The New Yorker Radio Hour - Isabel Wilkerson on America’s Caste System

Episode Date: August 11, 2020

In this moment of historical reckoning, many Americans are being introduced to concepts like intersectionality, white fragility, and anti-racism. But Isabel Wilkerson would like to incorporate a little-discussed concept into our national conversation: caste. Wilkerson is a writer and historian who spent the past decade working on a book that examines the history of race in this county. During the Jim Crow era, “every aspect of life was so tightly controlled and scripted and restricted,” she told David Remnick. “I realized that race was an insufficient term.” Plus, we’ll meet some of the volunteers and the former inmates who make up the Rikers Debate Project. New Yorker Radio Hour listeners, we want to hear from you.  We have a few questions about the show and how you listen to it. The survey takes about twenty minutes, and your feedback will help us make our podcast better.  Take the survey here.

This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Welcome to The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. Since the killing of George Floyd, we've seen not just a protest movement, but something like a historical reckoning. A lot of white Americans seem willing, at least more willing, to address the reality of systemic racism in the present day. We're learning terms like tone policing, white fragility, and anti-racism. Isabel Wilkerson would like to introduce another term to our lexicon, and that's the term cast. Wilkerson argues that what we have in the United States is a rigid social hierarchy akin to the caste system in India. She writes, we cannot fully understand the current upheavals or most any turning point in American history

without accounting for the human pyramid encrypted into us all. Wilkerson's new book is called Cast, The Origins of Our Discontents. It's just out this week, and she's previously the winner of a Pulitzer Prize and many other awards. Now, your first book was a masterpiece on the Great Migration, and it was both history and personal stories of families who made that essential journey. This book is personal, too, in many ways, but in some ways it's a book about the search for a metaphor, search for a better, more accurate description of what American racism is. Why is racism somehow insufficient as a description of the way we've lived in this country for centuries, really? Well, it's so interesting that you put it that way, and that you mentioned the war and throw the sons,

because that book, as you know, was about the people who were fleeing Jim Crow repression. And in writing that book, you know, I was having to discover the many ways that the Jim Crow South repressed this entire group of people, and in fact, all people were repressed under it. They just weren't aware of it. You know, it was a world, you know, as you know, in which it was against a law for a black person and a white person to merely play checkers together. It was a world in which African Americans could not pass a white motorist on the road, no matter how slowly that person was going. Every aspect of life was so tightly controlled and scripted and restricted. And emerging from the research into that era, I realized that race was an insufficient term to capture the depth and organized repression that people were living under,

that the only word that was sufficient was cast. And I find it at this moment of upheaval that we're currently in, that we need new language. You know, we need a new framework for understanding the divisions and how we got to where we are. in some ways still held captive to the hierarchies that were created many centuries ago before any of us were here. Why is CAST specifically the right language? Why is that descriptor apt to the American experience? Well, you know, CAST is essentially an artificial hierarchy, graded ranking of human value in a society. It determines standing and respect and, you know, benefit of the doubt. access to resources through no fault or action of anyone's own. It's just, it's what you're born into.

Cast is the infrastructure of our divisions that undergird the more visible delineations that we make among ourselves. In other words, as I often say, I mean, it's, you know, cast is the bones, race is the skin, and then class is the diction and the accent and the education, the clothing, the things that we can control as we present ourselves to the world, each caste system creates a different metric for division of who should be where in the hierarchy. So in some caste systems, it's religion and some caste systems, it may be geography or ethnicity. And in this caste system, it's skin color or race as we now know what to be. There's a story in the book about a little boy who played baseball.

His name was Al Bright from Youngston, Ohio. Yeah. What is his story and explain why it was so important to you to include it in the book? That is a story that just so gets to me. It's hard even to talk about. It's a story about a little boy, Albright, as you said, who was on the Little League team, 1951. The Little League team he was on won the city championship. And so the coaches decided to take the whole team out for Celebration Party, went to a local pool, a municipal pool, meaning a public pool, where they were going to go treat the kids to a pool party.

Albright was the only black member of the team. And upon arrival, the lifeguard instantly pulled Albright aside. And the lifeguard said that he would have to stay outside of the pool area. He was behind. a fence and could not come into the general pool area. That actually is the, in some ways, the definition of caste. It's setting boundaries as to who can be where and who can be admitted into spaces of privilege and who has to be forced outside of it. In any case, eventually, the coaches decided that they couldn't take any further. So they went to the lifeguard and said, what can we do? This is so unfair for him not to be able to go inside. And what they ended up doing was they had all of the people who were in the pool, all of the white people were forced to get out of the pool.

