Robert L. Tsai, Boston University School of Law, and Sanford Levinson, University of Texas Law School, have posted Under What Circumstances is “Caste” Likely to Be a Useful Analytic Concept (and Should We Care)?:
There is growing interest among egalitarians to embrace "caste" to analyze forms of inequality in the United States. In this essay, we offer a few reservations about this trend. First, we note some general limits to arguments by analogy. Second, we point to some historical and legal differences between the caste system in India and the system of American slavery and segregration that followed. Third, if caste analysis were to take hold in American law, many more cultural practices (and perhaps even the value of pluralism itself) would need to be reconsidered. Fourth, there is some risk that the anti-caste project could lead to a proliferation of groups and conditions problematically characterized as "backward," and thereby paradoxically fixing social status in the political imagination. Relatedly, caste analysis in the law might obscure subtleties in material inequality. Fifth, even when caste is used purely as a trope for political mobilization, we note concerns of intelligibility and persuasiveness that ought to be taken into account.
--Dan Ernst