Free Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents by Isabel Wilkerson Page B

World they were creating.
    They joined forces with other Shorts around the world, with whom they made common cause. With their superior guns and stratagems, they conquered the Talls, captured and enslaved them for a quarter millennium, and built a great democracy. They told themselves the Talls deserved no better, that they were uncultured, backward, inferior, had not made use of their strengths and resources. They were an altogether different species, born to serve the conquerors, deserving of their debasement. They were a separate and subordinate race.
    This story of conquest sounds preposterous to our ears, not because it did not happen, but because of the seeming absurdity of height as a means of categorizing humanity and determining race.
    We could have been divided up by any number of other traits. And yet height, like skin pigment, isoverwhelmingly an inherited trait, controlled by as much as 80 percent of one’s genes and fairly consistent in family and tribal groupings. As with the pigment of skin, height falls within a wide range among adults in the species, with most people in the middle and with extremes at the poles, from a maximum of seven feet for adults to a minimum of under four feet. Were height the measure for determining race, as arbitrary a measure as any and less arbitrary than some, the Dutch people of the Netherlands would be the same “race” as the Nilote people of South Sudan or the Tutsis of Rwanda, as they are all among the tallest in our species, even the women averaging well over six feet. On the other end, the Pygmies and Sardinians would be their own separate “race,” as they have historically been among the shortest humans.
    If current caste behavior were any guide, everyone else would be in the middle, perhaps playing up to whichever height was in power, wearing platform heels if the Tall people ruled, bragging that height ran in their families, choosing the tallest people to date and to marry to gain the advantages of the ruling caste. Stereotypes would calcify, as they already do for extremes in height, but magnify to justify the lowly or elevated position of whichever group was in power.
    In a caste system dominated by Short people, anyone in the subordinate race of Tall people would be dismissed merely as brawn, consigned to menial, servile positions, seen as good only for entertainment or servitude. Short people would be seen as born to leadership due to their presumed innate intellect and culture, admired for the longevity said to attend people smaller in stature, regarded as the standard of beauty, the default setting for human.
    Tall people would be made to feel insecure and self-conscious, gangly and unappealing, having been born at the opposite end of the ideal. Society would assume that any Tall person was good at sports and physical labor, whether or not he or she had interest or aptitude. Scientists might devise tests to measure the difference between Talls and Shorts beyond height alone, tests that would largely track the results of generations of either advantage or exclusion and likely affirm widely held assumptions about the Shorts’ inherent supremacy and the Talls’ misfortune of deficits. There would be few Tall people in the boardrooms and corridors of power, and a disproportionate number of them in prisons and on the streets. Being tall would become shorthand for inferior in a caste system ruled by Short people, and vice versa.
    Ludicrous though it may sound to us now, had height been the means of categorizing humans for centuries as it has been for skin color and facial features, people would have accepted it as the received wisdom of the laws of nature. It would have seemed ridiculous that, in an alternate universe, people would ever be divided by color, given that, clearly, it would have been obvious that height was the determining factor in beauty, intelligence, leadership, and supremacy. The idea of linking disparate groups together on the basis of an