Ideas - To fix America's caste system, acknowledge it exists: author

Episode Date: November 3, 2025

The true story of America is that it was built on a caste system comparable to India’s, says Pulitzer-prize-winning American journalist Isabel Wilkerson. The author argues that it's key to recognize the roots of the U.S. caste "structure" as she calls it, to understand why conflicts relating to race and class persist. Wilkerson delivered the 2025 Beatty Lecture at McGill University in Montreal.

Every day, your eyes are working overtime, from squinting at screens and navigating bright sun to late-night drives and early morning commutes. They do so much to help you experience the world. That's why regular eye exams are so important. Comprehensive eye exams at Spec Savers are designed to check your vision and overall eye health. Every standard eye exam includes an OCT 3D eye scan. Advanced technology that helps your optometrist detect early signs of eye and health conditions. conditions like glaucoma, cataracts, or even diabetes. It's a quick, non-invasive scan that provides a detailed look at what's happening beneath the surface. Don't wait. Give your eyes the care they deserve.

Book an eye exam at Specsavers from just $99, including an OCT scan. Book at Spexsavers.cavers.cai.a. Eye exams are provided by independent optometrists. Prices may vary by location. Visit Spexavers.cavers.cai to learn more. Tonight, we are deeply honored to welcome Mrs. Isabel Wilkison. Welcome to Ideas. I'm Nala Ayyad. Tonight, we go to the campus of McGill University in Montreal for the annual Beattie Lecture. The speaker is Isabel Wilkerson. She writes history, but she doesn't call herself a historian.

She came to her current role by way of print journalism. In 1994, she was the first African-American woman to win a Pulitzer Prize for journalism. At the time, she was the Chicago Bureau Chief for the New York Times. In 2010, she published her first non-fiction book, The Warmth of Other Sons, which told the stories of three people, each, whether they knew it or not, was a participant in the Great Migration. when six million African-Americans left the South during the early to mid-20th century

to escape Jim Crow laws, heading to cities in the north and west of the country. Wilkerson's book won the National Book Critics Circle Award. The New York Times later ranked it as America's best book of nonfiction published this century. In 2020, Isabel Wilkerson put out a second book called cast on the origins of our discontents. It makes a case for seeing America as sharing an important quality with India

that both societies have inherited a long-standing and rigid cast structure. Cast immediately topped the New York Times bestseller charts. Time magazine named it the non-fiction book of the year. Oprah Winfrey chose it for her book club and declared it the most important book she had ever. selected. In the five years since cast came out, Isabel Wilkerson has been called on constantly to speak to what she sees happening in her country since the pandemic, the protests over the killing of George Floyd, and the resurgence of far-right nationalist politics. The 71st

annual Beatt lecture in Montreal was her first public address to a Canadian audience. In this episode, you'll hear Isabel Wilkerson's speech along with my on-stage conversation with her. Thank you so much for inviting me to be with you on this beautiful campus, my first time on this campus, for this esteemed lecture series. I'm reminded of many, many, many moons ago, my very first two trips to Canada. One was my father wanted to make a trip to, not here, to Nova Scotia, sorry, to Nova Scotia. He insisted upon that. He wanted to go to that part of the country. That's the first time. And then the second time that I came to Canada was in the 10th grade for, I was taking French. We were so excited to be able to get to the closest place that we could get

to practice, what we'd been learning. We did not, in the school that I went to, have have the funds to go all the way to France, as some of the wealthier schools did. So we came to Quebec, a long bus trip. The parents all raised money and sold cookies and did whatever we could in order to be able to afford to send their children to Quebec. I remember several things, one as was gorgeously quaint.

The food was amazing, and that the very kind citizens did not allow us to practice our French as much as we liked, because they heard our American accents and responded in English, so we were fooling no one. But we tried. I'm also reminded on, you know, that as I, you know, stand here on this campus in this country, which has been so embracing of the work, I will never forget a few, about a couple years ago when Cass first came out, and we got this notification. And something actually appeared online that said that people in Toronto, that's what we became aware of, the library in Toronto, the library system in Toronto, was having a hard time getting the book to people, that the waiting line or the whole line was 3,000 people in order to get the book in Toronto. So we'd had no idea of how much had been embraced in this country and by the readers here.

So thank you so much for your welcome. Thank you so much for your embrace. It just means the world. You know, I spent 15 years working on that first book, The Warmth of Other Suns. So I often say that if it were a human being, it would be in high school and dating. That is how long it took me to finish that way. I would never have imagined that years later, decades later, I would be standing here speaking to a group. Actually, when you're working on something like that, you can't imagine anything except trying to get the next chapter done.

