Hi, everybody. I'm Trussey mcmillancott up the co host with Roxanne Gay of Here to Slay from Luminary. We have an excerpt from this week's show we'd like to share with you. We recently spoke with journalist Isabel Wilkerson about America's racial cast system. Her latest book focuses on the American hierarchy and looks well beyond the confines of race, class, or gender. If you want to hear more of this fascinating conversation, you can listen to the whole thing by going to luminary dot link slash slay. First of all, I'm just fascinating, and how did you sell white people on this book, because that to me, it's just it just seemed like you would go against the very impulse of the kinds of books people want to hear about this nation. Well, I think that part of it had to do with what we've been through in the last few years. I mean, you know, this is I mean one of the main audiences for this book where the people who you know, we've all heard the people say, you know, this is not my country. I don't recognize as my country. This is not what America stands for well, actually it has been the country for long, far longer than it has not been a country, and it was for them. I think that there was more of an awareness, I'd say, more of an openness to looking at almost anything that could help explain what otherwise did not make sense for so many people. So I thought a lot about the different examples that you used to build this argument about cast and how we can find a lot of the origins of American racism and what happened with the Third Reich and we can see it in the Indian cast system. But I've kept thinking about South Africa and apartheid, and so part of it. I'm going to qualify by saying, when you write a book like this, everyone is going to give you twenty thousand things that you should have could have included, and you cannot be everything to everyone. But you know, when I think about apartheid, it's such a significant example. Why was it not you think the best fit for your argument? That is a great question. I really appreciate your asking that I did think about them, And actually, you know, when I was at the New York Times, I actually covered South Africa for a short time, so I'm I'm familiar with it. Yeah, I'm familiar with it actually on a personal level, and I had experiences that I could have actually incorporated it if I wanted to. But you know, I think that as writers, you know, the three of us are writers, and this is narrative nonfiction. So the goal is to bring the audience, and the goal is to make it such that, you know, you invite the reader to want to turn the page. Uh, you don't want to overload it. So that's part of it. But then another part of it is because it's the most recognizable connection that many people would make. I wanted to look at two places where race in and of itself was not the metric used to design those cat so that in that way you can see, you know, other metrics that were used in these other societies, so that you can then look and see beneath them and say, actually, those structures led to some of the same behaviors, the same impulse to manage those boundaries and police those boundaries, and to enforce it in the same way. The whole even some of the actual mechanisms were similar. And so that was one thing. And then one other reason why is because as it turns out the United States predated South Africa and the creation of it. It's racial jurisprudence, So that means that actually they followed us. Apartheid was made law well after Jim Crow was in place in the United States. That's significant to me. So you've got a temporal problem that doesn't I don't think exists in our popular imagination of when. You know, history is also always just really weird to Americans. I don't think we tend to understand the sequence of events that make um we really struggle with that. And I uh, and I gotta admit I mean, I knew that because I know like some of the years, but I gotta admit that one. I don't think I've ever put them in my mind on a comparative timeline. Yeah, apartheid, I know. I think what happens to white readers if they start to grapple with what cast means in the American system of racism. I kept wondering, what does it mean for black folks to read this argument? You think, Isabelle, what are you think some takeaways for us, if any, from recentering or sort of shifting our understanding of the historical origins of the American racial hierarchy. I personally have found the concept of cast to explain a lot of what I have been through personally moving about this world, um brushing up against the expectations for someone who looks like me from the group that I'm from, the cast to which I was born. And I feel that you know that we live this, and we know it in our bones that our society, the country that you know, our ancestors or people who look like us built, still keeps us in a fixed place at the very bottom the videos, you know that the kind of things that we see happening to Brianna Taylor and to George Floyd, uh to Ahmad Aubrey, so many names, you know, there's a metronomeal names. We almost are overcome by them. I also have to say, I think about someone Jonathan Farrell. I cannot get his story out of I cannot. I mean, I just think if we could just say lost, Oh my god. He had had a massive car accident that just was so tragic and of itself, and then he went to get how he managed to climb out of the back window of the car, and then he goes to try to get help, and he goes to the first house that he comes across, and the woman calls the police. The police arrived, who are supposed to help him, or help any citizen in that situation. And what happens. He gets shot and I killed, executed, And that is solely because what he looks like. The metric of race, metric of phenotype, metric of what we look like has been used by this hierarchy to determine who has which place in our society, whose lives are valued and whose