♪ ♪ HARDING: It is now my pleasure to introduce 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 Suns", won many awards, including the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Heartland Prize for Nonfiction and the Dayton Literary Prize.

We are here to celebrate her latest book, "Caste The Origins of Our Discontents".

Oprah Winfrey called it a must read for humanity last week when she announced "Caste" as her most recent Oprah Book Club pick.

We are also excited to announce that "Caste" is officially a "New York Times" best seller.

It's number two on the combined nonfiction list.

So congratulations to Miss Wilkerson for that.

And tonight, moderating our conversation is Bryan Stevenson, the founder and executive director of the Equal Justice Initiative, a human rights organization in Montgomery, Alabama.

In 2018, he opened up 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 Isabel Wilkerson and Bryan Stevenson.

STEVENSON: Hello, everyone, and thank you for joining us.

I cannot tell you how excited I am to have this opportunity to talk to one of my favorite writers in the world, the extraordinary Isabel Wilkerson.

I've been so jazzed about this moment.

And of course, reading "Caste" for me has just been; we were talking, we've already had a really great conversation before y'all even joined.

I'm thrilled to be here.

And I want to start by just asking, like, what is this like?

"Caste" 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 with 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.

What is the book, they probably wanted a book six years ago, the fact that you took your time and you have crafted something that is 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 you going to speak your truth?

You're not worried about what people say.

How does it feel in this moment?

WILKERSON: Well, you know, 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 a little blip.

You know, "The Warmth of Other Suns" 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 it took to develop.

So my, the vast majority of my time is in the process of creating.

So this is just a continuum.

And so much is happening in terms of how we're managing and Covid-19 and all the additional things that it's hard to process.

And so much is virtual anyway.

That's really hard to process.

But obviously 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 in it.

STEVENSON: Yeah, 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.

And 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.

WILKERSON: Yeah.

STEVENSON: And you went to Howard and became the Editor in Chief of that really well respected campus newspaper, then got all of these opportunities, of course, the first black woman to win a Pulitzer Prize with "The New York Times".

Um, but when I read "Caste", 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 it's so remarkable in this intersection.

Of course, it's African-American studies and of course, its 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?

WILKERSON: Well, you know, I, I specialize in narrative nonfiction, 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.

I 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 Other Suns' And it was 'Warmth of Other Suns' that led to this book, because in that book, in 'Warmth of Other Suns' people may not realize that in writing about six million people who were fleeing the Jim Crow South, um, leaving a place where it was actually against the 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.

But when they were, when I was describing that, I realized that racism was not the-the most sufficient word to describe what they were reading.

It was deeper and bigger and more...

There was 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 "Caste" with that book.

The 'Warmth of Other Suns' does not have racism in it, it uses the word caste system.

And that's what led me to this book.

And I should probably take the time to say what-what "Caste" is "Caste" is-is essentially an artificial, arbitrary, often random graded ranking of human value in a society.

And it's what determines one standing and respect, benefit of the doubt, access to resources, assumptions of intelligence and beauty even, all of those things that are poured into 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 with the arrival of the colonists here, you know, to Virginia and with the arrival also of the enslaved people to build the land, to build the country for free and 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.

STEVENSON: 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 Suns".

And we opened our memorial on lynching.

We started doing our work.

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 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 what I love about "Caste" is that you, you, 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 interp, interpreting and articulating over and over again.

The other thing you do, though, is you make comparisons.

You bring in the experience of the Dalit's in India, the, so called, "Untouchables" and you talk about 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?

WILKERSON: You know, that a lot of people really we don't really know the history even of our own country of what actually happened in this country.

As you said, the language has almost obscured the-the dangers that people faced and live 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 Other Suns" what I did not know that I was using this word "Caste" but not really fully understanding.

How exactly does the caste system work in, say, the originating caste system?

What 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 Discontents.

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 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 paraphernalia and the banners and the flags 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 the presence of memory, memory of the civil war, memory of enslavement, memories of American history.

And so as a result of that, that sparked my, you know, my sense of imperative to find out how has Germany dealt with the aftermath of the World War II?

How have they reconciled their history?

What is it that they now do to as they remember this?

And so this came together as a result of Charlottesville that the rally or 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 learn that that the that German eugenicists actually were in dialog, continuing dialog with American eugenicists in the years and decades leading up to the Third Reich to learn that American eugenicists wrote these books that were huge sellers in Germany and 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 and 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 crafting what would ultimately become the Nuremberg laws as this was.

