The Origin Experience: Caste, Mark Zuckerberg and Banned Books

Dalit Scholar, Dr Suraj Yengde, described caste as a marked category and [those of us in the lower caste]  have to navigate that marking. Our options are to assimilate or blow up. If we dare blow up, that is met by the upper caste as “how dare they.” It’s so easy to dismiss caste as an Indian problem. But,  Sunday afternoon, listening to a discussion after a screening of Origins, I saw a distinct example tied to the US, the impact of caste and  Mark Zuckerberg.

Mr Zuckerberg was “marked.” Last  week, Meta, TikTok and other social media CEOs testified in a Senate hearing on child exploitation. Watch the hearing and it’s obvious, this was not an attempt at problem solving, but, finger pointing. The language, the approach, all wrong and yet, sadly, fully appropriate and aligned with the Senators’ intention. One Senator approached the interaction as collaborative, let’s find a solution versus the rest who saw this as an opportunity to chastise and hold CEOs accountable for child exploitation. The Senators performed for the families in attendance and soundbites.

This does not invalidate the points made. There is justifiable anger with child exploitation via social media. But, this hearing was a setup. Caste systems have Brahmin. Oliver Wendell Holmes coined the term Boston Brahmin describing the elite families of New England. Consider this, Mark Zuckerberg is one of the Brahmins of technology, Senators are Brahmins of politics. In this scenario, the senators consider themselves to be at the top of the caste system. To maintain this, other groups have to be lower. How do you lower a group? Attack, vilify and dehumanize the technology CEOs. This  appeared to be the sole intent of the hearings. What options did the CEOs have? You can either assimilate or blow up. Assimilation was impossible, this was a public flogging and what we witnessed was how dare you reactions. For the record, Zuckerberg got the most heat because he’s at the top and this hearing attempts to knock him down. There is an impact of caste that may be hard to acknowledge yet difficult to ignore.

As a country, can we afford to continue with a framework of chastise and dehumanize rather than collaboration and problem solving? The movie Origin is based on the how the book, Caste, the Origins of our Discontent was written. One theme in the book that resonated with me was while none of us are responsible for the past, think of the past as an old house, you did not do the neglect you did not do the damage, but you have to live in the house today. You have to do the repairs. 

I was chilled as the movie depicted book burnings in Nazi Germany in 1933. I thought of book banning in the US as both actions take books out of circulation. Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents is currently banned from libraries in Texas. Banned books vilify ideas, cast doubt on validity and disparage the writers. It is devaluing, it is caste, not worthy. The movie did a long pan of the book burning memorial in Germany. Will the large scale banning of books in US be memorialized in the future, you know, as part of the repairs?

This week consider this quote from Primo Levi “If it happened once, it can happen again.”  I often marvel that “we are living history,” and in this time, what is my role.