Caste: Pillar Number Seven Summary & Analysis

To keep a group of people in a falsely rigid, subordinate place, the dominant caste must employ psychological and physical violence and terror. Caste structures incentivize the terrorization of the subordinate castes by the dominant ones—and in India, the U.S., and Nazi Germany, fear and dread were useful weapons of the dominant caste. Physical violence, mind games, and sexual assault were used as methods of control in all three caste systems, and the disregard for those being terrorized was easy because the system had already dehumanized them entirely.

Public displays of violence, like lynchings and hangings in Nazi labor camps, were used to frighten other members of the subordinate caste into continued submission. In all three caste systems, members of the subordinate caste were often forced to exact cruel and unusual punishments against others of their caste who had gone against the grain. This ensured that those meting out the punishment knew all too intimately what would befall them if they, too, stepped out of line. Kapos (the head prisoners in each bunk at a concentration camp) and plantation overseers (enslaved Black people in charge of a large group of other enslaved Black people) were forced to punish their own people.