Isabel Wilkerson on America’s Caste System

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David Remnick: This is the Politics and More podcast. I'm David Remnick. Since the killing of George Floyd, we've seen not just a protest movement, but something like a historical reckoning. A lot of white Americans seem willing, at least more willing, to address the reality of systemic racism in the present day. We're learning terms like tone policing, white fragility, and anti-racism.

Isabel Wilkerson would like to introduce another term to our lexicon and that's the term caste. Wilkerson argues that what we have in the United States is a rigid social hierarchy, akin to the caste system in India. She writes, "We cannot fully understand the current upheavals or most any turning point in American history without accounting for the human pyramid, encrypted into us all." Wilkerson's new book is called Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents. It's just out this week, and she's previously the winner of a Pulitzer Prize and many other awards.

Now, your first book was a masterpiece on the great migration, and it was both history and personal stories of families who made that essential journey. This book is personal too in many ways, but in some ways, it's a book about the search for a metaphor, search for a better, more accurate description of what American racism is. Why is racism somehow insufficient as a description of the way we've lived in this country for centuries, really?

Isabel Wilkerson: Well, it's so interesting that you put it that way and that you mentioned The Warmth of Other Suns. because that book, as you know was about the people who were fleeing Jim Crow repression. In writing that book I was having to discover the many ways that the Jim Crow South repressed this entire group of people. In fact, all people were repressed under it. They just weren't aware of it. It was a world, as you know, in which it was against the law for a Black person and a white person to merely play checkers together. It was a world in which African Americans could not pass a white motorist on the road, no matter how slowly that person was going. Every aspect of life was so tightly controlled and scripted and restricted.

Emerging from the research into that era, I realized that race was an insufficient term to capture the depth and organized repression that people were living under. That the only word that was sufficient was caste. I find it at this moment of upheaval that we're currently in, that we need a new language. We need a new framework for understanding the divisions and how we got to where we are. In some ways, it's still held captive to the hierarchies that were created many centuries ago, before any of us were here.

David: Why is caste specifically the right language? Why is that descriptor apt to the American experience?

Isabel: Well, caste is essentially an artificial hierarchy, graded ranking of human value on a society, determines standing and respect and benefit of the doubt, access to resources through no fault or action of anyone's own. It's what you're born into. Caste is the infrastructure of our divisions that undergird the more visible delineations that we make among ourselves.

In other words, as I often say, caste is the bones, race is the skin and then class is the diction and the accent and the education, the clothing, the things that we can control as we present ourselves to the world. Each caste system creates a different metric for division of who should be where in the hierarchy. In some caste systems, it's religion and in some caste systems it maybe geography or ethnicity, and in this caste system, it's skin color or race, as we now know it to be.

David: There's a story in the book about a little boy who played baseball. His name was Al Bright from Youngstown, Ohio. What is his story, and explain why it was so important to you to include it in the book?

Isabel: That is a story that just so gets to me, it's hard even to talk about. It's a story about a little boy, Al Bright, as you said, who was on the Little League team. 1951. The Little League team he was on won the city championship. The coaches decided to take the whole team out for a celebration party. Went to a local pool, a municipal pool, meaning a public pool where they were going to go treat the kids to a pool party

Al Bright was the only Black member of the team. Upon arrival, the lifeguard instantly pulled Al Bright aside, and the lifeguard said that he would have to stay outside of the pool area. He was behind a fence and could not come into the general pool area. That actually is, in some ways, is the definition of caste, it's setting boundaries as to who can be where, and who can be admitted into spaces of privilege, and who has to be forced outside of it.

In any case, eventually, the coaches decided that they couldn't take any further. They went to the lifeguard and said, "What can we do? This is so unfair for him not to be able to go inside." What they ended up doing was they had all of the people who were in the pool, all of the white people, were forced to get out of the pool. Then, and only then, could Al Bright be brought into the pool area. He then was told to get on a raft and then the lifeguard got into the pool and he then pushed the raft around the pool for one turn. The entire time that the lifeguard was pushing him in that raft, the lifeguard said to him over and over again, "Do not touch the water. Don't touch the water.' That was a gut wrenching experience.

Even as I think about it now, it's so hard to even even capture, even imagine the pain and horror of that moment. What happened to him is what I described as one of the pillars of caste. I compile these eight pillars that are universal to caste systems that I studied. One of the essential pillars is what's called purity and pollution. Protecting the sanctity and purity of the dominating group at all costs.

