Monday, fourtime governor of new york and the first catholic candidate for Major Political party. On American History tv, on cspan3. Isabel wilkerson, near your new book is entitled tapped. What is its main thesis . Guest the main thesis is that we live in an old house. We often cannot see the pillars and the beams in the structure beneath it. We often focus on what we think we can see, but we may not be focusing on the structure underneath. We may have inherited a hierarchy that harkens back to enslavement and live today with the consequences of that hierarchy in which people at the very beginning were put into assigned categories, that were part of creating what would become the United States and that we live with the aftereffects to this day. When we think about the United States, the word caste language that we apply to other civilizations, human creation that give us away viewing ourselves in a different lens. Host you write in the acknowledgments, this was a book that i had to write in the air the era that we find ourselves. Can you talk more about that . Guest using the word caste in which i was writing about the migration of 6 million African Americans fleeing the jim crow south. I came to realize through my research that i was not running about leaving, but they were defecting a caste system. I use that to describe the jim crow south and in doing so, i realized that i would find that readers would truly understand and see what people were living under in the jim crow south from a for much of the 20th century. It was after writing that book and going on and talking about the book that i then begin to think about the idea of caste. The words i was using all the time when i spoke to any audience about it. But then, trayvon martin, the young man in florida who was killed as he was coming back from the store wearing a hoodie. He was seen as someone who did not fit in that suburban subdivision in florida. He was suspected based on what he looks like. I wrote about how these assignments and assumptions about who people are, where people belong, whose expect it and viewed as worthy, and so i wrote a piece connecting caste to that experience and i have been thinking about that ever since. We have seen a metronome of names of people unarmed People Killed at the hands of police or homegrown vigilantes who have taken upon themselves to take the lives of people, unarmed people in places where they were not expected to be. This became an era that seems to suggest that there was a way of looking at what we were going through through a different lens. You write that the idea was germinating, and the two conferences that you attended at amherst and london, coalescing the ideas. Can you tell me more about that . Guest the case in amherst was when i was invited to give a keynote about caste and race. That was a result of people of the research i was doing. People beginning to hear that this africanamerican woman was researching this topic, have been in india and they had heard about it and invited me to the conference. It was there at amherst that i began to test out some of the thinking that i had come to recognize as a result of the research. They were quite fascinated with the idea that i had written about the africanamerican experience in the south without using the word racism, a word that does not appear although people would assume that, the word that i used was caste. It was there that i began to get a chance to explore and share the views that i had come to recognize, not only is someone who has researched it, but also was experiencing it as well. All of these things came to coalesce in that space and as i talked about it, it turned out that i had a deep connection to people who were formerly known as untouchable. The conversations came with such recognition of shared experiences across time, across oceans, a shared experience. Those were some of the experiences that led to my feeling that this actually was something that needed to be written. Host we talk about warmth of other sons celebrating its 10th anniversary. I wonder about your thoughts on its enduring popularity. What do you think the secret sauce is for that book . Guest i think that people always feel drawn to a much larger phenomenon in our country that does not get much attention as it should. A time period between the end of reconstruction to the civil rights movement. That era does not get as much attention as they might otherwise. This is a way for people to understand it. The beauty of narrative nonfiction is that, and i think the warmth of our sons reflects that. It is the process that a reader will get to being another person. I spent 15 years on that book getting to know three people, very deeply, providing them with getting to know them deeply and being able to share their experiences from a well of deep understanding because they share so much with me and being able to go along a journey with them and in going along in that journey, you get to experience what they experience. To see how and why they made the decisions that they did, and to see the ways in which a human being response to the circumstances that they might be born into and they may have to this pivotal decision. These are all deeply human circumstances and a human being can identify with the yearning to be free, the yearning to break from the restrictions that they might have been born into. The hopes and dreams that they might carry as they make it across the country. The deeply universal story that there is always someone in our background no matter where we might come from, to experience some type of migration, so i think that is what speaks the speaks to people. Narrative nonfiction is the closest we might get to being another person. We know that fiction allows us to build empathy as we get drawn to the characters we are learning about and experiencing that unfold in the story of a novel. But in narrative nonfiction, we seek to allow the reader to experience that journey that comes from that we often associate with fiction, but it is true, it is real, it is verifiable. This gives people the best chance that they ever will get to be another person, to be inside the heart and mind, the spirit, the dreams, heartbreaks and setbacks that people might go through. So