Isabel Wilkerson, "Caste" (with Bryan Stevenson)

tonight's guests whom both have many more accomplishments than i can list in this introduction isabel wilkerson is an american journalist and the first african-american woman to win a pulitzer prize in journalism her debut work of nonfiction the warmth of other sons won many awards including the national books critics circle award the heartland prize for nonfiction and the dayton literary prize we are here to celebrate her latest book cass the origins of our discontents oprah winfrey called it a must read for humanity last week when she announced cass as her most recent oprah book club pick we are also excited to announce that cast is officially a new york times bestseller it's number two on the combined nonfiction list so congratulations to ms wilkerson for that and tonight uh moderating our conversation is brian stevenson the founder and executive director of the equal justice initiative a human rights organization in montgomery alabama in 2018 he opened the two cultural centers the legacy museum and the national memorial for peace and justice he is the author of the new york times best-selling and award-winning book just mercy please welcome isabelle wilkerson and brian stevenson uh well hello everyone and uh thank you for joining us i cannot tell you how excited i am to have this opportunity uh to talk to one of my favorite writers in the world the extraordinary uh isabel wilkerson i i've been so jazzed about this moment and of course um reading cast for me has just been we were talking we've already had a really great conversation before y'all could join uh we were talking and i just was talking about how therapeutic it is so i'm thrilled to be here and i i want to start is what we're just asking like what is this like cast has already been declared an american classic and i think it's generating a lot of excitement it's praise that is well deserved i'm just going to put it out there should win every major book award in america um you know i think of you as a kind of chef who who takes her time and doesn't put her delights out until she's ready and i know random house has been sweating you when is the book going they probably wanted a book six years ago the fact that you took your time and you have crafted something that is uh absolutely extraordinary but i want to begin with this is it a relief to see all of these great reviews and to have this great response or are you just indifferent to are you going to speak your truth you're not worried about what people say how does it feel in this moment well you know i i spent so much time on my books that i don't even i can't even imagine being at this moment i spend more time in the book than in this part of it like this part is this like little blip because you know the word one for the sons was 15 years so i often say if it was a human being it would be in high school and dating that's how long so my the vast majority of my time is in the process of creating so this is just a continuum and there so much is happening in terms of how we're managing covet 19 and all the additional things that it's hard to process and all so much as virtual anyway that's really hard to process but yeah i'm you know obviously i'm i'm thrilled that people are reading it it's really important to me that people read it because there's a lot in it as you know there's a lot yeah well a lot of us are really excited for you because we're just energized that people are going to encounter this really remarkable um dissection of so much about our experience that i don't think has been addressed i guess i wanted to start with that you know you're a renowned journalist you seem to have developed an interest in journalism early on i know you were involved in journalism as a high school student yeah and you went to howard and and became the editor-in-chief of that really well-respected campus newspaper and then got all of these um opportunities of course the first black woman to win a pulitzer prize with the new york times um but i when i read cast i think of it as a masterwork in sociology i can't imagine any sociology student in the next 30 years being able to graduate without reading this book because you do something so remarkable in this intersection of course it's african-american studies and of course it's history but it's also this really deft use of sociology and i guess i'm just curious where that started did you always have this kind of interest in the sociology of race that's been with you a long time or did you develop this idea you know more recently and just we're looking for some other way to explain and articulate these concerns well you know i i specialize in narrative non-fiction so in order to tell a story you have to call upon all disciplines that are at your disposal you know sociology anthropology history psychology economics literature whatever it is necessary in order to tell the story and of course i spent a lot of time normally doing a lot of ethnography spending time with people getting to to really spend time to know and feel what they're feeling and what their experience has been you know often say that narrative nonfiction is the closest that you get to being another person which is what i specialized in and focus on with warmth of the suns and it was warm from other suns that led to this book because in that book in one vote of sons people may not realize that you know in writing about six million people who were fleeing the jim crow south um leaving a place where was actually against law for a black person and a white person to merely play checkers together there were separate segregated bibles and almost anything that could be segregated was that when they were when i was describing that i realized that racism was not the the most sufficient word to describe what they were leaving it was deeper and um bigger and more um there's something almost primordial about it that was beyond just simply not liking someone and that's not all that racism is but but that element of emotion was not the only thing there and so i began using the word cast with that book the warmth of the sons does not have racism in it it uses the word caste system and that's what led me to this book and and you know i should probably take the time to say what what cast is cass is is essentially an artificial arbitrary often random graded ranking of human value in a society and it's what determines one's standing and respect benefit of the doubt uh access to resources assumptions of intelligence and beauty even all of those things that are recorded people or withdrawn from people based upon where they are perceived to be in the caste system and the american caste system of course you know began uh with the with the arrival of the colonists here uh you know to uh virginia and and uh with the arrival also of the enslaved people to build the land uh to build a country for for free and it went on for 246 years so those were the origins of our hierarchy here in this country and this is an effort to try to understand that and see how we still live under the shadow of that to this day yeah i so appreciate that search for language for words that give a more complete meaning to the experience and you know and that comes through in the warmth of other sons and and when we opened our memorial on on lynching we started doing our work you know we began using this word terrorism to describe the experience that black people were suffering because people could easily think that the victims were the thousands of people who were lynched and exclude the millions of people who were terrorized who had to flee and give up their lands and to you know not develop the wealth that they would have if they had been able to stay in their homes and that search for language is really so important because it gives you a perspective that you