide the card from ourselves but leave it open to others so that we can work out our assigned status from their interactions with us. We rarely get these guesses wrong despite the fact that, as aspiring therapists, we might all have strongly defended a position that we are individuals uniquely placed to respond on the basis of deeper insights or intuitions, that as a group, we see past status and take people as they come.
Replicating this exercise we have all been surprised and confronted by how easily we know how to enact these positions and how sensitively we perform and read cues about status.
Wilkerson, I, (2020) also notes how she came to read the unconscious signals of encoded superiority in her encounters with people from higher castes in her own work. These ways of interacting are so embedded as to be usually unconscious even in those who are otherwise self-aware and committed to progress. In the UK, caste is delivered on the basis of race but also of wealth and education to the point where many of our governing classes are drawn from the same few, very expensive schools.
Children practice these hierarchies in their playgrounds, estate agents in their pricing strategies. Parents know the lie of the land when they choose schools for their own children even when their decisions might impact the interests of other people’s children. Oluguso, D. (2020) recently described how black people have been rendered voiceless in our broadcasting and media corporations. High profile black people have given accounts of being stopped when driving for trivial or for no reasons (Grierson, J., 2020; Walker, P. (2020). When Black people are disproportionately stopped and searched, they cease to have respect for authority just as authority has demonstrably ceased to have respect for them. In CAT we have such a powerful way of understanding how the outside world gets into our inner worlds and of how this gets endlessly reproduced in our personal interactions that we cannot continue to focus on human development without noticing how people are situated in these historical and economic silos.
Reciprocal roles have history (Wilkerson says that caste acts as if there were historic flashcards showing how people are to be positioned and treated) and they have gravity. Some are brutal: many are backed up by uncontested social norms and very real sanctions; some are amplified by the media and many are unfit for the purpose of raising human beings to respect and care for each other.
Wilkerson describes a life in which we are herded into separate and unequal queues where either inflated or disfavored assumptions are always present as a reference point [Wilkerson I, 2020]. Where we fail to take these contexts into account we miss the force, direction and rigidity of key reciprocal roles. White people are often unaware of how their race helps them by not being ‘an issue’ or by not registering that this “centrality” (Wilkerson I, 2020) lies at the core of their/our1 privileged status.
When we draw maps for our clients, we can easily fall into the trap of making them seem two dimensional, but landscapes have contours, chasms and most importantly borders. Valeria Luiselli (2019):
A map is a silhouette, a contour that groups disparate elements together, whatever they are. To map is to include as much as to exclude. To map is also a way to make visible what is usually unseen.
This week a young man drowned while trying to reach out for a life worth living. This was not taken as a signal for national mourning but as a rallying cry to turn back, or perhaps and more accurately to turn our backs on, other people who embark on their own similarly perilous journeys.
The UK government appointed a Channel Threat Commander to ensure that these rickety boats filled with desperate people do not reach our shores, as if hungry children were a threat to a country that wastes 4.5 million tonnes of edible household food (WRAP based on 2018 figures) per annum.
It is hard to imagine what will happen as so many countries are made more unstable by the human and economic costs of the pandemic or to foresee how these pressures will impact on the mental well-being of millions of people.
Psychotherapy is predominantly a white, middle class, profession and although many people are working to make it less so, our theory, our models and our practice all need to catch up.
Awareness of race, caste and class must be brought into the room and worked with. We cannot focus solely on our mothers and fathers when our employers, governments and armies have drawn borders between us that continue to deliver such unequal access to resources, opportunities and respect.
We need to be speaking directly to these hierarchies in our therapeutic work so that we can see the way they distort what happens in our lives, loves, clinics and therapy rooms. Wilkerson, I (2020) notes that when any of us manages to create abiding connections across these manufactured divisions [it] is a testament to the beauty of the human spirit and that is surely as true in the therapy room as it is in the home, workplace or neighbourhood. Many of the roles we are cast into are not symmetrical, reversible or even reciprocal. Interactions frequently take place between one party who has power and another who does not. These positions are rarely chosen nor possible to escape from and every time we misrepresent depression and despair as a personal vulnerability or as an aberration instead of as an utterly sane response to injustice, we become complicit.
As Wilkerson I, (2020) says, the enforcers of our own versions of the caste system have tied their lot to[it]rather than to their consciences and as Ta Nehisi Coates (2015) notes, they will rarely be held accountable. Mostly they will receive pensions ....[they] are merely men enforcing the whims of our country, correctly interpreting its heritage and legacy.
As a profession we need to constantly renew our capacity to keep open the spaces in which these injustices can be spoken of and understood.
Wilkerson’s “Caste: the lies that divide us” is beautifully researched and articulated; it will help us stay true to that commitment and as such it belongs on all our reading lists.
Hilary Brown
1 am a white woman and therapist so I inevitably write from that position and perspective.
References
Brown H, (2019) Reciprocal roles in an unequal world in Lloyd, J. and Pollard, R. (2019:pp 20-37)
Cognitive Analytic Therapy and the Politics of Mental Health Routledge London
Chariandry,D. (2018) I’ve been meaning to tell you-a letter to my daughter Bloomsbury Books New York
Coates, T-N. (2015) Between the world and Me New York Spiegel and Grau https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/07/tanehisi-coates-between-the-world-and-me/397619/
Elliot, J. (1968) https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/article/introduction-2/
Fuller, C. (2017) The fat lady sings: a psychological exploration of the cultural fat complex and its effects. Karnac Books London
Gopal, P. (2013) Caste discrimination in the UK must be outlawed April 15th 2013 https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/apr/15/caste-discrimination-uk-outlawed
Grierson,J. (2020) Why did police stop and search Bianca Williams and Ricardo dos Santos? July 6th 2020 https://www.theguardian.com/law/2020/jul/06/why-did-police-stop-and-search-bianca-williams-and-ricardo-dos-santos
Luiselli, V. (2019) The lost children archive 4th Estate London 2019: pp250
Malik. K. (2018) In British education, the central issue is class not ethnicity https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/jan/07/british-education-failure-white-working-class
Oluguso, D. (2020) Racism in TV has led to a lost generation of black talent https://www.theguardian.com/media/2020/aug/24/david-olusoga-racism-in-tv-has-led-to-lost-generation-of-black-talent The Guardian 25 August 2020
Pickett, K & Wilkinson, R The Inner Level: how more equal societies reduce stress, restore sanity and improve (2018) everyone’s well-being
Walker, P. (2020) MP Dawn Butler stopped by the police in London 9th August 2020 https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2020/aug/09/labour-mp-dawn-butler-stopped-by-police-in-london
Wilkerson, I. (2020) Caste: the lies that divide us Allen Lane Penguin Books Harmondsworth UK p 19; pp 23 – 44; p53; p310
Wilkinson,R & Pickett,K. The spirit level: why more equal societies almost always do better London Random House (2009)