In India, the Dalits, formerly known as untouchables, were not to drink from the same well as the dominant caste people, they could not be in the same waters. One of the biggest race riots that occurred in the United States was in 1919, when an African American boy, teenager was swimming in Lake Michigan, and he accidentally swam over the imaginary line between what was considered the White water, the place that white people swam, and the Black water, which is where the Black people swam.

David: Thereby polluting it.

Isabel: Exactly. Even for a second.

David: You mentioned eight pillars of caste, what are some of the other pillars that you see as universal in caste systems?

Isabel: One of the earliest pillars to be introduced during the founding of the country, was the definition of who could marry whom? That in the original caste system of India is a term called endogamy. Essentially it's focused on the dominant group, only being able to marry within the dominant group, so as to keep it pure, so they're all interconnected as well. Another pillar of caste is the religious underpinnings, finding some type of spiritual justification for the division of people. In the Western world, people turn to the story of Noah and his three sons and about the curse of Ham. To justify what the colonists were doing is that they said that people of African descent were the descendants of Ham.

These are the beginnings, the framework that we now live with. That does not mean that all of the pillars that I'm describing, which are the foundation of our society, it doesn't mean that all of them are in full force now. It means that they existed for a very long time. In fact, they existed for longer than they did not exist.

David: What do we gain by using the term caste to name our society somehow rather than the words, racism or discrimination that we're all familiar with?

Isabel: This is not to say that racism doesn't exist. It's saying that there's something more powerful, something even more powerful underneath it that we are not seeing. The studies of unconscious bias will indicate that people really do not see themselves as being racist. It's very hard to get people to even acknowledge that, to begin with. What's underneath that is the enduring impulse to still keep people in a certain place. The idea that you should always remain at the bottom. In the same way, that a caste holds a person's bones in place when there's a fracture, caste wants to hold people in a fixed place, even without conscious awareness of it.

David: Now, in Indian society, I don't think there are any Brahmin kids who spend hours daydreaming about this or that iconic Dalit figure, untouchable figure in popular culture. Whereas in the United States, and this has been the case for a long time, there are a hell of a lot of white kids going to see Denzel Washington and Will Smith movies and Beyonce and all the rest.

Black culture, as so many critics from Ralph Ellison and on, have been insistent on telling us, and they're absolutely right, is American culture. Popular culture in so many ways is Black culture. Yet, we have this huge powerful strain of racism, North and South. How to reconcile that? How to think about that in terms of your book?

Isabel: Well, I have to go back to the history of how we all got here. I mean, literally how we, as different groups, arrived to this country. People who arrived and were ultimately enslaved for 246 years, the one area or role that they were permitted to perform was to be as entertainers. To be as people who were there at the behest of the people who were deemed above them, to entertain, but more importantly, to be the butt of entertainment, meaning the minstrel sea of the 19th century.

That, however, the brilliance though of the people who were in the subordinated caste was that they turned that into their own advantage, they found this one narrow pathway that had been created, and actually made the most of it by excelling in the area that had been carved out for them.

David: Now, caste in the Indian sense comes from religion, it's inscribed in Hindu religion. When something like that is inscribed in religion it suggests a certain immutability, it can't change. Can caste, in the Indian and the American sense that you're describing it, change?

Isabel: The essential framework of a dominant group and a subordinated group, and of the middle groups that move between the two is essentially the enduring framework for our society, though we may not see it. The things that do change are who may qualify to be in the dominant group, and who might move in between the middle castes. What often remains the same is the existence of the upper, the dominant group, and the existence of the bottom group.

David: Does that suggest that a caste system has to be thrown off psychologically, or legalistically?

Isabel: There have been so many efforts in this country, noble and important efforts to address these essential injustices. It's my view that it takes more than legislation, although legislation is essential. It also takes recognition of why the legislation was unnecessary, to begin with.

David: Isabel, you've been working on this book for years with just a tremendous amount of research and reporting. But now it's being published unexpectedly into the teeth of a political uprising. I wonder what effect that's had on your thinking about the book?

Isabel: I take the longer view, essentially, of history. I had no say obviously in the timing of this, I had no wish to be in the middle of any particular moment. I view this in a transcendent way of trying to illuminate our division so that we can find a way to transcend them because we keep reliving the same movie as long as we continue to ignore what's gone before us. I view this as part of a continuum, but I am, of course, hopeful that if this opens people's hearts and minds more readily to what I've written, then that hopefully would be to the good.

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David: Isabel Wilkerson, whose new book Caste: The Origins Of Our Discontents is out now.

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