wouldn't otherwise have and and what i love about cass is that you you're throughout the entire book you're defining what it means you're showing us how it plays out you're giving us the pillars you're interpreting and articulating over and over again the other thing you do though is you make comparisons you bring in the experience of the dalits in india the the so-called untouchables and you talk about uh the experience of of of jewish people in nazi germany was that your conception from the beginning why was it important to have this global approach to kind of use these references to the experience of people in india and people in germany well as you uh know from your uh incredible and just necessary uh uh critical work that you do you know that a lot of people really we don't really know the history even of our own country what actually happened in this country as you said the language has has almost obscured uh the the dangers that people faced and lived with every single day and so what i knew was as you know i knew what the jim crow south was like from having written the warmth of the suns what i did not know that i was using this word cast but not really fully understanding how exactly does the caste system work uh in say the originating cast system or the most recognizable one in india what other places might i look at in the world to give us insight really to illuminate our own hierarchies the focus is on the united states with this book and i wanted to look at other places to have a better understanding of why the subtitle is so important the origins of our own discontent and so of course the first place i was going to go or have to look at obviously would be india the originating one the most recognizable one to see what how is it set up how does it how does it work what are the behaviors and similarities what are the points of intersection along with the things that might be different and to better understand that and then charlottesville happened and when we when all of us saw what happened in charlottesville we could see these symbols merging the symbols of the confederacy and of nazism in the uh paraphernalia and the banners and the flags and the uh and and the t-shirts and all the things that they were wearing they were claiming and recognizing a similarity they connected these two cultures and societies and there we saw the symbolism of questions of memory memory of the civil war memory of enslavement memories of american history and so as a result of that that sparked my um you know my sense of imperative to find out how has germany uh dealt with the aftermath of the civil of the world war ii how have they reconciled their history what is it that they now do to as they remember this and and so this came together as a result of charlottesville the the ralliers the protesters there made that connection and i followed it but then what i discovered was i had no idea of how how much more there was there was so much more to discover to to learn that that the that the that german eugenesis actually were in dialogue continuing dialogue with american eugenesis in the years and decades leading up to the third right to learn that american eugenesis wrote these books that were huge sellers in germany and the you know the nazis needed no one no one to teach them how to hate and yet they sent people they sent researchers to the united states to study the jim crow laws to see how america had subjugated and subordinated african americans as they were and to study those laws of anti-miscegenation laws and segregation laws to see how they might actually apply it there and they actually debated these laws the jim crow laws here in the united states they debated those laws as they were considering and and crafting what would ultimately become the nuremberg laws and it just was it was wrenching to see uh the interconnectedness there yeah yeah i i mean it is so fascinating to me because i do feel like what has happened since world war ii is that there has been uh a more comprehensive investigation into the holocaust yes we have hundreds of films about that narrative and we have when i went to berlin what was striking to me is that they have that incredible holocaust to the memorial in the center of the city but what was striking to me is that it's an abstract sculpture it's these shapes and there were no words there were no descriptions of the holocaust they trust people to walk into that space without a narrative about the holocaust and still have an informed experience i remember coming back and when we were building our memorial i thought we can't do what they did we're going to have to tell the story of enslavement and how it became this era of terror and how lynchings happened because we haven't done that work in this country to allow people to have a narrative that would get them to appreciate what we are signifying and it is fascinating to me i kept thinking about this as i was reading cast you know there are no adolf hitler statues in germany it would be unconscionable for someone to actually try to honor the architects of the third right yet in the american south the landscape is littered with this iconography and i think you understand that differently when you think about a dominant caste shaping the landscape and a lower caste doing all it can but still not being able to change that fundamental landscape and i i guess i'm curious how that understanding of caste helps you understand uh the the the evolution of uh where we are now in terms of this begrudging holding on charlottesville holding on to these symbols well it it it it's stunning that you you made the reference to the lack of there's there's nothing uh in the berlin monument which is massive in the middle of the city you know prime real estate in the middle of the city devoted to as it should be honoring those who perish during the holocaust and then there are many many other museums many of the headquarters and buildings that the nazis had had were are now devoted to education everything where the final solution had been voted had been voted upon that's now a museum and i went to as many of them as i could to absorb how they were remembering and how they were absorbing um their own sense of responsibility to memory and uh i think that it it was a reminder too that they have done so much work that they have the luxury as you said of not even having to explain certain things because everyone is on the same everyone is pretty much on the same page obviously there are people there's still resurgent uh dissidents but but in terms of education in terms of accepting that this was the history they're pretty much on board with that and we have a long way to go to just get on the same page as a country as to what even happened and you know when after the war for the suns came out one of the things that i would hear over and over and over again from people was they would say to me i had no idea i'm this book is about what it was like to be african-american during the 80 or 90 years of the jim crow regime and people who lived during that era would say to me i had no idea and that means that we really you know so many americans really do not know our own history we're not on the same page about our history and so that's the reason why as as you're saying there is a there's an added responsibility with anything that we might do to bring people uh up to speed to bring them on board to be able to understand why it is that we do the things that we're doing in our education and and that's that's a profound statement that you've made just i had not thought of it that way yeah well i i mean this a really brilliant way of integrating history with narrative storytelling it's really remarkable and one of the things you do and i referenced this before we came on you're such a gifted storyteller and the warmth of other sons you