But it's such a pleasure now to be able to be on the other side of that. So this is an unsettled and an uncertain time that we are in, and it calls upon us to search ourselves and our history, which is what I'm here to talk about. In everything that I do personally in my professional life, in everything that I do, I think about the ancestors whose names I will never know because of my background and what happened to how most African Americans arrived in that country. I think about the ancestors whose names I will never know and whose faces I could never conjure, who somehow survived the middle passage of Africans who were brought across the Atlantic to help build a nation. So I think about how they had somehow survived the Middle Passage and landed in the ports along the Chesapeake. It was against the law for them to learn to read and to write. And here I am standing before you as a Pulitzer Prize winner who makes my living doing precisely what they were prohibited from being able to do. And I hope that my work somehow helps to redeem their sacrifices.

My father was a Tuskegee Airman. How many of you've heard of the Tuskegee Airmen? Oh, that's so wonderful. My father would be so thrilled. My father was a Tuskegee Airmen, and these were considered among the finest pilots that America had ever produced. But after World War II, they were prohibited from doing the very work that they had shown themselves to be so proficient at and that they so loved.

And it turned out that they had to persist nonetheless. And so what they did was they could not find work. They were barred from being able to work as pilots, and their talents essentially were going fallow if they turned out the country was not willing or ready or open to being able to incorporate them into the society itself and doing what they had chosen to do and what they proved themselves as worthy of. So they had to forego their dreams and remake themselves. And my father went back for a second degree as many of them did. And my father became a civil engineer, which means that he literally was the builder of bridges, which means that I literally

I'm the daughter of a builder of bridges, and I take that legacy very seriously in the work that I do. A bridge spans, a bridge links, a bridge unites to otherwise disconnected spaces. You cannot build a bridge without digging deep into the two sides that you're seeking to connect. And that is what I do in his honor.

And I know that somehow, I mean, he's got to be happy that I'm here standing before you. There could be no more urgent time than ours to reckon with the, fraud inheritance that we have as a species. I've taken to talk about ourselves as a species, not just people, but as a species, because I think we need to be reminded of how interconnected we are, how interdependent we are. And speaking of ourselves, a species, connects us to other species and our responsibility to take care of this one planet that we have. So the question is,

why are we so divided? It's my belief that we cannot fix what we cannot see, and we We cannot cure a disease unless we have diagnosed it. In recent times, it's not been unusual to hear people say something along the lines of this about the country where I was born, which is people will say, I don't recognize my country. This is not what the country stands for. And whenever I hear that, I'm reminded that not enough people, both within the country and outside of the country, have had a chance to know the true and full history of what has gone before us.

Because if you know the history, then you would understand it not be a, surprised by so much that unfolds before us. A country can be like a patient with a pre-existing condition, like heart disease, let's say. And if a patient with heart disease has a heart attack, you might be alarmed, you might be devastated, you might be moved to action. In fact, one would hope that you would be moved to action. But you would not be surprised if a heart patient without intervention or treatment had a heart attack. And so it is with societies. that if something is not addressed and not recognized, then it does not get the chance to be treated in the way that it should

in order to help it to overcome those things. So people have not had the chance to know the full history of the country, and then that means that we're still operating under illusions that we had not been aware of. In my own world, I would never have imagined that the latest book, which seeks to tell some of the history of the origins of our discontents would be in the middle of a case, a federal case, involving a rural county in Texas

where officials, some of whom did not even have library cards, would take over the library board, would shut down the libraries in order to remove books, including cast. I would never imagine that a federal judge would then order the county to reinstate those books, but that the county would instead appeal that ruling rather than to restore the books and then would consider shutting down the entire library system.

This has been happening in the last just a couple of years. Who would have thought that authors and teachers and librarians and scientists and pretty much every citizen would be on the front lines of democracy itself? My mission is to use the power of language and narrative to change how people see the world. The idea is that this shows the quiet power of narrative because so much of what we see and perceive and accept as the way things are, begin with narratives. with narratives, what are the stories that we tell one another? What are the stories that have been passed down? What are the stories that we've come to believe about ourselves and our societies? Stories are the oldest form of teaching, and narrative nonfiction is the closest that a person can be to imagining what it's like to be another person. It seeks to show

and not to tell. It seeks to connect the dots rather than to dictate what someone should think. It takes you by the hand and it brings you into the middle of the story so that you can experience something for yourself. Some people have said to me, particularly after the last book, they'll say, well, you argue this or you're making an argument about that, and I say to them, I do not argue. I do not argue. My work is a prayer for society. It's a prayer for the species, and I come with receipts. I do not argue. I'm the building inspector presenting my findings. You may not like what the building inspector has to say. Or for some people, you may be relieved by what the building inspector has to report.

You may be comforted, at least, to know how we got here and what the building is facing. Not everyone wants to hear it, but some people would be relieved to know. But there's no point in arguing with the finding that, for example, there's mold in the basement. It just is what it is. I come to believe, and I think that this is useful for us in the era that we find ourselves, that you cannot convince someone of anything by trying to tell them what to think. I try to show rather than tell

because it takes patience and it takes research, it takes diligence and forethought in order to make a convincing case. The goal is to make the case so an audience can make up their own mind. I find that people are more likely to remember and to believe and be convinced of a thing if they feel that they came to the conclusion themselves.