And then and only then could Albright be brought into the pool area. He then was told to get on a raft. And then the lifeguard got into the pool. And he then pushed the raft around the pool for one turn. And the entire time that the lifeguard was pushing him in that raft, the lifeguard said to him over and over again, do not touch the water. Don't touch the water. That was a gut-wrenching experience. Even as I think about it now, it's so hard to even capture, even imagine the pain and horror of that moment. What happened to him is what I describe as one of the pillars of cast. I compile these eight pillars that are universal to caste systems that I studied. And one of the essential pillars is what's called purity and pollution, protecting the sanctity and purity of the dominating group at all cost. In India, the Dalits formerly known as Untouchables were not to drink from the same well as the dominant caste people. They could not be in the same waters. One of the biggest race riots that occurred in the United States was in 1919 when an African-American

boy teenager was swimming in Lake Michigan, and he accidentally swam over the imaginary line between what was considered the white water, the place that white people swam, and the black water, which is where the black people swam. Thereby polluting it. Exactly. Even for a second. You mentioned eight pillars of caste. What are some of the other pillars that you see as universal in caste systems?

One of the earliest pillars to be introduced during the founding of the country was the definition of who could marry whom. And that in the original caste system of India's term called endogamy. And endogamy means essentially is focused on the dominant group, only being able to marry within the dominant group so as to keep it pure. so they're all interconnected as well. Another pillar of caste is the religious underpinnings finding some type of spiritual justification for the division of people. And in the Western world, people turn to the story of Noah

and his three sons and about the curse of ham and to justify what the colonists were doing is that they said that people of African descent were the descendants of Ham. And these are the beginnings, the framework that we now live with. So that does not mean that all of the pillars that I'm describing, which are the foundation of our society, it doesn't mean that all of them are in full force now. It means that they existed for a very long time. In fact, they existed for longer than they did not exist. Isabel, what do we gain by using the term caste to name our society somehow, rather than the words racism or discrimination that we're all familiar with?

This is not to say that racism doesn't exist. It's saying that there's something more powerful, something even more powerful underneath it that we are not seeing. The studies of unconscious bias will indicate that people really, they do not see themselves as being racist. So it's very hard to get people to even acknowledge that to begin with. And what's underneath that is the enduring impulse to still keep people in a certain place, the idea that you should always remain at the bottom in the same way that a cast holds a person's bones in place when there's a fracture. Cast wants to hold people in a fixed place, even without conscious awareness of it. Now, in Indian society, I don't think there are any Brahmin kids who spend hours daydreaming

about this or that iconic Dalit figure, untouchable figure in popular culture, whereas in the United States, and this has been the case for a long time, there are a hell of a lot of white kids going to see Denzel Washington and Will Smith movies and Beyonce and all the rest. Black culture, as so many critics from Ralph Ellison on, have been. insistent on telling us, and they're absolutely right, is American culture. And popular culture in so many ways is black culture. And yet we have this huge powerful strain of racism, North and South. How to reconcile that? How to think about that in terms of your book? Well, I have to go back to the history of how we got here. I mean, literally how we, as different groups, arrived to this

country and people who arrived and were ultimately enslaved for 246 years, the one area that or role that they were permitted to perform was to be as entertainers, to be as people who were there at the behest of the people who were deemed above them to entertain. But more importantly, to be the butt of entertainment, meaning the minstrelsy of the 19th century. That, however, the brilliance, though, of the people who were in the subordinated cast was that they turned that into their own advantage. They found this one narrow pathway that had been created and actually made the most of it by excelling in the area that had been sort of carved out for them. Now, cast in the Indian sense comes from religious.

