Isabel Wilkerson, it's so nice to have this opportunity to talk to you.
Your new book is called "Caste: The Origins Of Our Discontent."
You use the word "caste." You could call it "racism in America," but you don't.
Why did you call it "Caste?"
When you don't know the country's history, our country's history,
then it seems like a completely alien language and alien term.
But then when you know our country's history,
when you really know the history of enslavement
and the history of Jim Crow, the true history of Jim Crow,
then it starts to click into place, and once you see it, you can't unsee it.
The idea of caste allows us to look past the somewhat
emotional freighted language that we're accustomed to
that kinda gets us mired in emotions of guilt and shame and blame
and allows us to sort of see things differently.
That's such a great point, right? Because for something to be racist,
someone has to be acting in a racist way upon it.
- Yeah. - And so I think that's right. It brings up a lot of guilt
in a way that caste just seems to invite a sense of examining the issue
versus feeling like you're part of the system.
We just love to have this vision of America
that doesn't match the actual history of America.
Why do you-- why do you think that is?
Well, it's a combination of things, but one of them is just to me,
the failure of our education system to truly be able
to impart the reality of our country's history.
41 of the 50 states at some point in our country's history
have laws against people marrying across racial lines.
Alabama was one of the last states to finally renounce,
to vote against its anti-misogynation laws,
and it didn't happen until the year 2000 that they finally passed a law, you know,
essentially concurring with what the Supreme Court already ruled.
And 40% of Alabama voters
voted to keep the anti-misogynation laws on the books in 2000.
Listen, my parents got married in 1958.
My dad was white, my mom was black, right?
And literally, they live in Baltimore, Maryland,
so they could not get married. They had to leave, go to D.C. to get hitched,
come back, live illegally. They had six kids.
My little brother was born the same year
The Supreme Court would overturn the ban in interracial marriage.
And people think of these things as like, "Oh, my God. Ancient history."
You're like, "I'm not so ancient."
You know, we often think about this as being ancient history.
Something that going so far back, has nothing to do with anybody alive.
Today, no adult will be alive at the point at which
African Americans will have been free for as long as they were enslaved.
That won't happen until the year of 2111.
It's the structure of human division.
It's the architecture of our hierarchy.
- It's what we've inherited. - What other signals are there,
do you think, that relate to where you fall in the caste system in this country?
Well, gender is a huge one. You know, patriarchy is real.
Immigrant status is yet another. These things have meaning.
I mean, these things determine one's standing,
one's, you know, sense of, you know the respect that is accorded a person.
The assumptions about, you know, intelligence
and resourcefulness and beauty, even.
Of course, some more extreme examples that we've seen are, you know,
people who are born to what I would call a subjugated group,
historically subjugated group, who are going about their days.
And then someone from what I would call the dominant group, you know,
asserts him or herself and intrudes upon that moment.
The two men who are at a Starbucks, you know, waiting for a friend.
Or the birdwatcher the black birdwatcher in Central Park.
Racism exists, but there's something underneath it
that seems to persist no matter what laws we pass.
Seems to be autonomic. People seem to know
who can say what in a way to an individual.
Can you buy your way out of the caste system
if you are black and wealthy?
Can you to some degree inoculate yourself
against the effects of systemic racism?
I think you can buy a buffer against some of it.
You can buy comfort for sure. You can buy distance.
I would say that, you know, when you think about someone who would say
the editor of British "Vogue," you know, Edward Enninful,
who is one of the, you know, clearly the most--
one of the most sophisticated people on the planet.
And yet when he was walking into his own office building,
the security guard stopped him and told him he needed to use the freight elevator.
So, what I say is that if you can act your way out of it,
then it's class. If you cannot act your way out of it, then it's caste.
You have talked about Germany and the eugenicists.
It wasn't until Charlottesville that, you know,
we all saw that the protesters were merging these symbols
of these two cultures across-- in the decades across an ocean.
They made the connection about the Confederacy in our country
and Nazism in Germany.
American eugenicists were writing books
that were huge bestsellers in Germany
and were, in fact, used by the Nazis in their school curriculum.
That's how interdependent these eugenicists were across the oceans.
When you look at some of the data, like a black person
being five times as likely to be stopped
without just cause compared to a white counterpart,
you know, I guess I'd like to know for the people
for whom they do have to think about it all the time.
What does it do to people?
Having to deal with the constant vigilance
and hyper vigilance of just making it through the world every day,
you know, it actually shortens the telomeres on the cells,
which opens people up to other-- other problems
that opens them up to cancers and other, you know,
other illnesses that literally can mean the longevity of a person.
It actually affects the lifespan of people who have to life with the constant fear.
What does an individual do in a system that seems
to sometimes be working against you
in order to fight against the system that's been around for such a long time?
Well, ultimately, a system is made up of individual people.
We make up the system. The system is us.
And that means that there are things that people can do.
I make mention of this term "radical empathy,"
which means that it requires each of us
to not just try to imagine ourselves in someone else's shoes,
but to be willing to do the work to truly understand
another person's experience so that we can begin to understand
not what we would do in a situation we've never been in in life and never will be,
but what it is for that person so that we can begin to see our common humanity.
We do have more power than we think we have.
Isabel Wilkerson, so nice to talk to you, as always.
What a pleasure. Thank you.
Thank you so much.