The Caste System Has Been Modernized
By Sara Afifi
@saratafifi
Living in the 21st Century, we are apparently the most educated human species in history. We like to think of ourselves as more advanced, powerful, and knowledgeable than our ancestors. This is not how I see it. We are more destructive than we have ever been; the only difference is we are hiding it behind the name of civilization.
A clear example of what I am saying is slavery. According to the National Geographic Society, slavery was officially abolished in 1865; yet, all I can see around me nowadays is modern slavery.
In one of the articles The Caravan’s Farah Abbas highlights the question whether we are participants of modern slavery. The article features the webinar held by the Gerhart Center where Siddharth Kara, an activist on modern slavery, explored the phenomena of slavery, forced labor, child labor, and other modes of servile labor exploitation at the bottom of global supply chains.
A quote I encountered by Kara perfectly summarizes the situation we are living in today.
“We wear slavery every day, we eat slavery every day, we use slavery every day, and that is because there is slavery, child labor, and other forms of extreme labor exploitation at the bottom of dozens of global supply chains across the Global South,” Kara emphasized.
What I find problematic is that not only do we buy products that are built on slavery, but we also engage in fierce competition to own them. We long to buy the best high-edged products, show off our capital, and take pride in material properties contaminated by traces of enslaved people’s blood, sweat, and tears who exerted efforts to manufacture what we exclusively consider valuable.
Consumerism and the capitalistic views embedded in our society are blinding our judgments and our ethical standards. Not only am I a consumer of products that exploit people, but as a Business student, I am also one who advocates for them whether I like it or not.
We might know that modern slavery exists, but we will never be able to bring it to an end. In other words, we live in a modernized caste system that is too big to fail.