It was wrenching to see the interconnectedness there.

STEVENSON: Yeah, yeah.

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 a more comprehensive investigation into the Holocaust.

WILKERSON: Yes.

STEVENSON: 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 lynching's 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 "Caste".

You know, there are no Adolf Hitler statues in Germany.

WILKERSON: No.

STEVENSON: It would be unconscionable for someone to actually try to honor the architects of the Third Reich.

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 guess I'm curious how that understanding of caste helps you understand the evolution of where we are now in terms of this begrudging holding on Charlottesville, holding on to these symbols.

WILKERSON: Well, it's, it's stunning that you made the reference to the lack of...

There's, there's nothing in the Berlin monument which is massive in the middle of the city, you know, prime real estate in the middle of a devoted to, as it should be, honoring those who perished during the Holocaust.

And then there are many, many other museums, many of the headquarters and buildings that the Nazis had-had, which are now devoted to education.

Everything where the final solution had been voted had been voted upon.

That's now museum.

And I went to as many of them as I could to absorb how they were remembering and how they were absorbing their own sense of responsibility to memory.

And I think that 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 page.

Everyone is pretty much on the same page.

Obviously, there are people there still resurgence the 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 and just get on the same page as a country as to what even happened and you know, after "The Warmth of Other 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 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 you're saying, there is a there's an added responsibility with anything that we might do to bring people 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.

STEVENSON: Well, I mean, this is 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 Suns" 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 1960's 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, "We're going to fight, we're going to fight.

And one, these days we're going to be called we're going to get the terms of respect we need.

They're gonna 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 is not even going to be called the state of Mississippi anymore.

It's just going to be "Sippi".

Cause we're gonna take the "Miss" for ourselves.

And it 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 a 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.

WILKERSON: Well, I think one of the things that happens as a result of a caste system is that it creates artificial divisions and separation spatially.

And what happened with this, one of the pillars is (inaudible), which means essentially people cannot marry outside of their caste in India and in the much in the United States for most of its history, actually, they were anti-miscegenation laws in the majority of states at one time or the other.

And of course, the Nuremberg laws also outlawed marriage across what they called 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 community.

And so we can't even begin to imagine how (inaudible), we are actually as a, as a society because we have had these parallel lineages.

In fact, these anti-miscegenation laws and hierarchy of caste actually is a form of curating race, because if you are restricted to the people who only do you are permitted to-to marry or to inter-interrelate 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 we used those terms as a 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 this society could have used any number of other characteristics it could have used as a reference in the book of tall's and short's, meaning that-that could have been used as an arbitrary, random delineation for the categorizing of people.

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 joist and the beams and the and the-the pillars inside the building.

I refer to our country as an old house.

And you can't see those joists and beams.

You can only see what's physical, what's-what's visible, and often describe a race as cast as the bones, race as the skin and then class, the third leg of that division is would be that the accents and the clothes and the diction 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-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 in others.

And that's one of the great tragedies of the hierarchy like this anywhere of any caste system is that it closes people off to potentially individuals who they would have amazing, incredible relationships with, but they are not permitted to in their mind and in the society at large.

STEVENSON: Yeah, yeah, you know, I've been giving these talks where 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 can't be the people we were meant to be.

We can't love anybody and everybody.

And it's a burden on all of us.

But what I loved about what "Caste" 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 caste.

We are bound by these artificial lines.

And we are all going to be we're all to be burdened by that at one level or another, some more than others, obviously.

But it means that none of us can be the kind of free people that I think we were designed to be.

WILKERSON: No, you're absolutely right.

One of the, there are tons of metaphors in the book as you know, I mean, I do like my metaphors... STEVENSON: I love it.

WILKERSON: One of the metaphors is, you know, I became fascinated with the word caste as a word.

So I thought about the idea of cast that 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.

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 or know the whole script.

And to your point about the smog or the pollution that we breathe, you might say the psychic pollution that we might breathe when we think about, apply it to caste and hierarchy, then it's something that 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 is 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 caste, is that 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 offices, 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 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 beyond-beyond small and large and small.

I mean, on everyday level and also macro level.

STEVENSON: Yeah, but that's one of the, again, really amazing things I loved about the book.

And and you tell these stories and you do them so skillfully.

But it was interesting because it was a moment I was moved to tears several times, both because the story you told was so heartbreaking.