that is one of the reasons why people are drawn to it. The experiences of people who were survivors of jim crow, and were part of the great migration, their experiences become deeply familiar to those of us who may see what happens with george floyd and many others. A lot of people look at the warmth of sons suns, so there is the combination of story and truth unfolding before us. Host how would you describe the style of caste . It is very different in your approach. Guest there are many pcs pieces that i explored and researched. In many disciplines. History, of course, but also philosophy, anthropology, all kinds of in order to better understand the phenomenon that is very old and an ancient phenomenon, one that can surface in other cultures where we might not be looking for it or expecting it to be. I was pulling from different disciplines, many previously written works, many different ways of looking at it, references to the old testament, to einstein, pulling all of this together in order to create a quilt that would give us another way of looking at ourselves. Host how did you decide on the subtitle . Guest the subtitle was actually the working title for most of the time that i was working on it. It was the immediate purpose and goal of the work, and that was to understand what was unfolding around us. In the recent years, to understand what was unfolding around us and to try to understand how and why and where how to better understand the origins of our discontent. That is the goal, the purpose to try to get underneath the divisions and tensions that we are living in now. Host the word caste is one that you are wanting readers to use to change the lexicon, but other words that you use our race and racism, which you write as one of the most contentious and misunderstood words in american culture. What are you saying there . Guest i am saying that racism is a word that is a phenomenon that is real and has affected our country for as long as there has been a country. There is no question about that. What i am saying is that that word has become so contentious and i think a lot of everyday people may not even realize that there are formal sociological definitions that many scholars have created their lifes work to understand this phenomenon, but because it has so many different meanings to different people, it is a misunderstood term that has come to be confused or conflated with hating someone or just or all of these words that get pulled together. What this book is saying is that underneath all of that is the infrastructure of a division to begin with. Meaning the originating hierarchies, the greatest ranking of human value that has been assigned to people based upon where they were born. What group they were born to. And where that group is positioned in the hierarchy from a time that was even before the country was founded, owing to colonial virginia. Because those hierarchies have them with us all the time, what i am doing is shedding a light on, holding up an xray to the country to show what is underneath these divisions. What is underneath what you call racism, that there is an infrastructure of division that predates race as a concept. Race has a concept is a fairly new one in history, dating back to 400 or 500 years, before there was this coming together of people either by choice or by force onto this line. Onto this land. Human beings did not think of themselves in terms of what we now call race. They were irish, they were polish, they were lithuanian, they were from the area known as senegal or gambia, but they were not identified primarily based on what they look like. In europe, hundreds and hundreds of years ago, you would not have needed to identify yourself as a basis of your skin color. You were surrounded by people who looked like you. It was not the identifying characteristic. It was only when people are brought together, and what we now know as the United States, the new world, do these external characteristics that would have been neutral or had very little meaning or then have meaning here, once people came together. This is a creation. We also hear that race is a social construct, and this is a way of understanding how it became a social construct. How it became an arbitrary characteristic to use to rank people in a hierarchy that was requiring that there be people to do the work, to build a colony, and then the country. And there had to be people to do that, of course the great tragedy is that the people who were here, the Indigenous People whose land this was was driven off the land and numbers decimated, and then they brought in africans to be enslaved, to build this country. In doing so, they created a caste system on what was really a bipolar caste system, originating from the africans brought in as slaves to be at the bottom. The Indigenous People were excluded and out casted in their own land. This was the framework for how the country, the hierarchy that we had lived with throughout the centuries. Host you write in caste that the human impulse to create hierarchies runs across societies and cultures. What did you learn in your research about the genesis of that human instinct . Guest i came to the process of compiling eight different characteristics, pillars of caste. They are the common thread, the point of introspection in the hierarchy that i saw occurring wherever it happened. I would say that one of the originating characteristics, which is pillar number one, would be world religion. Finding the laws of nature, the way that culture must find or chooses to find justification from the laws of nature or from received wisdom from on high to justify the degradation, the positioning of putting people beneath your group. There is this desire to find justification for these things that are arbitrary. One of the goals is to remind ourselves of how arbitrary these divisions actually are. But to overcome the recognition and natural recognition that one would have come about a culture needs to have some justification, that is one of the things that i found and made reference to that as a pillar because that is the essential framework for convincing entire groups of people that they are above others and that others are beneath them, and from that, all of the other