just present these stories that just are so compelling and i love the story you told about a father who names his daughter miss i just thought this was such a great part because of course growing up black you know the indignation that black people have had to experience because they're not given these terms of of respect and there's a story about ralph abernathy going to mississippi in the 1960s and you know black preachers during the civil rights era had to encourage and inspire people but also promise something because they were going through so much and people were feeling really bad and he got up in front of this church and he kept saying you know we won't fight we're going to fight in one of these days we're going to be called we're going to get the terms of respect we need they're going to call us miss and mrs and mr and sir and all of this kind of stuff he says after we fight and get our civil rights things going to change so much it's not even going to be called the state of mississippi anymore it's just going to be sippy take the miss and take it for ourselves and it res and it spoke to this kind of psychological burden that a lot of black people have had to endure and we've not really created much space to talk about that and one of the things that i found really powerful is that you are constantly shining on light on the multiple indignities that black americans have had to endure the humiliation the the marginalization and i would love to hear you talk about why you think that's a part of the analysis that is relevant and essential for people to understand well i think one of the things that happens as a result of a caste system is that it creates artificial divisions and um separation spatially and um what happened with this one of the pillars is endogamy which means essentially people cannot marry outside of their cast in india uh in in the in much in the united states for most of its history actually there were anti-miscegenation laws in the majority of states at one time or the other and of course uh the nuremberg laws also outlawed marriage across what they call racial lines and so when you have these segregated lineages then that means that people have less of a stake in the well-being of one of other people it serves as an additional barrier to empathy and understanding and a sense of connectedness for by for community and so we can't even begin to imagine how written we are actually as a as a society because we have had these parallel lineages in fact um these anti-miscegenation laws and hierarchy of caste actually is the form of curating race because if you are restricted to the people who only who you are permitted to to marry or enter into inter relate with then that means that that's creating and reinforcing the very difference that is used to divide people to begin with and of course the originating ones you know we say race is a social construct and it is a social construct in that it was a creation people were not black before before uh you know we used those terms that race as we know it is only 500 or so years old and when you think about the long arc of history that's not very much time these are creations and and this society could have used any number of other characteristics they could have used as a reference in the book of you know of talls and shorts meaning that that could have been used as the arbitrary random delineation for the categorizing of people but instead the term you know the ideology grew around race and so i think that one of the things that i am speaking about here is trying to shed light on how we have been divided for so long that we don't realize we don't even see the joists and the beams and the and the um the pillars inside the building i'd refer to you know our country as an old house and you know you can't see those joists and beams you can only see what's physical um what's what's visible and i often describe a race as you know cast as the bones race as the skin and then class the third leg of that division is would be the the accents and the clothes and the addiction and education that we might get that that would allow us to move up the things that we can control but in any case these are creating divisions that the uh the hierarchy of the caste system creates divisions that then makes us feel not almost assures that people will not see as much of themselves and others and that's one of the great tragedies of a hierarchy like this anyway of any caste system is that it closes people off to potentially uh individuals who they would have amazing incredible relationships with but they are not permitted to in their mind and in the society at large yeah yeah i you know i've been giving these talks where i i say we're not free in america that this long history of racial injustice has created the kind of smog in the air that we all breathe in and it makes all of us sick it doesn't matter whether you're black or white and none of us is free because we we can't be the people we were meant we can't love anybody and everybody and it's a burden on all of us but what i loved about what cast is you actually create language that helps people understand at least what i'm trying to say when i say we're not free is that we're bound by these casts we are bound by these artificial lines and we are all going to be this we're all going to be burdened by that at one level or another some more than obvious uh obviously but it means that none of us can be the kind of free people that i think we were designed to be no you're absolutely right one of the uh there are tons of metaphors in the book as you know i mean i i do like my metaphors one of my one of the metaphors is you know i became fascinated with the word cast as a word so i thought about you know the idea of cast that go the what goes on your bones on an arm when you have fractured bones and a cast is there literally to hold your bones in place in order to fuse them back together to put them in their place um when you think about cast of a play and the characters in a play and how everyone in a play knows where they're supposed to be stage left stage right in the front or in the back they know their lines and if they're very invested in the play they will know other people's lines they'll know the whole script and to your point about the smog or the pollution that we breathe you might say the psychic uh pollution that we might breed when we think about apply it to uh cast and hierarchy then it's something that you know that everyone knows the script and so when someone steps out of their place on the stage it throws the entire production off everybody knows this person's supposed to be over here wait a minute now what do we do and that's really in some ways that's one of the hallmarks of cast is that it's it's there to maintain the boundaries of these artificial of the artificial ranking and that if we all have been raised and and programmed to the rules and the expectations and the customs of caste then we all know where people are supposed to be who's expected to be in the corner office who's expected to be in the mail room who's likely to be the janitor i mean we all know and have been exposed to the expectations of the characters that that you might imagine uh or apply in an actual caste system and so this has an effect that that gets inside our bones gets inside of how we see one another and even ourselves and it has ramifications for beyond you know beyond um large and small i mean on everyday level and also macro level yeah but that's one of the again really amazing things i i loved about the book and and and you tell these stories and you do them so skillfully but it was interesting because there was a moment i was moved to tears several times um both because the story you told was so heartbreaking you tell the story about the little league baseball player oh my goodness