It's inscribed in Hindu religion, and when something like that is inscribed in religion, it suggests a certain immutability. It can't change. Can cast, in the Indian and the American sense that you're describing it, change? The essential framework of a dominant group and a subordinated group and of the middle groups that move between the two, is essentially the enduring framework for our society, though we may not see it. The things that do change are who may qualify to be in the dominant group and who might move in between the middle caste, but what often remains the same is the existence of the upper, the dominant group and the existence of the bottom group. But does that suggest that a caste system?

has to be thrown off psychologically or legalistically? There have been so many efforts in this country, noble and important efforts to address the essential injustices. And so it's my view that it takes more than legislation, although legislation is essential. It also takes a recognition of why the legislation was necessary to begin with. Isabel, you've been working on this book for years with just a tremendous amount of research and reporting, but now it's being published unexpectedly into the teeth of a political uprising.

And I wonder what effect that's had on your thinking about the book. I take the longer view, essentially, of history. I had no say, obviously, in the timing of this, I had no wish to be in the middle of any particular moment. I view this in a transcendent way of trying to illuminate our division so that we can find a way to transcend them. Because we keep reliving the same movie as long as we continue to ignore what's gone before us. And so I view this as part of a continuum. But I am, of course, hopeful that if this opens people's heart and minds more readily to what I've written, then that hopefully would be to the good.

Isabelle Wilkerson, her new book, The Origins of Our Discontents, is out now. This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, more in a minute. Welcome back to the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. So briefly, now that we have a pretty full group, thank you all for joining.

Really appreciate it. On a Thursday evening in June, two teams faced off in a competitive debate, making opposing arguments on a single issue. And given the times, it was all on Zoom. The debate will be started via a coin flip, and that will determine the size of both the government as well as the opposition. This event was co-sponsored by the Yale Debate Association, which is more than a century old and one of the most successful college debate societies in North America. I think I speak for the entirety of the YDA and the board.

When I say that this is the most excited that we've been for an event all year. As to why that night's debate was such a big deal, our let our producer, Kalalia, explain. A few weeks ago, I set up my laptop at my kitchen table to watch a debate, inspired by the protest over the killing of George Floyd. All right, so I'll call this House to order. I'll call on the Honorable Prime Minister, Louis Conway, to deliver the first constructive speech of the round, not to exceed three minutes. Here here. To the Speaker of the House, guests and my esteemed opponents, thank you for allowing the opportunity. This is Lewis Conway, Jr.

his team won the coin flip. That means they get to choose which side to represent. In debate speak, you either pick government or opposition. The current iteration of policing that is used in the South is directly connected to the abolition of slavery in that southern agriculture economy. Tonight's topic is defunding the police. The question is, should the policing budget be reduced by more than 25% and should those funds be reallocated elsewhere to reduce crime, violence, and injustice. The crime that created policing in the South

was the freeing of the slaves in 1865. That crime against the South was a spark to the Kendall that continues. Watching over Zoom, I can see that Lewis stands out. While just about everyone else is wearing t-shirts or more comfortable looking clothing, he's wearing a suit jacket. And what makes this debate different from other college debates

is that Lewis is not an undergraduate student, at Yale or any other university. He's a former felon who started debating just 10 months ago, and he's part of a non-profit organization called the Rikers Debate Project. We beg to speak to the House, guests, and judges, to consider the fallacy upon which any argument, to the contrary, can be honestly considered. The Rikers Debate Project teaches at Rikers Island Jail Complex in New York City,

plus in eight other prisons and jails. It teaches debate skills to both incarcerated people and those who have been released. Some of the formerly incarcerated people are called fellows. Fellows like Lewis are teamed up with debaters from Princeton, Columbia, and for tonight, Yale University. Comfortable with co-signing,

dollars flying out of the unemployed pockets into the coffers of colonial racism. Ask yourself that question. That was thanks to the Prime Minister. We'll talk about Lewis leader. Up next is Camilla Broderick. The opposition speech of the round not to exceed four minutes. Your hair.

The opposition is against defunding. She's also a former felon and her team is arguing against defunding the police. The distribution of funds is necessary to create a better police force. Our first point is that defunding the police will only lead to an increase in cutting corners and a lack of resources leads to a lack of accountability. Many small and underfunded police departments, already can't pay for ongoing training. They can't fire problematic officers

or fund investigation into police misconduct. In a suburban town in Chicago... My time in Rikers was excruciatingly boring. You couldn't have books. You couldn't visit the library. They wouldn't even give me the newspaper. I was sitting there reading the backs of like condiment bottles and shampoo bottles.