are not. What can happen to an individual? And I feel as if when I look at that, I realized that we are living with it, whether we give it a name or not, we know on our bones that we have been so devalued, so dehumanized. We are ranked at the very bottom of our society. And you know often say that you know when it comes to like class versus cast. If you can act away out of it, it's class. If you cannot activate out of it, it's cast. It is this fixed nature that there is nothing that an individual can do to escape these assumptions and stereotypes that literally put your life in danger. It dehumanizes so that the natural human responds to something that happens to an individual gets turned into something that literally can me in your life. Yeah, when I teach the concepts of race, class, and cast, you know, as I do as a sociologist, and I've taught it several times over the years. The example that always stumps my my children. I know, the adults, I get it. I know, I get it. They're adults. Blah blah blah. Okay, it's not infantilizing. It's that to me. I'm there to take care of them. So and I'll say, this is the thing that stumps them because they're still you know, bright eyed and bush detailed, and they know how to talk about the lower end of the spectrum right there, so trained on how to talk about poverty and yes, disproportionately African Americans, and you know, they've got it, they've been trained. Where they get hung up is when we talk about the other end of the spectrum. And I'll say to them, how rich do you have to be to no longer be black? And I asked them to bring me examples, Right, tell me the person who's wealthy enough, because really, already now you know they're only five, right, we've got black billionaire because each one they bring back. I have a news story. I have a news story. I have them all cued up and ready to go Oprah can't buy a purse, Robert Johnson being pushed out of the elevator at time, I mean, Michael Jordan's being mistaken the most famous man in the world, right, And we go through them, one by one by one, and it just destroys them their whole concept. And I think often about what would have happened if they understood limits in that way, if we talked about the top as much as we talked about like the bottom, what might be different for how we think about race and class and cast Yeah. Well, I I think that the natural and necessary focus on those who suffer the most as a result of our hierarchy um is important and need. There's there's not enough that can be spent on trying to understand and help people who are suffering the most in our society, as we can see with COVID. Absolutely. But the reason why I think that looking at those who are brushing up against uh, the expectations of people in our society who are assigned as a group to the very bottom, is that you can see the limits in the It's almost like that contrast die that is used when you know, cardiologists try to see what's happening with the arteries, and then you can better see exactly what is happening because you have now factored out all the other things that can possibly be at work, and now all you are left with is that very thing that keeps a person at the bottom, no matter whatever else they might do or represent. And and that's why I spent a lot of time in the book actually talking about what happens when you brush up against are in contention with the pre existing roles that we have been assigned from the time of our arrival on this on this soil. I've been thinking a lot about colonialism lately, I think because everyone's been talking about the royal family, and I think that one of the main things being left out of the conversation is that, of course, the Megan Markel situation ended up this way. I mean, they're colonizers, that's what they do, quite literally. And you know, you have to wonder is there a point where there's a remedy for all of this. And one of the proposed remedies that has been discussed for decades now is reparations. Do you think reparations is a path to dismantling the cast system? Is there anything that can dismantle the cast system? You know, it's it's one way to explain, for example, what happened in It's one way to understand what happened the response to two thousand eight um In other words, the biggest breach of the cast system occurred in two thousand eight. You might say, and and everybody, and that's what this is. And now, of course we saw people literally climbing the walls to get into the capital to reassert the birthright that they perceived themselves to have. In January six with that insurrection, we saw them literally climbing the walls and making police barricades. And so I don't present myself as having all the answers. My goal was to present the X ray of our country. My goal was, like I said, I'm like a building inspector is coming back and saying, this is what we're dealing with. You know, I actually don't even perceive myself as making an argument. I've perceived myself as shining a light on what we otherwise cannot see. And you cannot fix what you cannot see. But one of the things that I just think is central is us getting on the same page about the basics of what have happened in our country, Like we're not on the same page as a car about how we got to where we are, basic history. And it's dangerous to not know. You know, not knowing has consequences. I mean, not having an idea affects you know, how you vote, what policies you support. You know, you know where you send your children, where you choose to live, whether you choose to give this person a mark mortgage or to hire that person. That has consequences. And so whether we want to acknowledge it or not, these are the facts of our country. You can listen to our full interview with Isabel Wilkerson and many other conversations we've been having on here to slay by going to Luminary dot link slash Sleigh not dot com Luminary dot link slash Sleigh