You tell the story about the Little League Baseball player.

WILKERSON: Oh, my goodness.

STEVENSON: And him sitting outside.

This place 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, 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 we came up out of an age where it's the end of Jim Crow.

WILKERSON: Right.

STEVENSON: We have all of the residue of Jim Crow.

We know the rules, but then we were told we have civil rights and so we're on the front lines of going into these spaces that people hadn't gone into before and were 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 them 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 our 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 it wasn't prepared to embrace all of those norms.

And the anxiety we would have and how we would say, mom, I tell 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, were there moments that you kind of had to, you reinterpreted or re-evaluated the things you'd gone through when you began to think about it through the prism of caste?

WILKERSON: Well you know, as a, as a, 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 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.

STEVENSON: Of course.

WILKERSON: These are, some of them are quite mundane, actually.

And that's that actually is part of the tragedy of it, is that they are so mundane.

So the case where I have 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 the people and, you know, everyone is lined up for their interviews.

Meaning I had a lot of interviews I was going to be conducting that day and everything was fine until I got to the last one, got to this place, this retail establishment.

And a man walks in and he's very rushed.

He's kind of frazzled.

This is clearly the man that I'm there to interview the store manager.

So I go over to them, to him, and I say, I'm here to, I'm Isabel Wilkerson, set to interview you.

And he said, well, 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 Isabel Wilkerson of "The New York Times".

I'm the one here to interview you.

And he said, well, let me see your I.D.

So I gave him my driver's license and he looked at me, 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 fifteen or twenty minutes into what was supposed to be an interview.

I'm here to interview you and we're-we're wasting time.

And he said, I'm going to have to ask you to leave because "The New York Times" will be here any minute.

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 millions of people 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 can 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.

I want to ask you about your experience, if you wouldn't mind.

STEVENSON: Oh, no, I'd be happy to.

No, I was, we were talking beforehand because I and I so identified with all these multiple moments because I-I was actually representing dozens of kids in Iowa and Nebraska and going to these courtrooms I've never been to before and 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 have been basically oriented to over perform.

So I always get there early.

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 defendants in my courtroom without their lawyer."

And I had to apologize, I said, so I'm sorry, your honor, I didn't introduce myself.

I'm Bryan 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 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.

When I got in the car, I actually thought about the fact I've argued these cases that the US Supreme Court got this Harvard Law degree 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 want to ask you, you have this unbelievable story.

It comes right at the end of your pillar's section.

I was absolutely blown away by this.

And you talked about how at the end of World War II, 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.

You write, "A 16 year old African-American girl 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?

WILKERSON: I want people to see you know, I, I describe again that building, that old house that, you know, when it rains, you don't want to go in the basement and see what the rains have brought 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.

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 want it 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, 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 a there's a there's a line in "The Warmth of Other Suns" that gets repeated a lot.

And that had to do with Dr. Foster when he was getting ready to leave the south and he went to see a tailor who went to a white man who-who was saying, you know, I'm going to be leaving.

I can't work here as a doctor because I can't work at the hospital.

And the man didn't understand.

So he said, "Why can't he work at St. Francis Hospital?"

And the man did not realize a basic fundamental fact for a black person in that era.

Didn't understand it.

And so the question that I ask 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?

STEVENSON: Yeah, yeah.

WILKERSON: And this is an attempt to see the bars so that all of us can be free.

STEVENSON: Yeah, it's so, so powerful, so powerful.

One of the things that came to mind for me when I was reading the book, you know, when you think about transformation and change, you know, there's usually a change in power.

The places I mean, the Dalit's are still struggling in India.

We're obviously struggling in this country.

And I think about the transformation that happens in South Africa after apartheid because there's a black majority.

They have political power.

WILKERSON: Yes.

STEVENSON: 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 absence of any transfer of power in America impacts our ability to deal honestly with Caste, to kind of confront castes 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.

WILKERSON: Well, I mean, that gets us to the projections of 2042 in this country when the demographic 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, in this country, and that people of color would be in the majority of America, American majority.

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, what kind of country do we want to be.

And it's a chance, if we are making the most of it, to make an even better, fairer country.

The question will be up to everyone.

STEVENSON: Yeah, yeah.

Well, I, I was really struck in the first few pages of the book.

Uh, you give essentially a summation of the 2016 presidential election.

And I've told my staff, I said Isabel 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 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 unmistakable.