So let them do that. In the perilous era in which we find ourselves, It will become more important for every single person to recognize that we can only influence others when we allow them to hear what we have to say and come to the conclusion on their own. So I want to say a little bit about the second book, Cass, which when it came out, it came out in the middle of a global pandemic. I mean, who in the world would spend all these years on a book and then have it come out then? I did not choose that. That was not my choice at all. It came out in the middle of a global pandemic.

it came out in the middle of all of these divisions and the political upheaval of that time. It was the same year as George Floyd. All these things happened in the months leading up to the book coming out, and yet there we were. It turned out that you couldn't even, I could not speak in a situation such as this.

No one was, the libraries weren't open, nothing was open, everything was done by Zoom. And so one of the very first events that we had was a Zoom event, and while we were waiting for the technicians to get everything sorted, the person who was the interlocutor for that event, you know, beforehand said to me, you know, we've been through so much as a nation,

and we've been through this global pandemic and this presidential campaign and then what's happening with George Floyd, all these things we're going through. And then you come out with, then you hit us with Cass, and I said, I did not hit you with Cass. Cass is operating, whether we acknowledge it or not.

cast is working within human society whether we see it or not. It is undermining progress and democracy, whether we know it or not. So we might as well know that which we're dealing with. We might as well know. I would like to say a little bit too about the connection between this and the first book and how

the idea of not knowing our history can be so damaging to one's sense of oneself and of how we got to where we are. That first book, The Warmful of the Suns, was about the out migration, the outpouring of six million African Americans from the Jim Crow South to the rest of the country. Many people had no idea, I would hear that over and over again, they had no idea of this having happened. They had no idea how African Americans happened to have landed in Harlem or in Detroit or in Chicago or any of these places.

They had no idea how the cities actually came to be. And so that was one of the things that I set out to do. it turned out that the people who were part of that migration were proxies for anyone in the world who'd ever sought to leave all that they'd known for a place that they'd never seen in hopes that life might be better. That means that they're proxies for the ancestors

of almost everybody, particularly in the western hemisphere, unless they were indigenous people, because that is how people got to this continent. And so what we learned from that is that no migration is actually about migration. migration is about freedom and how far people are willing to go to achieve that it's not about geography it's about freedom and so I want to say a couple things about understanding the United States from the perspective of this history is that the great migration occurred because it was the only time in American history that American citizens had to actually flee the land of their birth just to be recognized as the citizens that they had always been no other group of Americans has had to act like immigrants just to be recognized as citizens. That's the magnitude of what the 6 million people were doing

as they were fleeing the Jim Crow South. It may seem as if this is a group of people who's just setting out and relocating. But what they were doing was a commentary on the structure of the country itself and once hope in how that country could realize its ideals. This group of Americans who did this were In some ways, they were not moving.

It was actually a defection. It was a seeking of political asylum within the borders of their own country. They were defecting a caste system known as Jim Crow that was so arcane that it was against the law for a black person and a white person to merely play checkers together in Birmingham. You could go to jail if you were caught playing checkers

together with a person of a different race in Birmingham, Alabama. It's just one example of what I'm speaking about. That means if someone had to have seen a black person and a white person, playing checkers together in some town square. And maybe the wrong person was winning or they were having too good of a time.

But whatever it was that they saw, they felt that the entire foundation of southern civilization was in peril. And took the time to write that down as a law. This world that they were fleeing was so arcane that in courtrooms throughout the South, there was actually a black Bible and an altogether separate white Bible to swear to tell the truth on in court.

That means that the very, word of God was segregated in the Jim Crow South. That means that the same sacred object could not be touched by hands of different races, which is a hallmark of what we consider to be one of the essential defining characteristics of what a caste system might be, the idea of purity versus pollution. There was one other example I want to give to you, and that is the idea that it was actually against the law for African Americans, for black people in the Jim Crow South into the 1970s. How many of us know someone who was born before 1970?

So this is not ancient history. It was actually against the law in the Jim Crow South for an African American motorist to pass a white motorist on the road, no matter how slowly that person was going. Now that actually is dangerous because it means that you're not able to do what is the safety. and wise thing to do when you're behind the wheel and a car is slowing up in front of you.