Hi, everybody. I'm Trussey mcmillancott up the co host with Roxanne Gay of Here to Slay from Luminary. We have an excerpt from this week's show we'd like to share with you. We recently spoke with journalist Isabel Wilkerson about America's racial cast system. Her latest book focuses on the American hierarchy and looks well beyond the confines of race, class, or gender. If you want to hear more of this fascinating conversation, you can listen to the whole thing by going to luminary dot link slash slay. First of all, I'm just fascinating, and how did you sell white people on this book, because that to me, it's just it just seemed like you would go against the very impulse of the kinds of books people want to hear about this nation. Well, I think that part of it had to do with what we've been through in the last few years. I mean, you know, this is I mean one of the main audiences for this book where the people who you know, we've all heard the people say, you know, this is not my country. I don't recognize as my country. This is not what America stands for well, actually it has been the country for long, far longer than it has not been a country, and it was for them. I think that there was more of an awareness, I'd say, more of an openness to looking at almost anything that could help explain what otherwise did not make sense for so many people. So I thought a lot about the different examples that you used to build this argument about cast and how we can find a lot of the origins of American racism and what happened with the Third Reich and we can see it in the Indian cast system. But I've kept thinking about South Africa and apartheid, and so part of it. I'm going to qualify by saying, when you write a book like this, everyone is going to give you twenty thousand things that you should have could have included, and you cannot be everything to everyone. But you know, when I think about apartheid, it's such a significant example. Why was it not you think the best fit for your argument? That is a great question. I really appreciate your asking that I did think about them, And actually, you know, when I was at the New York Times, I actually covered South Africa for a short time, so I'm I'm familiar with it. Yeah, I'm familiar with it actually on a personal level, and I had experiences that I could have actually incorporated it if I wanted to. But you know, I think that as writers, you know, the three of us are writers, and this is narrative nonfiction. So the goal is to bring the audience, and the goal is to make it such that, you know, you invite the reader to want to turn the page. Uh, you don't want to overload it. So that's part of it. But then another part of it is because it's the most recognizable connection that many people would make. I wanted to look at two places where race in and of itself was not the metric used to design those cat so that in that way you can see, you know, other metrics that were used in these other societies, so that you can then look and see beneath them and say, actually, those structures led to some of the same behaviors, the same impulse to manage those boundaries and police those boundaries, and to enforce it in the same way. The whole even some of the actual mechanisms were similar. And so that was one thing. And then one other reason why is because as it turns out the United States predated South Africa and the creation of it. It's racial jurisprudence, So that means that actually they followed us. Apartheid was made law well after Jim Crow was in place in the United States. That's significant to me. So you've got a temporal problem that doesn't I don't think exists in our popular imagination of when. You know, history is also always just really weird to Americans. I don't think we tend to understand the sequence of events that make um we really struggle with that. And I uh, and I gotta admit I mean, I knew that because I know like some of the years, but I gotta admit that one. I don't think I've ever put them in my mind on a comparative timeline. Yeah, apartheid, I know. I think what happens to white readers if they start to grapple with what cast means in the American system of racism. I kept wondering, what does it mean for black folks to read this argument? You think, Isabelle, what are you think some takeaways for us, if any, from recentering or sort of shifting our understanding of the historical origins of the American racial hierarchy. I personally have found the concept of cast to explain a lot of what I have been through personally moving about this world, um brushing up against the expectations for someone who looks like me from the group that I'm from, the cast to which I was born. And I feel that you know that we live this, and we know it in our bones that our society, the country that you know, our ancestors or people who look like us built, still keeps us in a fixed place at the very bottom the videos, you know that the kind of things that we see happening to Brianna Taylor and to George Floyd, uh to Ahmad Aubrey, so many names, you know, there's a metronomeal names. We almost are overcome by them. I also have to say, I think about someone Jonathan Farrell. I cannot get his story out of I cannot. I mean, I just think if we could just say lost, Oh my god. He had had a massive car accident that just was so tragic and of itself, and then he went to get how he managed to climb out of the back window of the car, and then he goes to try to get help, and he goes to the first house that he comes across, and the woman calls the police. The police arrived, who are supposed to help him, or help any citizen in that situation. And what happens. He gets shot and I killed, executed, And that is solely because what he looks like. The metric of race, metric of phenotype, metric of what we look like has been used by this hierarchy to determine who has which place in our society, whose lives are valued and