And I loved it because in many ways 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 pub...

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?

WILKERSON: I want to see a world without caste.

I mean, 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 might 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.

You know, 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 not by anyone alive today, but once you know then it does become the responsibility of those of us alive today, like inheriting a house, you didn't have anything to do with how 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 one's family.

Love, extending out to community, love, extending out to country and love to other species on the planet.

That's really what I'm writing about.

STEVENSON: Yeah, well, I think that's what I find so alluring and affirming about your work is that-that comes through.

And I have to say, you know, after I read "The Warmth of Other Suns" and more in, like, the last 10 years, I find myself talking about my fore parents 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 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 we could have lost his life for that.

And when emancipation came, 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 all night and she would sit next to him because she loved how he could give to the community just by knowing how to read.

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, after we were born, she gave that desire for reading.

And I remember growing in this kind of kind of poor rural community.

My mother went into debt to buy us the "World Book Encyclopedia" in 1968.

And other kids, they had bicycle's 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 (inaudible) 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 just respond.

When I when I finished "Caste, when I finished, 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 your book being out there and how grateful I am.

I've got to let other people start asking some questions.

Someone is asking about caste within community.

And I did find this really interesting in your book, too, because, 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 of even people from the West Indies.

Can you talk about how that distinction becomes significant in American life today?

WILKERSON: Well, one distinction is that there is a long history of when people who enter this hierarchy, going back to this 18th century, if they were not if they did not neatly fit into either of the poles of the hierarchy, meaning they were not English colonists or enslaved Africans, then they had to find a way to fit into this bipolar structure.

And and then anyone who was coming from other parts of the world also had to find a way to navigate what would have, was designed as a bipolar system.

And that meant that they were coming from-from Asia or from South 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 are people in the top and everyone, anyone arriving knew who those people were.

And that creates yet another tragedy in a caste system in which those who might be in the middle will do whatever it takes to succeed, which often in a caste system, means separating yourself from those who have been identified as at the bottom.

And so one of the one of the results of that is that immigrants who are black, immigrants, black immigrants who come to the United States are the only group that actually finds that they fare better if they maintain their accent.

Whereas with white immigrants, one of the things they were told immediately is to lose the accent, change your name, Anglicized your name, put away the their culture and customs of the old country, blend in.

And they were they were elevated as a result of that because they could then be folded into the dominant caste known 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 kinds of divisions among people who are of African descent on this soil is that, is that, all, all African African all people, of African descent have experienced some, some abuse in terms of, of colonization, enslavement.

These are shared experiences in which there is 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 creates these additional divisions.

That is another sad after effect of hierarchy.

STEVENSON: Yeah, yeah, wow.

There's so many great questions here.

We have a very thoughtful listening audience.

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.

This question says, thank you for the gift of your writing.

I have a basic question about your process.

How do you keep over 1,000 interviews, plus your research and sources and notes and thoughts organized and accessible?

I'm kind of curious about that myself.

WILKERSON: 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, but it just means you have, well I use Word.

So I'm dating myself with that by using 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.

with "The Warmth of Other Suns" each of the main characters, each protagonist had their own entire file.

There were sub-files underneath based upon the time of the section or time of that period of their life, I should say.

And then within the period of their life, 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 there's no getting away from the need for organizing and order and structure.

As you can see, I'm-I'm big on structure because it's what you need to get things done, and that's part of it.

STEVENSON Well, I think that's really important because I, I, I mean, there's such skill in and there is such 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 a conference in London, (inaudible) and I love that moment when you were describing being at a conference, and I'd love to hear you say more about this, you were at a conference and 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 this sentence, I thought, "Now what is she saying?"

And then you explained it.

Can you share with what was being expressed to you how you come to understand?

Because it was absolutely fascinating to me.

WILKERSON: It is fascinating to the American ear that lands oddly because you think there's a whole subcontinent of people who are black.

So what would that mean?

And again, that 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 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 are 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 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 navigation for arriving to a preexisting hierarchy and then trying to figure out how to manage it.

STEVENSON: 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 your Aryan blood would actually purify you.

It might allow you to lift you up.

But America is quite distinct where we actually said any evidence of blackness, of black blood was a 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.

WILKERSON: Yeah, well, one of the things is, of course, the United States has had the one drop rule, which meant that it spoke to the, speaks to one of the pillars of caste that I described, which is called purity and pollution, in which the-the dominant caste works to maintain its purity at all cost.

