“I Can’t Breathe”: Perspectives on Emancipation from Caste

Yesterday, April 20, 2021, a jury in Minnesota convicted the former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin of murdering George Floyd, a Black American. Mr. Chauvin, who is white, had knelt on Mr. Floyd’s neck for more than nine minutes despite Mr. Floyd’s desperate appeals that “I can’t breathe.” Those words reignited a powerful social movement for racial justice in America and were echoed around the world by communities disadvantaged by their histories of persecution fed by illusions of superiority. In the United States, racial inequality causes major disparities between African Americans and people of white ethnicities. These deprivations, despite progress, are seen today in economic assets, educational attainment, rates of incarceration, and health outcomes as in Covid-19. Yet Covid-19 did not create health disparities and differences in life expectancy. Those disparities are directly the result of racism. Racism is declared to be a public health crisis wherein Black lives are more prone to life-limiting illness and premature death including police killings in which Black males are 2.5 times more likely to be killed by police.11“This problem is only exacerbated if we look at the global scale. White supremacy is the idea that there is a hierarchy inherent to the chain of human beings, with those who are white at the top and Black people at the bottom.”22 J-CASTE agrees, though we also see these deep divisions and resentments within societies of color. All forms of graded hierarchies continue to degrade the lives and well-being of those whose births deprive them of their full potential and human rights whether by race or gender, indigeneity, language, or culture. Like white privilege, there is caste privilege in high Brahmanical societies, and like white supremacy, caste supremacy is responsible when Dalits choose suicide over humiliation at universities or when high caste men gang rape Dalit girls in rural villages.