That becomes a metaphor for the restrictions on an entire group of people that you were not to pass someone from the presumed dominating group in the hierarchy that was in place in the Jim Crow South, meaning you literally could not pass them

and you figuratively could not pass when you could not pass in any way. So so much of what we see is in some ways a is what happens when there is progress made, a tremendous amount of progress made in a society which is obviously been made in the time since

the Jim Crow era and the civil rights era. And when there is this kind of progress, there can often be an immediate backlash and attempt to readjust to get back to what the originating caste system intended all along. And that

is some of what we are ultimately seeing right now. to say a little bit about, you know, a lot of people think that what I write is history until they turn on the news. And I want to say a little bit about the consequences of history and the divisions and give me an example of how this can have an effect that often can be a matter of life and death. And that's just going back a few years to the pandemic itself. There were two countries that led the world in COVID deaths, the United States in India. I was talking about this throughout the time of

when Cass came out and I was speaking about this and every time I would, about to give remarks, I would always check to see, is this right? Is it right? Is it possible? I couldn't even believe my eyes when I would look at that number. You know, the technology and advancement on so many levels would suggest

that this should not be a place where there would be such a high rate of deaths from COVID, but those are the stats, those are the facts. So how is it the two very, very different countries, the oldest democracy in the world, and the largest democracy in the world, we're stricken with these numbers. One country has the world's oldest caste system, and the other has a less recognized one. A caste system through its social

controls and stigma and other pillars of caste embeds and fomens division. That's the purpose of a caste system. It programs people into believing that they have no stake in the well-being of those that they have been told are beneath them. Those that they have been told are unworthy or undeserving. It makes for a less magnanimous society. It creates a built-in us versus them distance between groups. It affects policy, how people vote, how and in whom a society invests. It costs lives and humans flourishing. There are many, many reasons why we find ourselves in the situation that we're in, but the embedded divisions that go back to the founding of the country actually help us understand. So it doesn't, it's not as surprising when you understand it

from the perspective of Cass. Now, Cass is not a word often applied to the United States, but it was Dr. Martin Luther King, who came to the recognition about the applicability of this ancient concept when he made a historic trip to India in the winter of 1959. He'd always wanted to get there because he'd been so inspired by the nonviolent protest philosophy

of Mahondas K Gandhi, and so he had the chance to go in 1959. While he was there, he's treated as visiting dignitary, but he wanted to visit with the people who were then known as untouchables, now known as So he made a trip to the southern part of the country, and he decided to visit or was invited to visit a school that was populated by students who are from the Dalek community that are not as untouchables. When he got there, the principal was so excited to greet him that he brought the children out, he brought the students all out and collected them for an assembly, and he brought Dr. King out, and then he made the introduction of Dr. King to the students. He said, young people, I wish to introduce you to a fellow untouchable from the United States of America. When Dr. King heard that language applied to him, he bristled at it.

He was floored that they would think of him in that way. He didn't use the language of caste. He did not think of himself in that way. He'd been treated as a visiting dignitary at dinner with the prime minister. He didn't see himself in that way at all. In fact, he was peeved that they would think of him that way. But then he thought about it. He thought about what was a thing.

that very moment, 20 million African Americans who were then held in a fixed place at the very bottom of the hierarchy there. They were restricted as to where they could live, whether they could vote, actually restricted from being able to, prohibited from being able to vote, prohibited as to the kind of work that they could do, and that their efforts to be recognized as citizens were being met with tremendous hostility, resentment, and in fact violence. And so he thought about and he said to himself, I am an untouchable and every black person in the United States. is an untouchable too. Dr. King made the connection that other people would not have ever thought about because those who knew best what a caste system was instantly recognized caste when they saw it.

They knew who fit where in this caste system on the other side of the planet, and they connected their system of hierarchy to the hierarchy in the country that he had come from. Cass is essentially an artificial, arbitrary, graded ranking of human value in a society. It's what determines one's standing, respect, benefit of the doubt, access to resources, the denial of access to resources, assumptions of competence and worthiness and intelligence, whether one will be protected by the authorities or attacked by the authorities. CAST is the infrastructure of the divisions that we see to the current day. Any number of arbitrary metrics could be used to divide and rank people in any society or any caste system.

Ethnicity, religion, language, place of origin, it's arbitrary, so it could be literally anything. In America, the metric that the early colonists chose to use to divide and to rank people, to determine who would be slave or free, who would have rights or no rights, not even over their own bodies, who would profit from the labor extracted from others, who could be bought, who could be sold, who could be won in a bet or given away as a wedding present. The colonists chose to take otherwise neutral physical characteristics that should have no meaning whatsoever other than the beautiful manifestation, physical manifestation of the individuals within our species. And they took those otherwise neutral physical characteristics and used them to assign people to an inherited role in a hierarchy

before there was even the United States of America. And that is how so much of these divisions that we are seeing actually began. A metric so arbitrary, it could be literally anything. That's how Isabel Wilkerson describes America's caste system, a system so profound, so entrenched, and based on such superficial characteristics. Her choice of words saying cast structure rather than racial prejudice is how she steers her audience's attention to where she believes it needs to go. She wants people to see why race and race.

doesn't just go away. Once people acknowledge the existence of a caste structure, they won't be surprised or confused by backlashes against change to that structure. It's a theme she takes up in the remainder of her Beattie lecture and in our on-stage conversation that follows her talk. You're listening to Ideas from CBC Radio. I'm Nala Ayyad.

