I kid you not–it’s in Time magazine this week, by Isabel Wilkerson, author of “Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents.”

In 2021 for the first time, the USA’s white population showed a decline–the only racial or ethnic group to do so, by 8.6%.

This had an effect on the caste system, defined as “an artificial, arbitrary graded ranking of human value, the underlying infrastructure of a society’s divisions.” What has the drift resulted in?…The groundswell to outlaw abortions; increased killings and harassment of non-whites, the contrived accusation of “replacement theory,” the forced abortions in refugee quarters, the stranglehold in the public schools on children’s minds about reality, the attack on adult pairings of couples unlikely to produce offspring (LGBT), taking with it the U.S. Supreme Court.

To insure white births–and to maintain the caste system–Texas will fine doctors $100,000 per abortion procedure and up to 20 years in prison. In Georgia, after a woman’s embryo has reached six weeks of gestation, people are allowed to claim them on their tax returns by allowing the state to include fetuses in the state’s population counts. There is a suspicion that red states are trying to swell their numbers so as to have a greater impact in Congress. And we are reminded that mass incarceration for nonviolent crimes by non whites keeps a disproportionate number of men from the reproductive pool for a long time.

Is it just a black-white conflict, or something darker inside us? Wilkerson remind us that Tyre Nichols was fatally beaten by five black men who were black, like him. Perhaps it’s enforcing the hierarchy in order to uphold the caste system, and to maintain one’s own place within it.

I’m reminded of reading Lyndon Johnson’s fact-checked words on Google: President Lyndon B. Johnson once said, “If you can convince the lowest white man he’s better than the best colored man, he won’t notice you’re picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he’ll empty his pockets for you.”