and um you know him sitting outside where all of his teammates are having fun and then you just imagine them passing him things through this created barrier and they finally persuade him to get in the pool and the whole time he's in the pool he's being told you know don't touch the water all of that and what was heartbreaking was to kind of read that but the other thing it did was it just triggered for me my own little league stories right because you know we came up of an age where it's the end of jim crow we still have all of the residue of jim crow we know the rules but with then we were told we have civil rights and so with the front lines of going into these spaces that people hadn't gone into before and we're encountering that we're kind of getting the micro aggressions and the humiliations that you wouldn't get if you didn't even try to get into that white space and i and it caused me to stop and i started remembering things about playing little league and all of the people would say and these things that people would do and and i'm just curious i mean for me as a reader it was very at times challenging to kind of sit back and remember things remember things that would happen when i went to the store with my mother and they wouldn't put the change in her hand they'd put the change on the counter and they'd make her pick it up and she would sometimes refuse because she was from philadelphia and didn't wasn't prepared to embrace all of those norms and the anxiety we would have and how we would say mom i said mom i'll go into the store because i was worried about the conflict and all of these things and i'm wondering for you how i mean was writing this book and thinking with such clarity about class challenging in ways that made you re-evaluate some of the experiences you have you tell that incredibly moving story about when you were covering writing in chicago and trying to do an interview and a person with an exception were there moments that you kind of had to you reinterpreted or re reevaluated things you'd gone through when you began to think about it through the prism of cast well you know as a as a uh someone who's been you know uh so accustomed to is that like my go-to is just to start writing things down whenever something happens so i write a lot of things down so a lot of these things have been written down and i had a storehouse i mean as we both all you know of course we all have a storehouse of experiences you just start to think back and then it all kind of kind of floods back to you and i had to think hard about what to include i mean the things that i'm including are actually not at all the worst things that have ever happened to me of course these are kind of some of them are quite mundane actually and that's that actually is part of the uh tragedy of it is that they are so mundane so you know the case where i you know i reached out to these people for a pretty routine story i was doing while i was a national correspondent for the new york times and call up with the people and you know everyone is lined up for their for the interviews meaning i had a lineup of interviews i was going to be conducting that day and everything is was fine until i got to the last one got to this place uh this retail establishment that was not busy there was there was no one uh there were no customers there at that time in the afternoon and um the person i was there to interview the store manager was not in uh yet uh he was expected but he was not there yet and the clerk said just you know he should be here any minute you could just uh stand here and he'll be here in a minute and a man walks in he's very rushed he's kind of frazzled uh he's you know trying to take his coat off while he's trying to get situated this is clearly the man that i'm there to interview the storm manager and the clerk uh gestures toward him and says gestures toward him for me saying you know go ahead and talk with him so i go over to that to him and i say i'm you know i'm here to um you know i'm isabelle wilkerson to interview you and uh he's he said well i i can't talk with you right now i'm very very busy i'm getting ready for a very important interview with the new york times and i said well i am i'm isabella wilkerson with the new york times i'm the one here to interview and he said well how do i know that and there's nobody there and there's literally nobody there i it's him me and the and the clerk and uh he's late anyway so whoever would have been there was not there if i wasn't the person and so he said so i said he said well well do you have a business card and it happened that was the end of the day and you know to your point about how you know we we walk a fine line you there's no room for error and i happen not to have a business card and uh so i said i don't have a business card i've been i've been working all day and i'm out of them he said well let me see your id and i said well i shouldn't have to show you my id i mean i'm here to interview you no one else is here i'm with the new york times you say well i need to see your id so i gave him my driver's license and he looked at and he said you don't have anything with the new york times on it and i said i'm here to interview you we're already 15 or 20 minutes into what was supposed to be in the interview um i'm here to interview and we're wasting time and he said i'm gonna have to ask you to leave because the new york times will be here any minute and so i had to walk out and then try to figure out um you think to yourself what is it that just happened um processing it it's been many years and and it's only now that i'm processing it and recognizing now that i have the benefit of the all the research that i've done to put it in perspective having to do with the expectations of who is supposed to be where who would be doing what and to all evidence to the contrary so sticking to that script in the mind that despite evidence to the contrary you still do not believe what is evident self-evident uh and and actually losing out i mean if you multiply this times millions of people who might be going through something like this as they go about trying to get their job done trying to work you can see how this could affect um millions of people you know on a given day many hundreds of thousands of businesses that are affected by this when their workers are not able to complete their tasks or there's some disruption because of something like this and then how it also um how it also can um drain the soul you know drain the soul of the energy that you need in order to do the kind of work that just just to get through the day so it has a massive massive impact and of course in the case of him he didn't get what he wanted he was very excited to talk with the new york times he wanted to be in the paper and he did he didn't get it i mean he wouldn't he didn't he didn't let me interview him so he didn't get in there i wanted to ask you about your experience if you wouldn't mind oh no i'd be happy to you know i was we were talking beforehand because i i and i so identified with all these multiple moments because i you know i i've argued a bunch of cases at the u.s supreme court and i often talk about having just won this case where we were able to persuade the court that they can no longer sentence children to life without parole have been convicted of non-homicides and because we were doing these cases all over the country i was actually representing dozens of kids in iowa and and nebraska and going to these courtrooms i'd never been to before and i actually went to a courtroom in the midwest not the deep south and i had my suit and tie on and i think like you i've been basically oriented to over perform so i always get there early and i was sitting at defense counsel's table and the judge walked in and when he saw me sitting there he got angry and he