Every day, your eyes are working overtime. from squinting at screens and navigating bright sun to late-night drives and early morning commutes. They do so much to help you experience the world. That's why regular eye exams are so important. Comprehensive eye exams at Specsavers are designed to check your vision and overall eye health. Every standard eye exam includes an OCT 3D eye scan. Advanced technology that helps your optometrists detect early signs of eye and health conditions, like glaucoma, cataracts, or even diabetes.

It's a quick, non-invasive scan that provides a detailed look at what's happening beneath the surface. Don't wait. Give your eyes the care they deserve. Book an eye exam at Specsavers from just $99, including an OCT scan. Book at Spexsavers.cairs.cavers.caiates are provided by independent optometrists. Prices may vary by location. Visit specksavers.caver to learn more. This ascent isn't for everyone. You need grit to climb this high this often. You've got to be an underdog that always over delivers.

You've got to be 6,500 hospital staff, 1,000 doctors, all doing so much with so little. You've got to be Scarborough, defined by our uphill battle and always striving towards new heights. And you can help us keep climbing. Donate at lovescarbro.cairbo.com. Now back to the Beattie Lecture by Isabel Wilkerson, and why the social divisions in today's United States, should be no surprise at all. Slavery lasted for 246 years. That's 12 generations. How many grades do we have to add to the word grandparent

to begin to conceive of how long slavery lasted in the country? There are so many people who describe it as a sad, dark chapter in the country's history, but it lasted for so long that it was not until 2022, just a few years ago, that the United States became, was a free and independent country for as long as slavery. lasted on its soil. It became 246 years old in 2022. Slavery lasted for so long that no adult alive today will be alive at the point in which African Americans will have been free for as long

as African Americans were enslaved. That will not happen until the year 2111. It will not be until the second decade of the 22nd century before African Americans will have been free for as long as African Americans were enslaved. We've not addressed much less reconciled. We've not addressed much less reconciled this history, no one was held to account for all that we saw in January of 2021 of the United States Capitol. No one was held to account for the 246 years of slavery or for the rupture of secession or civil war. Instead, there are monuments to these men. Because we have not addressed much less reconciled this history, we actually saw a Confederate flag inside the United States Capitol in January of 2021. Because not enough people have known our history or been willing

to address our history or much less a tone for our history, those of us alive today will have to explain to succeeding generations. How is it that a rioter in 2021 in our era could deliver the Confederate flag farther than Robert Lee himself? These are the things that actually have happened. These are not opinions. These are things that actually have happened. These are not opinions. These are things that actually happen. We all saw what happened at the Capitol that day. But one of the things that I noticed that I think is worth thinking about is that there was a video that circulated after the rioters had been cleared. And it was a video that showed a scene after the Capitol had been cleared. And there were a crew of janitors who were brought in to clean up after the rampage.

There they were laboring in their uniforms bent over with mops and with brooms and with masks over their faces. They were to a person all black. There was a police officer standing over them, the only one who was standing over them, surveilling them. And I saw instantly the people assigned to the subordinated group, the subordinated

cast for 400 years in the country, still consigned to their historic role of serving, of cleaning up after those who've been programmed to see themselves as dominant and superior and supreme. Had people who look like the janitors in that crew, seen working late into the night, dained to burst through

police barricades and to break into the capital? Well, we know what would have come of that. It is inconceivable. It is unthinkable. They would not have lived to tell. This is the enduring nature of hierarchy. The entitlement of those trained to see themselves as dominant by birthright and to act and to take whatever they perceive to be theirs. The error that we are in calls for a radical kind of empathy. It requires a searching and a desire to be. to know far beyond what we have been told. Empathy is not sympathy. Sympathy is looking across at someone and feeling sorrow.

Empathy is not pity. Pity is looking down from above and feeling a distant sadness for another in their misfortune. Empathy is commonly viewed as putting yourself in someone else's shoes to imagine how you would feel. That could be seen as a start, but that is actually a little more than role playing, and it is not enough. In fact, I perceive it as something that could actually detract from being able to truly understand another person because you're assuming that what you are experiencing or how you think you feel would be how this other person would be feeling. It is not enough in the ruptured world in which we live. Radical empathy, on the other hand, means putting in the work to educate oneself,

to learn the history, and to listen with a humble heart, to understand another's experience from their perspective and not as we imagine that we would feel. Radical empathy is not about you and what you think you would do in a situation that you've never been in and never will, perhaps. It's a kindred connection from a place of deep knowing, and it opens your spirit to the pain of another as they perceive it. Empathy is no substitute for experience itself, and I would say that the price of privilege or whatever advantages the universe is bestowed upon us all is the moral duty to act when one sees another person treated unfairly. And the least of the person in the dominant group or has been granted great advantage by the universe, the least that that person can do is to not make the pain any worse. I'm sure that many of us might secretly wish that our lives had intersected with a different timeline.