There was just absolutely nothing. When Camilla was introduced to the Rikers debate, project. She was serving an eight-month jail sentence. She was 26 years old, but her troubles had begun many years ago. I didn't really look forward to anything. I had depression since I was a very, very young girl. Camilla is not the typical Rikers debate student. She grew up in a comfortable middle-class household with parents who were college professors. And she went to an all-girls private high school in New York City. People who come from wealthy families have the means. to buy a lot of drugs, and they do.

She said cocaine was rampant at the school. And to coat with her depression, she started taking opiates and then heroin. She was selling the prescription med she was given to treat her addiction. One day, she sold a small amount of heroin to a buyer she had met on Craigslist. I thought everything was fine. And then, as soon as I get in my apartment, I walk into the house. the lobby and like three cops grab me and drag me outside. Camilla had been set up by an undercover police officer, arrested and sent to Rikers.

About three months into her sentence, a guard walked into the dorm to announce that the volunteers from the Rikers Debate Project were there to teach a class. My first impression was, first of all, that the volunteers for it were very, very nice. They were asking us how we were and how our week was, how our family. families were and things like that that other people who come in didn't do. The Rikers Debate Project was founded in 2016. Now it's run by one of its former volunteers, Caitlin Halpern. Most of our students in jails and prisons have never had access to a debate team or a

public speaking class. And I think inculcating those skills serves them really well, both to advocate for themselves in their communities, and also just in their relationships and in job interviews. And I think the other service that's really meaningful for me to provide is just providing confidence for people. I've had so many students tell me that no one ever told me I was smart, and I never thought of myself as the kind of person who could do this. So if I can structure these real quick, Charles and Camilla, do you remember at the end of

our last debate when Camilla I said how awesome your first speech was? because it was two pieces of offense and then one piece of terminal defense. I was able to listen to a practice session coached by a man named John Langel, who's a business analyst. Because of the pandemic, the debate project had to stop in-person classes. Now they mail a correspondence course to their incarcerated students. But the debate fellows who are no longer in prison have been practicing on Zoom. if in our contention three, we can prove that defunding the police makes the police better, that is terminal defense against every possible argument the opposition could make.

So I think we do a little research on one Camilla's community policing piece to see if there are good empirical examples. Camden, New Jersey, got their excessive force by 92 percent, and they're a violent call. crime by 42%. See, that's dope. That's perfect. That's off the top of my head. Yeah, that's perfect. The debaters research their topics and construct arguments with three points. And they have seven minutes in total to argue their points.

And remember that coin flip? Whoever wins chooses which side their team will argue. So Lewis and Camilla must be prepared to argue both sides. You have to understand these folks that are in the Rikers Debate Project, they're doing this on their own time, as opposed to, I think a lot of collegiate and high school debaters are generally there for one of two things. One, and there's nothing wrong with these two things, one, for it to, you know, look good on their resume, or two, they, like I did, they become extremely competitive and just want to win as many debates as possible, just for the sake of winning debates.

So I think the motivating factors are very different, and that shows in the debate practices. But it definitely isn't easy for people in prison or recently released to participate in something like this. Because of the way inmates and former inmates are treated in America, the regular amounts of stress and difficulty that our debaters are going through from any number of issues is massive. And so getting them to a mental and emotional place where they are able to clear their mind of the other things that are happening, focus on the debate, and do so in a way where they're having fun, that I would say is the most difficult. The only males in my family that have my last name that haven't been to prison nor have died

by violence is my father and my children. That's Lewis Conway Jr., who you heard earlier during the Yale Zoom debate. He joined the Rikers Debate Project years after his release from prison. Lewis is originally from Texas, and about 20 years ago he was selling crack cocaine to help pay his college tuition, and he was robbed. He felt like he had to confront the alleged thief. Things got really ugly, and he stabbed the man.

To Lewis, it was. was a case of self-defense. The officer took his statement and left the interrogation room. And then, as Lewis recalls, he returned with some news. And he was like, Mr. Conway, guess what? Congratulations. You've just been charged with intentional murder. I want you go ahead and stand up so I can take your picture.

And I tell people that that picture is a, It's a photograph of a 21-year-old kid that just saw his life flushed down the drain. Lewis was convicted and served eight years in prison and 12 years on parole. Last year, he was hired by the ACLU in New York City to be a campaign strategist. His new boss connected him to one of the founders of the Rikers Debate Project. He handed me a packet, and it was an ARE packet. And ARE stands for assertion, research, and evidence. And I pretended like I knew what it was because I didn't want to appear ignorant.

