Class and Caste

A class is a group that is ranked according to its place in a social hierarchy based on inequality in terms of wealth, education, and/or income. A caste is a more rigid form of social stratification whereby a member of a particular caste, as determined by birth and social mobility, has a fixed ethnicity and is rigidly confined to the status of the group. The intersection of class and caste as it relates to the global black experience has led to a provocative debate. To explain the social stratification in the “New World” experience of blacks, some scholars offer mainly a Marxist account that incorporates race into the paradigm. Other writers recognize that class and caste are an integral aspect of black life, yet they prefer an analytical approach centered on social action and interpretive sociology to an approach centered on race. The problem for African-centered scholars is that in regard to class and caste analyses, Marxist and related schools of thought lay fundamentally within the framework of Eurocentric-derived concepts and sociological discourse. Thus a Black Studies scholar seeking to understand the plight of African Americans within a class and economic structure may find a Marxist or Weberian class and status analysis too narrow and Eurocentric to be of any real value. The Africancentered scholar's problem therefore lies in what can be deemed not having conceptual agency and an authentic black perspective.

[Page 186]Unlike traditional Marxist accounts of white European class exploitation, the accounts of black scholars—such as Eric Williams's Capitalism and Slavery (1964), Oliver Cromwell Cox's Caste, Class and Race (1970), Robert Staples's Introduction to Black Sociology (1976), and William Julius Wilson's The Declining Significance of Race: Blacks and Changing American Institutions (1980)—all put a primacy on the economic basis of the exploitation and discrimination of black people in Western societies. In addition, regardless of their theoretical differences, the scholars who wrote these works have understood the place of race in Western societies and have each explained it by including the racial dimension in their discussions of the oppression and discrimination of black peoples. The common denominator in the accounts of these economic reductionist scholars is the placement of economics alongside race and racism as a primary factor of exploitation. For these scholars, capitalism as a system creates racist exploitation of blacks by upper-class whites, and it also uses race as a mechanism for dividing the white and black working classes. Therefore, racism is seen as part of an analysis of a racistcapitalist-caste society in which more than mere class exploitation is involved in the process of social inequality. The debate involving class being more significant than caste (i.e., race) intensified in the late 1970s and 1980s with the work of William Julius Wilson.

Class and caste are certainly slippery terms when analyzed from a black perspective, as they are complex and interconnected variables, as well as mutually exclusive yet interrelated terms when they are associated with societies that are structured in racialized hierarchies. Indeed, class alone does not explain the social inequality of black people in Western and Westernized societies, and neither does caste in isolation explain the inequality. Each variable plays into the other and together they can be useful in analyzing the structural position of black people, particularly in nations that can be deemed capitalist in terms of economic and social organization. In his Introduction to Black Studies (2002), Maulana Karenga writes that “it is clear that racism cannot be reductively translated as a function of class or class struggle. Such a position obscures the complexity and variousness of their interplay and their separate relevance as factors in a racist-capitalist society” (p. 305). The relevance of class is separate from that of race, although the concepts are often connected in discussions of racialized or castelike oppression.

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