But this is our timeline. Why did our trajectories have to collide with the global pandemic, with all the various things that are happening in our day, with climate change and dystopian upheaval around the planet. I would suggest that there's a reason why the things that we're witnessing are happening in our exact time on this planet. It's because we actually are the ones who are made for this moment. We're not in the situation that we're facing because we can't handle it. I think that we're in the situation that we're facing precisely because we can.

Why else will we be here? For some reason that only the universe knows we are exactly where we're supposed to be in the flow of human existence. It will be up to each of us to figure out what we each uniquely can bring to the moment that the planet and the species needs us for. Every single one of us in this gathering, every single one of us here on this planet is here because the ancestors of every single one of us found a way to somehow survive war, famine, drought, floods, depression, plagues, pestilence, upheavals of every kind imaginable. Not one of us would be here if they had not found a way to survive. Every single one of us is a product of every single decision that every single ancestor somehow throughout our lineage ever made.

So we each have been given a code of instructions for survival deep in our marrow. How can we harness the wisdom of the ancients to survive and to transcend humanity's current upheavals? The answers reside deep within us and within the hearts of every one of us. I want to say one other thing about COVID, and that is in these unprecedented years that we have that we're currently still living through if we've learned anything from COVID it's that an invisible organism without a brain managed to cause upheaval across the planet

and to outwit and overtake a presumably smarter species because it does not care about color it did not care about nationality or immigrant status or gender or national borders or passports COVID saw all humans for what we actually are one interconnected and interdependent species.

It would infect anyone that it had access to long enough. It sees what we have in common, even if humans don't see it for ourselves, that we're all in this together, and that it is time that we started to act like it. Not only for our communities and our children and our countries, but for the species in the planet itself. I want to close with the words of Richard Wright, who brings us back to the Great Migration, and the mission that I happen to be on,

my own personal calling, which is to find somehow to find inspiration and hardship and to share that with others who are open, willing to hear. And so Richard Wright was one of the great writers of the 20th century. He was essentially the poet laureate of the Great Migration. And he wrote these words as a whisper and as a prayer to those of us alive today to imagine a future

that we cannot see but have faith as possible. And he wrote these words as he was recounting what was on his heart as he was making that the beginning of that journey

out of Mississippi to what he hoped would be freedom in the north a place called Chicago. And he wrote about, he wrote these words as he was remembering what was on his mind

and what was on his heart what he's hoping for and how he was, nothing is certain, but he had to have a belief that it could be what he was hoping for. He wrote, I was leaving the South to fling myself into the unknown. I was taking a part of the South to transplant an alien soil, to see if it could grow differently, if it could drink of new and cool rains, bend in strange winds, respond to the warm, of other sons, and perhaps, just perhaps, to bloom.

Thank you so much for having me. Isabel Wilkerson, delivering the 2025 Beattie Lecture at McGill University in Montreal. Early in her talk, she mentioned a controversy and a court battle involving her second book, Cast. In 2022, patrons of a public library system in Texas took county officials to court to prevent the removal of 17 books from library shelves, and cast was one of those books. The battle dragged on for three years, until May 2025, when a court of appeal upheld the county's right not to make cast available in public libraries. This overturned two previous rulings calling for the reinstatement of the banned books.

As of late October 2025, the library patrons with support from the Penn America Organization were petitioning the U.S. Supreme Court to hear the case. That was the backstory to my first question to Isabel Wilkerson. I'm curious what you think your book and applying the lens of cast actually exposes about U.S. history.

I mean, what is it that it exposes? that is so terrifying to those who seek to ban those ideas. Well, I think that if you're invested in a certain romanticized view of how the country came to be, then you only want to see that version of it anywhere you go. And, you know, the fact of the matter is the history is not romantic in any country. I mean, first of all, I want to say that what any society is capable of doing, good or bad any other society is capable of doing. So the idea of things only happening in one place but never happening in another place is part of the problem that we have as a species is we think that

somehow this, this set part of our species would never, ever, ever, ever do this. And this part of our species would only, only, only do this. And that's part of the problem. I mean, human beings are complex. And I think that we get caught up in and what we would like to think is the way society works and that's just simply not. I mean, if people don't have, if people do not want to face up to the truth of their circumstances, then they will find other many, many ways to avoid that. I mean, I often think of, when I talk about these issues, often talk about it in terms of health issues. So that, you know, if, if diabetes runs in your family and you'd rather not think about it, then you just go and eat whatever you want. You'd rather not think about it. I mean,

nobody wants to think about negative things. I mean, who wants to think about it? If alcoholism runs in the family, then you may not want to think about it. You just go ahead and drink what you want, however you want to. That does not mean that these issues are not there. It just means you're refusing to acknowledge them. It's a denial of sorts of. It's a denial. I think it's work to deny.

