# Baldwin and The British East India Company - real complaints but also distant past. Date: 2026-06-26 --- --- Baldwin and The British East India Company - real complaints but also distant past. Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents - that seems to be the real deal. But in Obama's mind even that book is describing the past as he explains at a NJ rally : *The first story says “We the People” means just some of us, that in order to qualify, you’ve got to be the right color. You’ve got to come from the right family. You’ve got to worship the right way. It says that even though we got rid of a king, that was the whole point of the revolution, there’s still a caste system in America, a pecking order of who makes decisions and who obeys, who gets opportunity and who is obliged to serve.* *And that story is policed by fear and by force, and it tries to convince people that for their group to win, another group has got to lose. It tries to convince people that if somebody doesn’t look like you, or doesn’t think like you or practice religion exactly the way you do, they must be a threat to your way of life and need to be put in their place.* *That’s how Donald Trump thinks about America, that that’s what Make America Great Again means, putting people like him back in charge, even when they don’t know what the hell they’re doing.* *That’s one story, and that story has been part of America. You can pretend it hasn’t been, but you can try to whitewash school books and go to national parks and say, let’s get rid of that, that sign that says Native Americans used to live here. You can do all that, but that story has always been part of America.* *And that story isn’t even new. It isn’t even uniquely American. For most of human history, it’s the way society worked. There was a hierarchy, and there were lords, and then there were peasants. And some people had everything and some people had nothing. There are all kinds of countries that still operate that way. And for a long time, that story of caste and privilege and concentrated power was the law of the land in America.* No the educational caste system currently in place in America is not a past thing and most of us elites are still supporting it one way or another.