characteristics and mechanisms that are then used to keep other groups in a particular position so that the group that deems itself above can maintain resources and the primacy that they have been told or come to believe are their birthright. Host i asked our producer to put those eight pillars onto a graphic that we can show to our audience. The question that i have as we look at them, do all castes share all these characteristics . Are they necessary to form a caste . Guest it is my contention that that is the case. I would say that in order to there was a tremendous amount of work to be able to make the case that its underpinnings, that there is an infrastructure of caste in order to make that case i identified these eight , pillars, which are present in any such hierarchy. They are present. I would say that sadly, they are present because some of them are very difficult to accept in many ways. Host in order to understand how castes function, your research took you to two places. India and germany. Castes exist in other places. How did you zero in and focus on those two places . Guest the entire book is really about us. It is about america, our country, and a better understanding our country. In order to better understand our country and these longstanding, these long shadows under which we still live, why are these things still happening . That was the originating goal, to better understand ourselves by looking at other places that had experienced what i am describing is caste. The first place you would think of would be southeast asia, particularly india. That was the original goal, to try to understand better how castes work, originated there, and to understand the framework for the caste system there historically. In the process of working on this, charlottesville happened. After charlottesville, we all could see the symbolism of the United States, the confederacy, and nazi germany in the regalia and symbolism that the protesters used, brought together themselves as they were protesting the potential removal of the statue of robert e. Lee. We saw the symbolism of another culture and another time reaching over to nazi germany in a way that we might not have seen before in such a big way because in recent times it was there that charlottesville where the protesters brought the symbols together and it was then that i began to think to myself about what is it that germany had been doing in the intervening time . What is it about germany and the protesters would see themselves in what we saw in charlottesville were questions about memory, questions about history, how do we remember our history . How have we absorbed our history . We are not on the same page about what our history has been. That is what set me on a course to look at germany and the 12 year concentrated creation of a caste system there, but the nazis did during that time. Obviously, the most terrifying, horrific crime against humanity that ultimately was called was culminated, and i wanted to understand how the german how did the germans work through their history . How did they reconcile that history . How are they atoning for that history . My initial goal was to see how they were dealing with history because we are dealing with history very differently. After i began to look into how they were dealing with it and then i came to realize that i had no idea one of them was that it turns out that germanys genesis was turning to dialogue with an american genesis leading up to the third reich, i had no idea about that. It turns out that american eugenicists were writing books that were popular among the nazis and nazis were using these as american books as their textbooks. The nazis needed no one to teach them how to hate. They needed no one to teach them how to hate. But it turned out that the nazis had researchers go to the United States to study exactly how the United States had subjugated africanamericans. The nazis sent researchers to study the laws that forbade marriage across racial lines in the United States. It turned out that there were 41 of the United States that had at some point or other barred marriage across racial lines, not just blackandwhite but also asian descent. They sent researchers to study how the United States had segregated with jim crow laws, segregation in public facilities, they looked for all of the ways. All of the laws in the United States and jim crow and segregation as they went back to debate those laws as they were forming what would ultimately become the nuremberg laws. That was stunning to me. I had no idea. That is how i ended up focusing in on these three places because they all spoke to this idea of hierarchy and creating these artificial boundaries and artificial rankings that would have such horrific for what the nazis did, obviously. Host i am sure many readers will be surprised about the parallels between the jim crow south and the development of the nazi code. Of course, the nazis ultimate goal was the elimination of a population. How far does the parallel go when thinking of American Society . Guest the subtitle of the book book wasal with the the origins of our discontents. With an emphasis on the origins. The focus for what i am looking at is where are the originating points for introspection and what can we learn from them . The focus when it comes to the origins for nazi germany would be the years of the 1920s, interaction with the eugenicists in the 30s as they were forming a government. And creating that was the interesting thing, to your point, the 12 year reign can be instructive for all of us because it started out as a way to begin to look for ways of legitimacy in the United States. But also, the fact that they took a group of people who were among the most successful and accomplished people in these countries and then converted them into aces a subordinated caste. That had to make them into a subordinated caste. [indiscernible] with each decision that they made, and ultimately the final decision that came later in the war. This is an effort to look at the origins of these hierarchies, with an emphasis on the origins so that we can somehow learn from them and obviously, to make sure that these things never happen again. Host thinking about indias caste system, it is still very differen