This is only indirectly related to the article at hand, but it effectively is an example of a 'caste' system in the United States.<p>I was born and raised in California, and ended up living in Arkansas, where I met my wife to be, who had been born and raised in Georgia (the state), near the border of Alabama.<p>My wife had always been somewhat of an outsider from her family, with the exception of her father. They were very close.<p>When we decided to marry, she asked me to meet her family, so we drove to Columbus and stayed for a week.<p>I met her father and liked him immediately. He had a thick west Georgia accent, and had a blue collar job (telephone line repair man) for decades.<p>My wife to be told me in private that her father didn't know what to make of me. In his old school southern mind, the clearest divide was between the races, and between north and south. We were white, so that wasn't an obstacle, but I'm from the 'far' west, so he didn't instinctively know what 'box' I belonged in.<p>She suggested that I ask him if we could go out and shoot on his out of town hunting property, which I did. He was delighted but wary.<p>So the next day he loaded up his guns and drove us out to his 34 acre hunting lot some miles out of town.<p>He had confided in my wife to be earlier: "I don't know if this city boy knows how to shoot. I don't know if he'll be safe."<p>Unbeknownst to him, while I had grown up in the city with my grandparents, my grandfather owned a lot in the desert outside of Los Angeles, and we'd taken HIS arsenal out there many times to go shooting.<p>Back on the rural lot in Georgia, he handed me a .308 Winchester bolt action and one round, and asked me to shoot a sapling about 100 feet away, while pulling himself and his daughter to stand behind me. I loaded the rifle, aimed and shot that little tree down. He asked me to do it again, and I did.<p>He leaned into his daughter and said, "Ok Michelle I think this boy is all right."<p>While he and his family had been friendly to me before, after that moment, I was treated like family.<p>Apparently at least some people from far off California know how to shoot.<p>Years after the wedding, I asked him about that day, and he was embarrassed. I told him not to be, that it was fine.<p>He said that he didn't know any other way.<p>In most every way I could determine, Mr. Shaw was a good, kind and honest man, but he grew up and continued to hold views that many, including his daughter and son in law, found repugnant. But he had learned to keep them to himself, and when he died, those views died with him, and were not passed on to his daughter, nor his grandson.<p>I'm taking a risk saying this, but here it goes: these things take time to change. Before a hundred years ago, for the most part, I believe the 'rules of society' only changed very slowly, over generations, and when such changes happened quickly for whatever reason, the results were almost always terrible and bloody.<p>Our civilization is learning how to change more quickly, and we definitely need to focus on figuring out how to be even more flexible, all with sensitivity and sensibility.