said hey hey hey hey you get back out there in the hallway you wait until your lawyer gets here i don't want any defendant sitting in my corporate outdoor lawyer and i had to apologize i said i'm sorry your honor i didn't introduce myself i'm brian stevenson i'm the lawyer and the judge started laughing and the prosecutor started laughing and i made myself laugh because i didn't want to disadvantage my client yes who was facing life without parole i knew he was more vulnerable than i was so i made myself laugh and we did the hearing and what i was sharing with isabel earlier is that when i got in the car i actually thought about the fact i've argued these cases at the u.s supreme court i've got this harvard law degree i've got all these other things and i'm still required to laugh at my own humiliation and there is something important about recognizing that reality that experience and in fact it leads me to this question i wanted to ask you you have this unbelievable story it comes right at the end of your pillar section i was absolutely blown away by this and you talked about how at the end of world war ii uh the public school district in columbus ohio decided to hold an essay contest challenging students to consider the question what to do with hitler after the war absolutely blew me away it was the spring of 1944 the same year that a black boy was forced to jump to his death in front of his stricken father over the christmas card the boy had sent to a white girl at work you talk about that earlier another powerful story but in that atmosphere you write a 16 year old african-american girl thought about what should befall hitler and she won the student contest with a single sentence put him in black skin and let him live the rest of his life in america it's just devastating and i'm i'm just curious what you want people to do with that kind of narrative in this kind of story i want people to see you know i i describe again that building that old house that you you know when it rains you don't want to go in the basement and see what the rains have brought yeah and you don't go in that basement it's at your own peril you're going to have to deal with the consequences whether you know what's in there or not you're going to not knowing does not protect you from the consequences of it and i want people to go and to know what has happened in this country what has happened to people who have been assigned to the subordinated caste and the effect that it has on people in the dominant caste the false um the false elevations that that actually can weigh people down in unexpected ways and so i i wanted i want people to know because as we were saying just so i'm still struck by what you said about how that berlin memorial has no no doesn't need any description or explanation because everyone knows and here not everyone knows so we have a huge task before us of getting everyone to know and you know there's there's a there's a line in the warmth of the sun that gets repeated a lot and that had to do with dr foster when he was getting ready to leave uh uh the south and he went to see a taylor who went to a white man who who he was saying you know i'm going to be leaving leaving for california um i i can't you know work here as a doctor because i can't work at the hospital and the man didn't understand he said why can't you work at saint francis hospital and the man did not realize a basic fundamental fact for uh for uh a black person in that era didn't understand it and so the question that i asked and trying to process that moment is to say how is it that some people can be in a prison and those outside cannot see the bars yeah yeah and this is an attempt to see the bar so that all of us can be free yeah it's so so powerful so powerful one of the things that came to mind for me when i was reading the book um you know when you think about transformation and change um you know there's usually a change in power the places i mean the the the dollars are still struggling in india we're obviously struggling in this country you know i think about the transformation that happens in south africa after apartheid because there's a black majority they have political power yes now facilitate things and in rwanda there was a military intervention that changed things the germans lost the war and because they lost the war there is this reckoning with history and i'm curious how you think the um absence of any transfer of power in america impacts our ability to deal honestly with cast to kind of confront cass in a way that gets us to a better place how power intersects with this new knowledge this new understanding about the hierarchy of american life well i mean that gets us to the projections of 2042 yeah in this country when the demographic uh composition of this country is expected to change to a configuration that none of us have ever seen that has not existed in american history in which there is no longer the historic majority of white people identified as white uh in this country and that people of color would be in the majority numeric majority i uh you know without any intervention without any enlightenment without any awakening or reckoning of of our history this will just be a continuation in which the numbers would not be the determining factor of who is in charge and who has the power and who has the influence it could end up being just a replication um that would be an even more um distressing um you know distribution of power because the numbers would not be there for the power that would be held by the people who had been in the majority before so we're at a point where we are looking at a point where we have to really think hard about who we want to be um what kind of country do we want to be um and it's a chance if we are making the most of it to make an even better fairer country um the question will be up to everyone yeah yeah well i i was really struck in the first few pages of the book you give essentially a summation of the 2016 presidential uh election and i told my staff i said isabelle wilkerson would be a masterful lawyer she has closing argument skills that are unparalleled because you know what happens in a courtroom is that they hear day after day of tedious evidence and even though it's all proving the point it can be so kind of much that you don't actually and so the skillful lawyer has to give a closing argument that puts it all together and i have to say the summation you give about what happened in 2016 is devastating and i loved it because in many ways um you're an historian you're a sociologist you're an anthropologist you are this brilliant craft beautifully crafting writer but i see you as trying to persuade as trying to move people as advocating and i guess before we open this up to the i'm just curious what the verdict what kind of verdict are you looking for how do you want people to respond to this book react to the book internalize the book and then move forward i i want to see a world without caste and that's what the epilogue is about i want to see a world in which we do not see division and difference when we look at someone who may be physically may have a different look about them but the first thing that we see is another another member of our species i want us to to exalt and be as happy to see someone who looks different from us succeed and do well as someone who looks exactly like us and i'd like to see the barriers fall and the divisions to wane away and that we can recognize that we have so much more in common than we've been led to believe i'd like us to be able to see past the walls that have been built um not by anyone alive today but once you know then it does become a responsibility of those of us alive today like inheriting a house you didn't have anything to do with how it was built before whatever is wrong with it was maybe built in the