How far do you think a book like Cass can go in actually tackling this ignorance of its presence, of the system's presence? I think that when you do something like, like this, your goal is not to, you, we know that the circumstances that we're in, the current era that we were in, did not happen overnight. It did not happen in the last five years. It didn't happen in the last 10 years. It didn't happen in the last century. This has been going on for a very, very long time. It's unaddressed history that keeps repeating itself. And so what you seek to do when you're in my situation is to put this out there in the soil,

in the water so that somehow it can find its way to the people who are most open to it. That's all that we can do. It really helps that this stuff that you put out there is so beautifully written and so wonderfully expressed. Just a tiny thing I want to quote. You describe cast as programming, as you said tonight. As the wordless usher in a darkened theater,

the flashlight cast down the aisles guiding us to our assigned seats for a performance. performance. I mean, what a beautiful and horrific metaphor both at once. What is it that permits a caste system, any caste system, not just what we're seeing in the U.S., to keep assigning us to those seats? What's the secret to the longevity? I think the secret to the longevity is within the wiring of every individual within the society. It's, of course, it's in the laws, it's in the norms. It's in the history, whether people know it or not.

It's in the language. It's in the way, in the actions. It's everywhere. I mean, that's the reason why it's hard to fight it. It's hard to overcome it. It's hard to vanquish it because one of the the book opens actually with the

anthrax that was discovered, that rose up through the soil and the Siberian tundra. as a result of a heat wave that went that was so extensive that it melted the permafrost and reindeer who had died in the in World War II they actually rose up and they had they had been they had been felled by by anthrax and so the the people in that remote part of the Siberian tundra had to figure out what to do that is I included that I started with that

because it just shows you how indelible it is part of it could be in human programming itself. You call it an operating system. It is an operating system. So that if it's an operating system or if it's like a virus, then that means that perhaps it can never on its own truly be vanquished.

And that's one of the things I've used in that opening chapter where I was saying that if it can't be vanquished, then that means that perhaps the main thing that can be done is how we treat other pathogens is that you prepare for it. You recognize that it's there. You have vaccines.

You do all the various things the scientists know to do because you understand that it's there and it cannot be vanquished. It cannot truly be killed. And so therefore you figure out ways to protect against it. And I think that's, I mean, it's a useful metaphor for understanding how to fight these things.

Can you anchor that in an example? I mean, is there a place in the world where maybe it hasn't been vanquished but where the dominant groups maybe have actually participated in the attempt to dismantle I'm not aware of a single place that it's figured everything out. Again, I think it may be in the human programming. But I do know that there are examples, I think, of Singapore, which is a

multicultural nation with many, many different groups, and they figure out a way to try to apportion power among the different groups. Rwanda is a nation that people will often turn to because they have been through the worst experiences of what the ultimate outcome is of these divisions, and they have then worked to protect against it. Now, the reason I hesitate to mention these places is because who knows what will happen in succeeding generations.

I mean, the point is that it perhaps cannot be vanquished, which means that we have to be even more cautious, even more aware. To me, that's the only way to protect against it. And I think that people often will look at Germany as well, which I did in the book, because Germany is a place that obviously has had to deal with, you know, just the horrors of their history. And they have found ways to incorporate that history into the way that they move about in the world.

And they have preserved those spaces so that people will never, ever forget. You go to Berlin and there's a massive, massive memorial right in the middle of the city. Haunting. There are signposts everywhere. so that people never forget, and children are taught from the earliest age where they can begin to understand as to the seriousness, the gravity of what happened. But it's not with a sense of, from what I could tell, it's not with a sense of shame and blame. It has to be from a place of wanting to protect against it ever happening again. And yet, even in Germany,

there is the rise of right-wing nationalist thinking. I mean, it's not entirely vanquished. Think about how that could still rise up in the face of such forward-thinking planning and strategy to protect against it, and it still rises up. Of course, we Canadians could also ask ourselves if this country has a kind of a caste structure operating. How would we decide? Well, working on that book, I came up with eight pillars of caste. They had to have been in place at the time that the caste system was. was structured. So it's not that each one of those pillars exist in its truest, purest form now. It means that they were there, they were present, and they were legislated, they were core values

and norms at the time that the society was built. And, you know, one of them is the idea of purity versus pollution. Another one is the idea of having to use terror and violence in order to maintain it because in order to keep people in a fixed place beyond and irrespective of their own talents and gifts and preferences and strengths and intellect to keep them in a fixed place perhaps let's say at the very bottom of a hierarchy where they could never ever do a particular thing where for example my father had the at the Tuskegee Airmen clearly had the facility the intellect to be able to do the work of a pilot but they were not permitted in the society once they were no longer needed in the war,

they were not permitted to do that. How do you keep people in a fixed place at the very bottom of a society? Well, it takes tremendous legal structure, jurisprudence. There were laws about this. You had to make sure everyone was well socialized to believe in the primacy of this hierarchy.