That's why there are 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 caste 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 dominant.

And in the term untouchable actually comes from the idea that the mere touch of someone who was from the subordinated cast of Dalit's and formerly known as "Untouchables" would be polluting to those 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 a little boy from the Little League 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 is that the issue of if a black person was drinking from a glass in a restaurant and this happened in the north, not in the south, that the, sometimes a bartender or the waiter-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.

Of course, one of the things that is a is a through line through with any caste system is that people will do whatever they can to escape that humiliation and degradation and those restrictions that-that 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, that there are people who have to have sought to pass, people who are born to the subordinated caste and passing of something other than what they are.

And, of course, the long history of passing.

Nella Larsen wrote a book about passengers, a history, novels about fiction about it, and also testimony.

But the tremendous loss to when there's no real escaping because that means that you have to cut off all ties and renounce your-your other identity in order to make this bargain in hopes that you will be accepted.

And then you live in such fear of being, of discovery.

And this is something that runs through all of these caste systems where people are in hiding, you might say.

So this is one of the other aftereffects.

You know, again, one of the tragedies of caste is that it forces people to go underground or to renounce their family in order to set out to-to have the-the you know, the freedom and what they hope would be freedom that otherwise would be denied them.

STEVENSON: Yeah, it's just so fascinating, because when you create meaning to a life story that provides context, you create a new relationship to it.

I remember reading the section... We were talking about the roles that black people were allowed to play in the roles that they had to play.

You know, all of my grandparents worked as domestics, my grandmother on my mom's side, my dad's side, and 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,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 a harsh judgment waiting on the other side of that.

So a lot of people are asking me to ask you, what is your reaction to hearing that a woman of color is going to be the Democratic nominee for vice president?

WILKERSON: Well, it's a momentous day for the country that took 244 years to get to this point where we have a black woman, a woman of color, who is now going to be the nominee on a major party ticket.

I mean, it's been a long time coming.

It shows you how long it has been.

Of course, Shirley Chisholm ran for president in 1972.

So here we can see and other people have run as well.

But to have someone on a major party ticket, Um, 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-the child of someone who migrated from Jamaica and then someone who migrated from India.

So she brings together all of these all of the history that I'm speaking about here.

And so this is a long time coming.

A very long time coming.

STEVENSON: Yeah, yeah, I know I'm supposed to shut things down, but I just have to ask one last question.

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 new spaces.

And I'm curious, just as you think about it, I know that your parents came from the south to D.C. and have that whole history.

Do you think of yourself as-as someone with kind of a generational, 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.

It's been something I've been kind of really thinking a lot more about.

And I'd love to hear your thoughts on that question.

WILKERSON: Well, yes, I do carry that.

I think anybody who is a child of people who survived Jim Crow absorbed their pain without even ever talked to them, talking about they didn't talk about it.

I mean, that's one of the reasons to write "The Warmth of Other Suns" that sounds I mean, it was everywhere around me, the manifestation of the migration.

Everybody was from, everybody's parents where our grandparents were from somewhere in the south, usually North Carolina, South Carolina, I mean, in D.C. that's-that's where a lot of people are from.

And yet no one was talking about how that happened.

And so that was how I how 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 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 so moved by what you just said about having been the descendant of people who had 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.

Essentially, African-Americans were brought here as to be servants with a servant caste, you might say.

And that's also an indication of a caste system, is a caste system generally is occupation based.

And and so that's an example too but it calls upon us to-to have a sense of joy and pride in what 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 in 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.

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 were opera singers and jazz musicians and-and 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 hierarchies such as this.

And I would hope we could see through that.

STEVENSON: 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 will tell you that now that into this pandemic we've had to close some of our sites with the memorial is open 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 at the National Memorial because I wanted to finish it there and something happened.

I just have to share this with you.

So 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 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-and right as we were starting, the dedication it just started pouring.

There were hundreds of people inside the square.

And this thing that I had dreaded it 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 shared by the thousands of people who had 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 has been really powerful about the joy this kind of book will create for those who need to understand, for those 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 "Caste" 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, and I'll let you say the final thing, because it's really just been such a thrill to talk with you.

WILKERSON: Now, all I can say is honor has been mine.

Thank you so much.

STEVENSON: You're very welcome.

NARRATOR: Books by tonight's authors are available at Politics and Prose bookstore locations or online at www.politics-prose.com