foundation before but once you take ownership then it is your responsibility and i think it's all of our responsibility to know and to learn and to have humility and ultimately everything i write is really about love it really is it's about love love love and of of one's family love extending out to community love extending out to country and love to of the species in the planet that's really what i'm writing about yeah well i think that's what i find so um alluring and um affirming about your work is that that comes through and um i have to say you know after i read the warmth of other sons um and and more in the last like 10 years of my i find myself talking about my foreparents so much more than i ever did before i start talking about my great-grandparents who were enslaved in virginia and i all these stories about my grandmother who was that classic african-american matriarch who was tough but kind and loving and i am i'm actually rethinking the things that the generation did for me and um you know i was talking to my siblings the other day and i you know we were poor in this rural racially segregated community and my great-grandfather learned to read as an enslaved person in virginia even though he could have lost his life for that and when emancipation came um my grandmother would say told me that all of the formerly enslaved people would come to their house every night and he would stand up and read the newspaper good night and she would sit next to him because she loved how he could give to the community just by knowing how to and she begged him to learn to read and he taught her how to read and and she had 10 children and my mom was the youngest of her 10 kids but she insisted that all of her children be good readers and when my mom uh after we were born she gave that desire for reading and i remember you know growing in this kind of kind of poor rural community my mother went into debt to buy us the world book encyclopedia and our other friends they had bicycles and basketballs and all these other cool things we had the world book encyclopedia and she wouldn't let us take it out of the house because but i now think about that gift of reading and language and word as really a gift rooted in love and that's really the way i i just respond when i when i finish cast when i finish i just feel like it's a gift of extraordinary love by an extraordinary person who has this ability to make us see things we need to see have to see if we're going to get to a better place so i i just cannot tell you how excited i am about people being out there and how grateful i am i've got to let other people start asking some questions pull this up uh let's see um someone is asking about casts within community and i did find this really interesting in your book too because um you know you really highlight how this long history of enslavement followed by terror and lynching followed by segregation creates a different kind of black experience than the experience of black immigrants and even people from the west indies can you talk about how that distinction becomes significant in american life today well one distinction is that um there is a long history of when people who enter this uh hierarchy uh going back to uh this the 18th century um if they were not they did not neatly fit into either of the polls of the hierarchy meaning they were not um english colonists or enslaved africans then they had to find a way to fit into this bipolar structure and so as people arrived there were you know irish people who arrived later there would be poles and polish people and hungarians and uh people from outside of of uh northwestern europe and then when they arrived they arrived as not hungarians or poles which they would have imagined felt if they were inside that was their identity but they were then categorized as white and and then anyone who was coming um from other parts of the world also had to find a way to navigate this what would have what was designed as a bipolar system and that meant that they were coming from uh from asia from south to central america or from africa as immigrants then they had to find a way to survive and to succeed in a society that made it perfectly clear that there were people on the bottom there were people on the top and everyone or anyone arriving knew who those people were and that creates uh one yet another tragedy in in a caste system in which those who might be in the middle will do whatever it takes to succeed which often in a cast system means separating yourself from those who have been identified as at the bottom and so one of the uh one of the results of that is that um uh immigrants who are black immigrants who are who uh black immigrants who come to the united states are the only group that actually is finds that they fare better if they maintain their accent maintain their uh discussion and wearing uh visibly their uh origin uh of wherever they might be from whereas for white immigrants one of the things they were told immediately is to lose the accent change your name anglicize your name put away the the culture and customs of the old country blend in and they were they were um elevated as a result of that because they could then be folded into the dominant caste known as as white people in the united states and so this created this is a way of further dividing and maintaining difference that is again artificial because one of the great tragedies for any any kind of divisions among people who are of african descent on this soil is that is that all of all african all people of african descent have experienced some um uh some uh abuse in terms of of colonization enslavement these are shared experiences in which there's exploitation occurring to people who are of african descent so we all have so much more in common than we've been led to believe but a caste system uh creates these additional divisions that is another sad um after effect of of hierarchy yeah yeah wow there's so many great questions here we have a very thoughtful uh listening audience uh but one of the questions is about craft and i i would love to have you talk about your process because you're such and i know you teach narrative nonfiction and do all of this amazing stuff but this writer this question says thank you for the gift of your writing i have a basic question about your process how do you keep over a thousand interviews plus your research and sources and notes and thoughts organized and accessible i'm kind of curious about that myself well well a lot of them were transcribed so that meant that it's just it's just a matter of it's not as complicated as it sounds it it just means you you have well i use words so i'm dating myself with that but i use microsoft word and you know i just have the file system and that's what i do i mean it takes a while i will acknowledge it takes a while to figure out the architecture of the research because if you don't have the architecture of the research right it's going to be hard to find the things that you need um with the warmth of suns each of the main characters each protagonist had their own entire file there were sub files underneath uh based upon the time of their the section or time of their period of their life i should say uh and then within the period of their life uh the geography and all the characters and additional members of the family so it's like a family tree for each of the people there so it's quite extensive and it's not something that's over overnight but that it's there's no getting away from the need for organizing and order and structure um as you can see i'm big on structure because it's what you kind of need to get things done and that's part of it well i think that's really important because i i i um there's such skill and and there is such uh kind of structural integrity to the book i mean it's a really hard thing to