The lives that don’t matter: The Brahmin as a hate figure

The current hyperbolic preoccupation with race in the Anglosphere has provided an opportunity for some to link caste to race as though they are cognate phenomena of oppression. In the article at this link, it is argued that this coupling of caste and race, and depiction of Brahmins as the epitome of whiteness at the apex of the Indian caste system, is actually generated from within the same western framework that treats race as a salient difference. The attempt by post-colonials to present caste as a variant of race tells us nothing about the Indian culture, but rather indexes how they have tried to make the alien western framework of race their own.