Cat lies next to Taylor Swift Album- The Tortured Poets Department
Source: Jovan Vasiljevic- Unsplash
I recently watched Origin, which is a gripping film written and directed by celebrated filmmaker Ava DuVernay. It documents the fascinating and, at times, heart breaking process that Pulitzer-prize winning journalist and author Isabel Wilkerson endured while developing her ideas for Caste: The Origins of our Discontents. Released in 2020, this ground-breaking book introduces a revolutionary theory about global inequity that hinges not on race, but on the principles of caste.
Often considered a unique feature of Indian society, the movie reveals that this hierarchical system is entrenched in many countries, including Nazi Germany and the US. In fact, the German political elite used American segregation laws as an example of how to justify the annihilation of the Jewish people and embed their eugenic ideologies about superiority and inferiority in law.
After viewing this film, it percolates in my sleepless mind and takes root around other things drifting through my subconscious. Things like a woman watching her boyfriend play football. Things like deep fakes of young t-shirted women used to support the political campaign of a man who might never be king again. As reported in The Guardian, and elsewhere, these t-shirts said: “Swifties for Trump.”
Why can’t people leave Taylor Swift alone?
Unpacking caste
The vitriol against this successful young woman is not merely an expression of anti-feminism or misogyny. When the GOP, conspiracy theorists, and ISIS terrorists are involved, we’re talking about something deep inside the anatomy of our global culture. We’re talking about caste, which is designed to buttress and reproduce a system that assigns particular meanings and powers to not just the dominant groups, but also to those on the fringes or members of so-called equity-deserving communities.
Taylor Swift is deemed a threat to her boyfriend’s football performances, and in a recent Newsweek article she was lambasted as a bad role model for girls because she is unmarried and childless. These aren’t standard red-pill grumblings about sexism or some “weird” off-shoot of Make America Great Again, as suggested in a NYT opinion piece. They are the expressed thoughts of leagues of adult men and political pundits who seek to curtail and control Taylor Swift’s sexual and reproductive agency.
These are key pillars of caste. As Wilkerson contends in her book, enforcing marriage relationships that occur only within one’s caste group is essential to the functioning of this hierarchical system. Known as endogamy, this practice is concerned with the genetic composition and the political destiny of a group of people.
Two other pillars of the caste system that resonate with anti-Swift vitriol are dehumanization and using cruelty as a measure of social control. The machines of capitalism, entertainment, and social media coalesce to feed the industry of regulating and subjugating Taylor. Media stories abound about why it’s “cool” to hate her.
In her masterful essay in the New York Times Magazine, Wilkerson writes:
“When we assume that a woman is not equipped to lead the meeting or the company or the country, or that a person of color or an immigrant could not be the one in authority, when we feel a pang of shock and resentment, a personal wounding and sense of unfairness and perhaps even shame at our discomfort upon seeing someone from a marginalized group in a job or car or house or college or appointment more prestigious than we have been led to expect, we are reflecting the efficient encoding of caste, the subconscious recognition that the person has stepped out of his or her assumed place in our society. We are responding to our embedded instructions of who should be where and who should be doing what, the breaching of the structure and boundaries that are the hallmarks of caste.”
Breaching our rightful place
In many places in the world, women are outperforming men in education, occupation, or mental health. These developments are framed as exemplars of women breaching our rightful place, and they are used to justify our oppression. We see this in the roll back of reproductive rights and increasingly restrictive rules about whether a pregnant woman who is abused can leave her marriage.
Cue the image of Margaret Atwood wearing a black coat and pink checkered shirt holding a white coffee mug with the following message emblazoned on it: “I told you so.”
We’re being written out of social and legislative spaces, as though our claims to things like abortions and divorce are illegitimate. We’re being threatened or attacked for using our voices, and Taylor Swift is perhaps the most golden victim of this dystopian-yet-all-too-real scenario.
Instead of being celebrated as a beacon of female storytelling and emotional vulnerability, she is deemed by many, and not just from men or the far right, to be undeserving of happiness. She’s routinely debased because she has the courage to claim for herself something that the center prefers to rule—her story. Her own way of making sense of the strange, often dangerous world we inhabit and her place in it.
The collective actions against Swift exemplify what Wilkerson calls “scenes of caste,” which is when people choose caste solidarity over empathy. I doubt that millions of people actually care about her relationship with Kelce, but they’ve been socially conditioned to recognize a boundary breach as a threat.
As Wilkerson says, in her NYT Magazine piece: “…caste is the wordless usher in a darkened theater, flashlight cast down in the aisles, guiding us to our assigned seats for a performance.” Yet, she also reminds us that caste is an artificial hierarchy built upon ideas that are socially constructed.
This means it can be deconstructed and resisted, which millions of Swifties already know.
As Taylor writes in the song ‘Clara Bow’, where the title of this article comes from:
Beauty is a beast that roars
Down on all fours, demanding more
Only when your girlish glow flickers just so
Do they let you know
It’s hell on earth to be heavenly