take on to kind of introduce a whole new concept to both lay readers and academics who are going to be pulling things apart and i just think you do it so beautifully and i love the way you actually turn your research process into part of the storytelling and so when you go to uh a conference in london uh outcasts or when you're going to sp and i love that moment when you were describing being at a conference in a and i'd love to hear you say more about this and you're at a conference in a a an african poet playwright comes up to you and after you speak and she says well you know there are no black people in africa and when i read the sentence i thought now what is she saying and then you explain can you share what what was being expressed to you and how you came to understand because it was absolutely fascinating to me it is fascinating uh you know i was giving a talk about the warmth of the suns in london and uh there were lots of people who you know who were curious about what is that because the great migration is not necessarily you know uh everyday talk in england so there was some curiosity and once aware of what i was talking about uh she came up to me afterwards she said you know there are no black people in africa and i got the sense that it had been said quite a bit and there's a certain kind of effect you you're she was expecting and and you know to the american ear that lands oddly because you think there's a whole subcontinent of people who are black so what could that mean and again that's speaking to the social construct of race is that there is no need to identify or be identified as black when everyone around you is looks you know similar to you but also when the primary identifier is not the color of your skin but your family lineage which which ethnicity you happen to be which languages you speak there's there also so many other ways that people can identify and it's only when they leave that space and then come to the united states or in the case of what she was talking about go to the uk that they then become black and it's an adjustment for people who never have to think of themselves in that way and of course in the in the caste system that i'm describing then to recognize upon arrival that they then are conflated with a group of people who have been assigned to the bottom of the caste system here so it's a very complex um navigation uh for arriving to a pre-existing hierarchy and then trying to figure out how to manage it yeah i mean it's just so it is really fascinating and one of the questions to ask this question can you speak to the role that passing played in the continuation or subversion of the caste system and i remember just that section of your book where you talk about how in some societies you know your aryan blood would actually purify you it might allow you to lift you up but america did something quite distinct where we actually said any evidence of blackness of black blood was it was a was a thing that was so toxic it'd be interesting i'd love to hear you talk about that because it was fascinating to read the way different countries and societies deal with this question of purity and who's what and how do we define it yeah well one of the things is of course the united states has had the one drop rule uh which meant that it spoke to the that speaks to one of the pillars of cass that i described which is called purity and pollution in which um the the dominant caste uh works to maintain its purity at all costs that's why there are the laws against marriage but there also are laws against intermarriage but also laws against or customs and rules about how close someone from the subordinated cast can actually be to someone in the dominant caste the idea being that mere proximity could be polluting mere proximity to those deemed subjugated would be polluting to those deemed uh uh dominant and in uh the term untouchable actually comes from the idea that the mere touch of someone who was from the subordinated cast of dullets and formerly known as untouchables would be polluting to those on on top we in the united states also have have had a long history of purity and pollution having to do with the water you mentioned the little boy from the little league who was told he couldn't go in the water because he as an african-american as a black person would be viewed as polluting to it but also there was there's uh the issue of if a if a black person was drinking from a glass in a restaurant and this happened in the north down in the south that the sometimes the bartender or the weight waiter would go to the trouble of smashing that glass in front of everybody to show that this glass is now polluted and cannot be used by anyone else because a black person had drunk from it so there is a long history of that um of course one of the things that is a is a through line through uh with any caste system is that people will do whatever they can to escape that humiliation that degradation and those restrictions that that um limit almost anything that you might be able to do you can't be who you're intended to be and so they often will make the heartbreaking decision both in india there are people who um have have sought to pass people who are uh born to the subordinated cast and passing of something other than what they are and of course the long history of passing manila larson wrote a book about call passing there's a history of novels about fiction about it and also uh testimony but the tremendous loss too i mean there's no real escaping because it means that you have to cut off all ties and and renounce your uh your other identity in order to make this bargain in hopes that you will be accepted uh and then you live in such fear of being of discovery and this is something that runs through all these cases where people are are in hiding you might say so this is one of the other after effects you know again one of the tragedies of cass is that it forces people to go underground or or to renounce their family in order to set out uh to um to have the the uh you know the freedom and the what they hope would be freedom that otherwise would be denied them yeah it's just so fascinating because when you create meaning to a life story uh that provides context you create a new relationship to it i remember reading this section we were talking about the roles that black people were allowed to play and the roles that they had to play and you had that really fascinating section even talks about entertainment and and the constraints that that created it was really insightful but you know i just was reading and i was thinking about you know all of my grandparents worked as domestics my grandmother my mom's side my dad's side my dad did domestic work all of my aunts and it just when you begin to create a context a narrative about why that was permitted and why it was a limit it just gives you a new relationship to it and uh and and now i tell i talk about that history of domestic work in my family boldly because i want people to know that that's the story and i just think that's what's so powerful about this writing is it allows you to kind of tell the story in a way that does that can get you away from the fear that there's a there's an unharsh judgment waiting on the other side of that so a lot of people are asking me to ask you about your responses to the announcement that uh kyla harris is is going to be it's only been like a day but you probably already asked this like 50 times but uh just because it's the dominant question i have to post what is your reaction to hearing that um a woman of color is going to be uh the democratic nominee for vice president well it's a momentous day for you know for the country and it took 244 years to get to this point uh you know where we have uh you know a black woman a woman of color uh uh who is now going to be uh the a nominee