So everyone had to be on board with it. People up and down the hierarchy, not just people at the very top, but people at the very bottom. There's so much to say about the ways in which the behaviors and the policing can happen at any rung of the hierarchy. Sometimes people at the very bottom will police themselves more than people at the very top because that's kind of how people are socialized to act.

And so all of these things would have to be in place in order for it to be a caste system. I can't speak to that. I am curious, though, whether you can speak to, I know you know that we have a truth and reconciliation process here to try to deal with the wound. of the history with indigenous people in this country, and it is definitely a work in progress. But I'm curious what hopes you put in that kind of process. I absolutely believe that that's necessary.

I mean, I think that, and I so admire that. In fact, in cast, I presented myself as a building inspector. The building inspector does not fix the house. I keep having to tell that to people. It's up to you as the owner to fix the house. So people continue to ask me, well, what should we do? you know, what would you suggest we do to fix the house? I just presented the report to you.

There you have it. And in doing so, I don't try to come up with prescriptions of what should happen. I'd also say that as someone who is descended from people who had been held in a fixed place at the bottom, it is not the responsibility of people who were assigned at the bottom to fix something that they did not create. It's very important to recognize that. Very important to recognize that. But recognizing that people were going to be looking for something from me, I did recommend a Truth in Reconciliation Commission

because I do think that that would be useful for the United States. There has not ever been one. And I think that not knowing how we got to where we are is one of the reasons why things persist the way that they are. You can't fix what you don't know. How does that land that idea? It hasn't happened. I'm curious about this title, this idea of being a building inspector.

Why did you become the building inspector? Thank you for asking that. I mean, it started with the Warrant of the Sons. I mean, the Warrant of the Sons is about, as you know, it's about people defecting a world of where they couldn't so much as just pass another motorist on the road merely because of what they look like. Because that's what race is what you look like. That's simply, that's what race is.

So, you know, we're a species that has a beautiful range of physical manifestation that was used against the people. That's all that racist. So they were leaving a place where they could not do something as basic as that. And a lot of people would describe that as racism. And I don't judge whether people do. You can call it whatever you want. I chose to use the word cast in the warmth of other sons. And a lot of people who've read the warmth of the sons don't even realize that the word racism

does not appear in the book. It does not appear in the book. You can go look. It's not in the... I specifically, purposely did not use that word. Because I wanted to be able to describe or have you recognized that this was more than

what some people think racism is, which is not liking someone or being prejudiced. This was more than that. This was a structure of control and domination with tremendous consequences that could be a matter of life and death if you so much breached one of the many, many norms that you had to have committed to memory

by the time you were in grade school. That's what this was. And so I felt that the word cast was more appropriate to describing what they were fleeing. So that was all through there. And I just kept thinking, well, it's probably going to, you know, someone will pick up on that and write something. Someone's going to see the castes throughout the book. And nobody did. I kept waiting for someone else to do it. And I decided that I would go ahead and do it. One of the reasons I chose to do it was because of what happened in Charlottesville in 2017, where you had these protesters who were trying to keep one of the statues of Robert E. Lee, the Confederate General that I made reference to, to keep his statue up there,

massive 20-foot statue in the center square in Charlottesville, Virginia. and during that the protest and the counter-protesting, the people who were trying to keep that statue up there brought the symbols of two different fraught histories. They brought the symbolism of the Confederacy, the Confederate flag, and they brought the Nazi swastika there. Those two groups recognize the commonalities between these two philosophies,

even if other people in the country or around the world would not have put them together. They saw common cause. Of course there is a history to that. There is a history to that. Yeah. But they saw common cause. It was there for the world to see and I decided that I needed to go ahead and do this. I hadn't

wanted to do. This is not something that I wish to do. I did not wish to do that. I prefer a straight narrative nonfiction, but this was what this is what called me to do and that's what I did. Those ancestors whose names you'll never know. What do you think they would make of the achievements that you've made? The progress,

the role you're playing, the bridge builder, the building inspector? It saddens me that my father, who I mentioned, never lived to see either of the books come out. So that really, that's a really difficult, you know, question to imagine. But I think that they would be, I think that they would be so overcome with joy. I just think it would be joy. I think they would be, they would feel that, that this was the manifestation

of all that they'd hoped for, and that this is what they had sacrificed and saved for, and that these were the fruits of all of their sacrifices. I think that's how they would be looking at it. Yeah. Isabel Wilkerson, thank you for taking my questions.

Thank you. Thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you. You've been listening to my conversation with Isabel Wilkerson, following her delivering the 71st annual Beattie Lecture at McGill University. This episode was produced by Tom Howell. Thank you to Megan Thurston, Robin Coning, Jonathan Roy, and Stuart McCombie at McGill.

Lisa Ayuso is the web producer for ideas. Technical production by Emily Carvasio, senior producer Nicola Luxchich. Greg Kelly is the executive producer of ideas, and I'm Nala Ayad. For more CBC Podcasts, go to CBC.