Caste: Chapter 27 Summary & Analysis

In the summer of 2017, the city of Charlottesville, Virginia covered its statue of Confederate general Robert E. Lee after a rally of white supremacists converged around the statue weeks earlier. On the day of the rally, marchers flew both Confederate and Nazi flags and chanted “Sieg Heil” and “Jews will not replace us.” After a white supremacist drove a car into a crowd of counter-protestors, killing Heather Heyer, the city shrouded its statue but didn’t removed it.

The end of the American Civil War didn’t really mean the end of slavery—instead, lawmakers just found new ways to justify the debasement and enforced servitude of the subordinate caste, such as sharecropping and the creation of the Ku Klux Klan. Confederate monuments sprung up throughout the South—and by the 21st century, over 230 monuments to Lee existed throughout the States. Lee was a racist, a eugenicist, and a violent slaver—yet even after leading a treasonous war against his country, he faced few penalties or repercussions and was later glorified. At one point, the U.S. Postal Service had five different stamps bearing his face in circulation.

That same year, in 2017, a SWAT team clothed in masks and garb that obscured both their identity and the color of their skin removed the first of four Confederate monuments in the city of New Orleans in the dead of night. Since the mayor had called for the removal of the statues in 2015, the city had faced threats of violence and terrorism should they make good on their promise to actually remove the statues. At the same time, Alabama passed a bill preventing the removal of any statue that had been in place for 20 years or more.

In Berlin, Germany, there is a 4.7-acre space dedicated as a Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe. A vast “modernist Stonehenge,” the site bears no signage or information—instead, 2,711 concrete rectangular stones form an indiscernible pattern. Germany has erected many memorials to the different groups of victims of the Holocaust—Jews, homosexuals, Sinti and Roma—but there are no memorials dedicated to the leaders of the Nazi Party and the SS troops who perpetuated unthinkable violence. In fact, the site of Hitler’s bunker is now a paved-over parking lot, nondescript and unmarked.

Displaying the swastika in Germany is punishable by up to three years in prison—but in America, the Confederate flag is part of the state flag of Mississippi. While some German families might privately mourn family members lost in the war, they know that there should be no public memorial of the men and women who perpetuated war crimes and atrocities. Restitution has been paid to the survivors of the Holocaust—but in the U.S., it was white slaveholders who received reparations for the loss of their property. While former Nazis were tried and, in some cases, put to death, former Confederates wound up in leading roles in government.

In modern-day Germany, young people are properly educated in school about the realities of the Holocaust and their country’s true history. Even they are aware that while they may not be responsible for the sins of their forbears, they are responsible for acknowledging the horrors of the past and becoming “guardians of the truth.”