on a major party ticket i mean it's been a long time coming uh it shows you how long it has been um you know of course shirley chisholm ran uh for for president in 1972 so here we can see uh and other people run as well but to have someone on a major party ticket um it's but it's massive i think we're still processing it you know from the standpoint of what i'm doing here of course she is she represents her life story represents a point of intersection on many levels i mean she actually is the you know the child of someone who migrated from jamaica and then someone who migrated from india so she brings together um all of these uh all of the history that i'm speaking about here and and so uh you know this is a long time coming a very long time coming yeah yeah um i i know i'm supposed to shut things down but i just have to ask uh one one last question um you know there's something really interesting about um the platforms that have now emerged where you know it's somebody asked me well why is it that we're just in this place and i'm just thinking about a generation now of black journalists that have the opportunity to kind of write stories and tell stories and we have a generation of black lawyers and we have a generation of um new spaces and i'm curious just as you think about i know that your parents uh came from the south to dc and have that whole history um do you think of yourself as um as someone with kind of a generational uh not obligation but do you feel the weight of that history and how do you process that and how do you think about your role in giving that to another generation i know you teach um it's been something i've been kind of really thinking a lot more and i'd love to hear your thoughts on that question well you know yes i do carry that i think anybody who is a child of people who survived jim crow um absorbed their pain without even ever talk at them talking about they didn't talk about it i mean that's one of the things that propelled me to write the one for the sons i mean it was everywhere around me the manifestation of the migration everybody was from everybody's parents where or grandparents were from somewhere in the south usually north carolina south carolina i mean in dc that's that's where a lot of people are from uh and yet no one was talking about how that happened and so that was how i how you know it actually sparked my interest that the silence made me want to know more and so i've lived with this but i don't view it as a burden i view it as as a gift to be able to have that sense of connection i mean this is this is how i pour my my sense of of obligation or duty if you want to call it that but i think it's i think it's a gift to be able to do it i was uh so moved by what you just said about um having been the you know a descendant of people who have been domestics i mean you don't have to go very far in the background of any african-american of any black person to find people who had done domestic work um essentially african-americans were brought here as to be servants with a servant cast you might say uh and that's also an indication of a caste system is that a caste system generally is occupation-based and and so that's an example too but it calls upon us to to um have a sense of joy and pride in what they they have done you know it allows us the recognition of the caste system into which they had been born allows us to see that they were not people who just did not have abilities that they were doing the best that they could in the circumstances into which they were born in the caste system into which they were born and that they what they did allowed us to be what we happen to be but it's also a reminder of all of the lost talent you know one of the greatest losses of a caste system is that millions upon millions of people have not been able to live out their dreams or be what they were intended to be to actually have their talents reach full flower because for 246 years we had enslavement another 80 or so years of jim crow segregation which meant you think about those cotton fields and those rice plantations and those sugar plantations and there were on those plantations where opera singers and jazz musicians and and and uh playwrights and novelists and attorneys and journalists and all kinds of people and we know that because that is what people became once they had the chance to do to choose for themselves what they were going to do with their talents and so if we learn anything it should be that it costs humanity when we have hierarchy such as this and i would hope we could see through that yeah well that's a beautiful way to kind of draw this to a close because you really express the hope of freedom and what it can mean for for all of us and i i will tell you that you know now that um in this pandemic we've had to close some of our sites with the memorial is open for for a few days a week but i get to go there now in ways that i don't when we're open have to tell you that i finished your book uh at the national memorial because i wanted to finish it there and something happened i just have to share this with you so when we did the dedication of the opening the same thing happened i was very worried about rain we had 25 000 people coming to montgomery and i was just because it's an outdoor site but the square has a roof on it and on the morning of the dedication it was cloudy and i was very worried about it and uh and right as we were starting the dedication just started pouring hundreds of people inside the square and this thing that i had dreaded for so long all of a sudden had this completely different meaning and people were singing and i stood up to talk and it just started pouring down on the top of the memorial and then all of a sudden i realized that it didn't sound like rain it actually for the first time sounded like tears of joy being shed by the thousands of people who have been lynched in this country whose names have never been called whose lives have never been honored whose histories have never been understood and when i was finishing your book yesterday at the memorial it started raining again and it just for me had something really powerful about the joy this kind of book will create for those who need to understand for those of us who are looking for answers to figure out this experience and to navigate the challenges of this experience and i just want to end by thanking you for taking your extraordinary gifts and putting them together and producing something as brilliant and as masterful as cass everybody has to read it make sure other people read it and i'm just so honored to have had this chance to talk with you thank you thank you i wish we could have done it in person but we'll find another opportunity and uh please take care of yourself during this time we need you the nation needs you and uh i hope we can do this again um but thank you and uh and i'll let you say the final thing because uh it's it's really just been such a thrill to talk with you now all i can say is honor has been mine thank you so much you're very welcome thank you i'll turn it back over to morgan thanks well on the behalf of politics and prose i would like to thank the both of you for uh being with us tonight it was such a powerful event um and i would also like to thank those who are watching um thank you for attending this event uh and if you have not already picked up your copy of cass or you would like another copy to give to a friend the link to buy it from politics and pros is in the chat along with the link to buy a copy of just mercy and thank you all for joining us this evening good night everybody good night thank you thank you isabel wonderful thank you

Channel: Politics and Prose

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Length: 65min 8sec (3908 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 20 2020