By Chandrashekar (Chandra) Tamirisa, (On Twitter) @c_tamirisa
The story of America is in many ways the struggle between the wisdom of its founding and the conventional wisdom of its society. Ever since the claim to the land by both the Northern Europeans (Erik the Red) in retrospect or by the Southern Europeans (Christopher Columbus some 600 years later), the history since 1492 has been the tension about social class between two broad groups of people: the coloreds and the whites ― between the reds, blacks, browns, yellows and the whites.
Social class among the peoples of the lands of the Great White North (Europa or the European continent) itself had evolved very tumultuously since Man mutated there about 30,000 years ago, after coexisting with the Neanderthals for about 10,000 years or for as long as there has been civilization since the beginning of the first agricultural settlements about 10,000 years ago. Race to Europe, as it is to other continents, including to the Americas before the European arrival, is a matter of biology.
The first immigrants to the American continent were those whose race had been fully formed before they migrated across Asia into the Americas by way of the Alaskan ice bridge about 14,000 years ago. The Americas have known nothing but immigrants. It was a New World also to the Americans (Columbus’ “Indians” because he had set out to discover a sea route to India going West from Europe across the Atlantic). True nativism resides elsewhere, where the human genome was spliced by nature to create the races as humans began migrating both within and out of Africa about 70,000-50,000 years ago.
Social class in Europe, as it was most of elsewhere, has always been intimately tied all along with the monarchies and their staying power: first the Greeks (if Plato’s Atlantis is not to be believed), then the Romans, later the people of Germania and now the English. American social class, on the other hand, has its roots in the desire to practice Anglicanism in a far more sanitized manner than the English monarchy itself: out of a motive as puritan as that of the Indo-Aryan brahmin class that was formed about 2500 years before the British monarchy was founded ― hence, the Boston Brahmins.
In Britain, the monarch, if a male, or the highest ranking male in the British aristocracy, heads the Church of England as has been the tradition since Henry VIII in the 15th century. Not the Archbishop of Canterbury. In the Indo-Aryan societies, just as it is with the New England brahmins, the brahmins formed the top strata of the society, above the ruling classes. In the United States, and in the world-at-large today, the complication, however, is once again CW: the colored Indo-Aryan brahmins and the white New England brahmins.
If the Indo-Aryan puritanism is about a faith that is rooted more in knowledge (the Rig Veda) than in ritual, that of the New England puritans is more rooted in faith and in the English ethnicity than it is in knowledge, Harvard (1636) notwithstanding. While the occupational (not racial) class structure of Indo-Aryanism itself sprung from the desire to maintain social stability challenged by the imperative of social integration, New England puritanism has always seen social class as an ethnic and racial hierarchy in American society, whether that be among the European immigrants or between European and non-European immigrants into America, going back 14,000 years into the demographic history of the continent: the Reds rejected subjugation by the Europeans and were both physically persecuted since Columbus and later internally displaced by the English into near extinction, while the Black slaves were coerced into subordination. But for European discovery, the Americas would have evolved into two continents of many neighboring countries and languages, similar to today’s Europe.
In the end game, the travails of American social integration, on the time scale of civilization, may not be that much different from those of the early Indo-Aryan societies. After all, English America is barely 400 years old and as old as English colonialism in India. The differences between the two are, therefore, important if America is to indeed truly embrace the lessons of history to realize its raison d’ etre: while the English puritans rejected the local civilizations and saw themselves as a civilizing force, the Indo-Aryans (the hyphenation is important) created a civilization by assimilating the local civilization into Hinduism whose antecedents date back to being contemporaneous with Egypt and Sumeria (Krishna, the divine Indo-Aryan incarnation of the Axial Age around 700 B.C.E, is dark skinned with 8 white wives in a society that practised both polygamy and polyandry). The United States of America must assimilate into it, its internally displaced peoples ― the continent’s first immigrants, for the country has always been gray or colored, not black and white or colored and white.
An anthropological consequence of social power has always been that men in societies that wielded power claimed the women of societies that were less powerful, an intra-American social characteristic in the process of American social integration that is seen in the United States until today: white men since Thomas Jefferson were socially more free to take colored women (Sally Hemmings) than are colored men (Barack Obama Sr., Associate Justice of the Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas and the Hollywood film from 1967 “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner”) to take white women.
If CW ― the de facto separation between the coloreds and the whites ― continues to prevail, as it de jure did until 1965, and similar to apartheid in South Africa until 1994, the world may not have run out of options if only to the dismay of the politics of English puritanism. The English brahmins (W) may once again (as if 1947, when the British had left India, was not enough) have to deal with the original brahmins (C), the Indo-Aryans, in the battle for civilization, if civilization is to be saved.
The coloreds of the world have their own claim to social class. After all, the brahmins are colored and this has been the conventional wisdom for nearly 5000 years.