But I had no clue. I had never seen any of the language before. There was these graphs talking about prime minister and governor. In prison, we had debates, but this was something different. After that meeting, Lewis went home and spent hours watching YouTube. videos of debate teams. It's important we do not confuse perfection with justice. Justice is concerned with something that I noticed wasn't happening on the debates I saw on

YouTube was that was very academic. It was very, everybody was trying to sound smart, if you will. And I felt like, you know what, let me get in here and make somebody feel a certain way. Folks deserve to have access to healthy homes. And the opposition spoke about the impact on the family. What good is a family member who has come home from prison and still engaging in drugs and still engaging in violence? What good is that person in the home?

That was Lewis at his very first debate at Columbia University as a Riker's fellow. At Columbia, I think we were debating well. or not to end the use of private prisons. And I had to debate the opposition side, which is kind of an oxymoron, because really that means I'm for private prisons. And that was confusing at first, too. It took a bit of rewiring how you think.

What excited me most was I thought we were going to be debating against each school as a team. And I was really looking forward to kicking some college kids. I was looking forward to, you know, showing up in a way that changed the normal perception of what only incarcerated folks are. Lewis has done everything from acting and music videos to working as a DJ and a strip club.

That's all before being hired by the ACLU. I work at a very large institution, and oftentimes, you know, you have to argue your point as to why, you know, this certain campaign is important and this budget is important. And so the debate project has helped me navigate that. It's been two minutes, so why do we go forth and begin with the voting? Back to the Yale Rikers debate. After a little over an hour, the judges are ready to vote. One of those judges is James Foreman, Jr. He's a professor of law at Yale and a former public defender.

In 2018, he won a Pulitzer Prize for his book, Locking Up a Room. Mr. James Foreman, would you please provide your vote? I kept going back and forth. I don't have experience with this. I wanted it to be a tie, but they told me that it can't be a tie. So at the end of the day, I am voting for the government. It was Professor Foreman's first time judging a Riker's debate, but he's taught formally incarcerated students in his classes at Yale,

so he knows what they're up against. I talked with him after the debate. You have debaters from an elite institution, and I can tell you that the students from Yale, the first time they go into participate in one of these debates, they are going to have a bias about the intellectual capacity of the men and women who are incarcerated against whom they're debating. They just do.

And every student that I teach tells me at the end of the semester, wow, Professor Foreman, I never expected the smartest students in this class to be the students who were locked up. See, that's the thing that frustrates me the most when reporting stories like this one. Why is the U.S. locking up millions of potentially bright and hardworking people for years upon years? I'm well aware that racism and classism are the driving forces behind mass incarceration, and the number of people who work in the criminal justice system is astounding, but just how many of them are there to truly help.

I often wonder what this country would be like if more people, law enforcement, DAs, prosecutors, and civilians were like the volunteers of the Rikers Debate Project. people who expect the best from their students and not the worst. Racism and stigma is powerful, and it doesn't only affect white people, and it doesn't only affect the people who aren't incarcerated. People who are locked up have internalized a lot of negative stereotypes about themselves. They don't believe. They might not say it, but deep down, they're not sure they can compete.

They have been told their entire lives that they're lesser than. And certainly since they've been in prison, they've been told that they're nothing. And now they're being asked to debate some of the smartest young people in the country. That is scary. But then when they do it and not just do it, but succeed and thrive and win, that has an impact on your consciousness. It makes you feel like you can do anything. We reached a verdict. We had a six to four.

The judges voted six to four in favor of the government. That means Lewis's team won this debate in support of defunding the police. Congratulations to the government. And this week, the Rikers debaters are teaming up with scientists to debate the ethics of vaccine trials. Increasing the efficacy of contact tracing and driving down and driving down a curve should be our focus, not funding or ways for us to brutalize people who've already under the knee of Congress. Lewis Conway Jr., a fellow of the Rikers Debate Project.

Kalalia is a producer for our program. That's the New Yorker Radio Hour for this week. Thanks for listening. I hope you'll join us next time. The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Our theme music was composed and performed by Merrill Garbus of Tune Arts, with additional music by Alexis Quadrato. The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Cherina Endowment Fund.