In 2020, former NY Times journalist Isabel Wilkerson published Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents. The book tells a compelling story: that the root of our social divisions is the invented hierarchical structure of castes, not, as we often assume in America, race. Race, she writes, is only another manifestation of caste.
While it’s certainly an important topic here in America, Wilkerson shows, by investigating the longstanding caste system in India, the social divisions in Nazi Germany, and America’s founding and expansion through chattel slavery, that caste is a universal phenomenon.
Derek discusses his thoughts on this powerful and important book.
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In 2020, former New York Times journalist Isabel Wilkerson published Caste, The Origins of Our Discontents.
The book tells a compelling story, but the root of our social divisions is the invented hierarchy of castes, not, as we often assume in America, race.
Race, she writes, is only another manifestation of caste.
And while it's certainly an important topic here in America, Wilkerson shows, through the investigation of the long-standing caste system in India, the social divisions in Nazi Germany, and America's founding and expansion through chattel slavery, That cast is a universal phenomenon.
Wilkerson has had quite a career.
She was the first African American woman to win a Pulitzer Prize in Journalism for her reporting on Midwestern floods in 1993.
Then she spent 15 years researching and writing her first book, The Warmth of Other Suns, which was published in 2010 and won the National Book Critics Circle Award among many others.
A decade later, C.A.S.T.
was published to similar acclaim, and in 2023, Ava DuVernay made a film adaptation called Origin, which I highly recommend as I do the book.
In fact, I'd picked up the book C.A.S.T.
a few times but never purchased it, and it was only after seeing that amazing film that I finally bought it.
And the only thing I could think of while reading it was, why did this take me so long to read?
I'm Derek Barris, and this is a Conspiratuality Bonus episode where I want to look at one of the foundations of one of the main topics that we discuss on the pod, which is the right-wing's fervent opposition to anything related to critical race theory or DEI.
And I think Wilkerson's work really shows why we need to keep this discussion going.
Because growing up in America, we're swimming in an ocean of race all the time.
Everything seems based on skin color and heritage.
Yet as Wilkerson points out, before the colonization of this land, caste divisions were the results of tribes, regions, languages, family lineages, not skin color.
And that's only come into prominence because of America, and the idea has been exported globally.
Now this seems counterintuitive given that the world now regularly talks about race, but it has an origin, and it is in caste divisions.
The Dalits, for example, weren't separated by skin color.
Dalits in India tend to be darker, but that's not a definitive rule.
You're more likely to discover that division through last names or their occupations, not necessarily their skin.
As Wilkerson frames it, race in the United States is the visible agent of the unseen force of caste.
And this happened during colonization.
Again, she writes, it was in the making of the new world that humans were set apart on the basis of what they looked like, identified solely in contrast to one another, and ranked to form a caste system based on a new concept called race.
She also notes that the word race likely came from the Spanish word raza, which originally referred to a caste or quality of authentic horses.
She then quotes Montague, who wrote, "...the idea of race was, in fact, the deliberate creation of an exploiting class seeking to maintain and defend its privileges against what was profitably regarded as an inferior caste."
Wilkerson then returns, writing bluntly, "...color is a fact, race is a social construct."
So, having swum in these waters my entire life, Wilkerson made me think deeply about the topic of race.
And it wasn't my first exposure.
I've visited Morocco four times on reporting trips, and each time I found a division between the Arabs who live in cities and the Berbers who live in villages in urban outskirts and in the mountains.
Now I spent time both in the Medinas and deep in those mountains, and there's no discernible skin color difference.
This isn't how race operates in America, but indeed it actually reflects divisions in much of the rest of the world.
Historian Neil Irvin Painter put it well, writing, Americans cling to race, as the unschooled cling to superstition.
So today I want to discuss a few moments in the book cast that really struck me.
And I want to qualify that with the fact that I think every American needs to read this book and see the film adaptation.
It's a beautiful movie.
We spent a lot of time on this podcast discussing the far right and their conspiracy theories and how part of that political fringe always denounces critical race theory and DEI as I mentioned, and they never discuss what it actually is and how race and caste function in American society.
Wilkerson offers centuries of perspective on how we got here, and her thesis is that underlying all of this division is caste.
And I have to say, after devouring her gorgeously written and powerful book, I agree.
