America Has a Caste System

In America, skin color defines our caste system

I started out last night subscribing to ESPN+ because I wanted to watch a documentary about the USFL.

Remember the USFL? The spring-based professional football league that existed for several years in the ‘80s and did reasonably well until a certain New York City real estate developer con artist got involved and. . . you can guess the rest. . .

It no longer exists. But, while it existed, it was the home of Herschel Walker, Steve Young, Anthony Carter, Jim Kelly, the birthplace of the instant replay, outrageous end zone celebrations and a collection of team names that didn’t offend anyone - the Generals, the Gunslingers, the Bandits.

I wanted to learn how the pedophile-in-chief destroyed yet another enterprise and it did not disappoint. Even Burt Reynolds dissed the guy.

From there I went on to watch a documentary titled “I Hate Christian Laettner” who played basketball for the Duke Blue Devils during the time George Bush, Sr. was president. I found it fascinating because, thinking back to that era, while watching Duke’s basketball team rise to prominence I recall feeling that Laettner acted like he was the next ‘Great White Hope’ and that Duke seemed like a bunch of entitled rich kids. As is the case with most subjects, it becomes infinitely more intriguing when you get a peek behind the curtain.

Christian Laettner was a great player. He holds the NCAA record for the most points scored in the NCAA tournament. He played in four Final Fours. Duke won two of them. He was the sole collegiate player to play on the NBA Dream Team that competed in the Olympics. And as I watched the documentary I was thinking to myself, he played the game exactly as I probably would have played it. Gritty, edgy and sometimes nasty.

And, then, this morning I listened to David Remnick of The New Yorker on the New Yorker podcast, The Radio Hour, speak with a woman named Isabel Wilkerson on America’s caste system. That’s right, our ‘caste system’.

I know! Where am I going with this?

Isabel Wilkerson, author of Caste: The Origins of our Discontents, says “rigid social hierarchy exists in America just as it does in India.”

She goes on, “caste is the bones, race is the skin and class is the diction, the accent, the education, the clothing, the things that we can control as we present ourselves to the world.” In America, skin color defines our caste system. In other caste systems, it may be religion, geography or ethnicity.

Listening to her while still ruminating over the two excellent documentaries I had watched the previous evening - one about basketball and one, tangentially, related to the racist-in-chief who, remember his niece says, has been ‘institutionalized’ his entire life, meaning, basically, he’s a boy in a bubble - got me to thinking once more about an odd experience I had in the ‘80s.

I was buying a fair amount of advertising on a local sports jock AM radio station called KJR. It was owned by a guy named Barry Ackerley who was Seattle’s media mogul at the time. He owned billboards all over town and he was also the owner of the Seattle Supersonics. Seattle’s professional NBA basketball team.

As a perk for my advertising buy, I received two tickets to a Sonics game. But, not just any tickets. These were Barry Ackerley’s seats. Mid court. On the floor. You could feel the whoosh of the cheerleaders pompoms. You could reach out and grab the refs or the players as they trotted by. You could listen in on the running conversations the players were having with the refs, with each other and, strangely enough, with members of the court side seats all around me.

Prior to the game, as some players stretched, they’d be having lengthy exchanges with the people to my right and left and behind me. It was clear this was a common occurrence. It was nothing out of the norm.

During the game, occasionally one of the people around me, would try to get a player’s attention, because of a player’s bumble, or missed free throw, or turnover, or some kind of mistake. The player would not always engage, but sometimes they would.

To be honest, it made me feel a little uneasy.

The guys - because it was only the males who spoke with the players - acted like they ‘owned’ the players. For all I know, they may have been shareholders of the Sonics and, technically, paid these players contracts, or assisted in paying them.

Even so, it was weird. The players were famous and well paid and one or two of them may even be eligible for the basketball Hall of Fame - and they were also Black. Meanwhile, these buttoned down white guys in Polo attire sat in their court side seats drinking expensive cheap beer treated them like chattel. Those were exactly my thoughts at the time.

Even though these guys were the creme de la creme of basketball players in the world, making top dollar in the premier basketball league, they were still part of that caste system Isabel Wilkerson mentioned.

Those guys treated those players just as the lying ‘Bubble Boy’ conman from New York, as well as millions of other Americans who have come to the fore over the last four years, treated Barack Obama.

That’s it.

That’s the column.

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