whose are not. What can happen to an individual? And I feel as if when I look at that, I realized that we are living with it, whether we give it a name or not, we know on our bones that we have been so devalued, so dehumanized. We are ranked at the very bottom of our society. And you know often say that you know when it comes to like class versus cast. If you can act away out of it, it's class. If you cannot activate out of it, it's cast. It is this fixed nature that there is nothing that an individual can do to escape these assumptions and stereotypes that literally put your life in danger. It dehumanizes so that the natural human responds to something that happens to an individual gets turned into something that literally can me in your life. Yeah, when I teach the concepts of race, class, and cast, you know, as I do as a sociologist, and I've taught it several times over the years. The example that always stumps my my children. I know, the adults, I get it. I know, I get it. They're adults. Blah blah blah. Okay, it's not infantilizing. It's that to me. I'm there to take care of them. So and I'll say, this is the thing that stumps them because they're still you know, bright eyed and bush detailed, and they know how to talk about the lower end of the spectrum right there, so trained on how to talk about poverty and yes, disproportionately African Americans, and you know, they've got it, they've been trained. Where they get hung up is when we talk about the other end of the spectrum. And I'll say to them, how rich do you have to be to no longer be black? And I asked them to bring me examples, Right, tell me the person who's wealthy enough, because really, already now you know they're only five, right, we've got black billionaire because each one they bring back. I have a news story. I have a news story. I have them all cued up and ready to go Oprah can't buy a purse, Robert Johnson being pushed out of the elevator at time, I mean, Michael Jordan's being mistaken the most famous man in the world, right, And we go through them, one by one by one, and it just destroys them their whole concept. And I think often about what would have happened if they understood limits in that way, if we talked about the top as much as we talked about like the bottom, what might be different for how we think about race and class and cast Yeah. Well, I I think that the natural and necessary focus on those who suffer the most as a result of our hierarchy um is important and need. There's there's not enough that can be spent on trying to understand and help people who are suffering the most in our society, as we can see with COVID. Absolutely. But the reason why I think that looking at those who are brushing up against uh, the expectations of people in our society who are assigned as a group to the very bottom, is that you can see the limits in the It's almost like that contrast die that is used when you know, cardiologists try to see what's happening with the arteries, and then you can better see exactly what is happening because you have now factored out all the other things that can possibly be at work, and now all you are left with is that very thing that keeps a person at the bottom, no matter whatever else they might do or represent. And and that's why I spent a lot of time in the book actually talking about what happens when you brush up against are in contention with the pre existing roles that we have been assigned from the time of our arrival on this on this soil. I've been thinking a lot about colonialism lately, I think because everyone's been talking about the royal family, and I think that one of the main things being left out of the conversation is that, of course, the Megan Markel situation ended up this way. I mean, they're colonizers, that's what they do, quite literally. And you know, you have to wonder is there a point where there's a remedy for all of this. And one of the proposed remedies that has been discussed for decades now is reparations. Do you think reparations is a path to dismantling the cast system? Is there anything that can dismantle the cast system? You know, it's it's one way to explain, for example, what happened in It's one way to understand what happened the response to two thousand eight um In other words, the biggest breach of the cast system occurred in two thousand eight. You might say, and and everybody, and that's what this is. And now, of course we saw people literally climbing the walls to get into the capital to reassert the birthright that they perceived themselves to have. In January six with that insurrection, we saw them literally climbing the walls and making police barricades. And so I don't present myself as having all the answers. My goal was to present the X ray of our country. My goal was, like I said, I'm like a building inspector is coming back and saying, this is what we're dealing with. You know, I actually don't even perceive myself as making an argument. I've perceived myself as shining a light on what we otherwise cannot see. And you cannot fix what you cannot see. But one of the things that I just think is central is us getting on the same page about the basics of what have happened in our country, Like we're not on the same page as a car about how we got to where we are, basic history. And it's dangerous to not know. You know, not knowing has consequences. I mean, not having an idea affects you know, how you vote, what policies you support. You know, you know where you send your children, where you choose to live, whether you choose to give this person a mark mortgage or to hire that person. That has consequences. And so whether we want to acknowledge it or not, these are the facts of our country. You can listen to our full interview with Isabel Wilkerson and many other conversations we've been having on here to slay by going to Luminary dot link slash Sleigh not dot com Luminary dot link slash Sleigh