How Isabel Wilkerson Learned "Caste" Was the Latest Oprah's Book Club Pick
Join her on this journey by following @oprahsbookclub across social, including the brand new Oprah’s Book Club Facebook group. Download your copy on Apple Books and #ReadWithUs. A discussion guide for Caste will be available on Apple Books to help shape conversations.
When Oprah called Pulitzer Prize-winner Isabel Wilkerson to tell her that she had selected Caste to be her latest Oprah’s Book Club pick, Wilkerson was surprised—and moved by Oprah’s words. Oprah promised that she’d call everyone she knew to tell them about the book, which she said had “touched her soul.”
Caste is a remarkable work of history, both a prayer for humanity and a way of seeing the evolution of inequality through an entirely new lens. It traces the roots of American racism back to another continent centuries ago, and uses the metaphor of an old house to describe how we can begin to take responsibility for something we didn’t ourselves initiate.
Wilkerson's book also reveals that the Third Reich drew on Jim Crow era laws to inform its own reign of terror, and gives us insights into the role of endogamy in enforcing racist policies. Reading Caste, you may be astonished at what you didn’t learn in high school or college about Reconstruction, Jim Crow, how and why “race” was invented—and much more.
Caste is a product of deep and meticulous historical detective work and a masterwork of storytelling, with the potential to forever change the way we think about inequality. So on the eve of the Oprah’s Book Club announcement, I called Wilkerson for a conversation about why she believes Caste is a hopeful book—and, of course, what it was really like getting that surprising phone call from Oprah.
Over the next few months, Oprah will be “teaching” this book via social media, podcasts, and on other platforms. Join her on this journey by following @oprahsbookclub across social, including the brand new Oprah’s Book Club Facebook group. Download your copy on Apple Books and #ReadWithUs.
You say that the idea of race—even the term Caucasian—is a recently created construct. What do you mean by that?
Race as we now know it—the idea of dividing people and addressing them as being white or Black—is a fairly new language in human history. Before the exploration of the world by European explorers, there was no need to think of one’s self on the basis of skin color or what one looked like. People were Italian, Spaniard, English, or Hungarian, but this wasn’t connected to one’s color. African peoples didn’t need to identify as being Black, because that was not the primary metric of distinction between people.
The idea of categorizing people by race grew out of the transatlantic slave trade and the arrival of different people from around the world, to what would eventually become the United States. It was the convergence of people who might have looked different from one another that created the impulse to define people on the basis of what they looked like. Before that, there was no concept of race as we now know it. Race is only a concept that dates back four hundred or five hundred years.
The idea of caste, however, is one that goes back many millennia. It predates race. Caste is an artificial hierarchy, a graded ranking of human value in society that determines the standing, the respect, the benefit of the doubt, access to resources, through no fault or action of one’s own. You were born to a position in a hierarchy in a traditional caste system. The reason I have chosen to look at our country through a different lens—that of caste—is because, in this age of upheaval, we need new language and framework for these divisions. Seeing ourselves through the lens of caste allows us to see the X-ray of our country, to see our country through new eyes and allow ourselves to build a new framework for healing.
Why do you avoid the term "racism" in your writing?
In my first book, The Warmth of Other Suns, I wrote about the exodus and flight of six million African Americans who were defecting the Jim Crow South—essentially fleeing a caste system that determined the contours of their days and what they could or could not do. In writing that book, I realized the word racism was insufficient, and did not capture the entirety of the social hierarchy of oppression.
The idea, for example, that it was against the law for a Black person and white person to play tennis together. The idea that even when Africans Americans were driving, they could not pass a white motorist on the road. There were such rules and restrictions at every turn about what they could and could not do, each of them designed to keep them in a fixed place. Therefore, racism as it is often spoken of in our current day, did not capture the extreme measures that were taken to repress them. Caste spoke to the all-encompassing comprehensive nature of this artificial hierarchy that keeps people in their place.
You reference a historian who refers to Jim Crow as “the nadir." Why was Jim Crow the nadir?
The historian Rayford Logan described that era—which began after Reconstruction when the south reclaimed its control over that region after losing the Civil War—as setting in motion the restrictions of the caste system that I talk about here. It began in the 1880s and didn’t end until the 1960s, with the civil rights legislation. But the nadir was about a hundred years ago, when an African American was being lynched every three or four days in the American South, which is why the summer of 1919 was called “the red summer.” This was an era in which African Americans had no political rights, and they could come under attack for any tiny breach of the caste system. These breaches could be as simple as not tipping one’s hat, not stepping off the sidewalk quickly enough. So Logan describes this time as the nadir: the low-point of race relations and the life prospects, safety, and well-being of African Americans.
What role does Martin Luther King, Jr. play in how you tell the story of caste?
In 1959, King and his wife Coretta Scott King made a journey to India because he had been so inspired by the non-violent protests of Mahatma Gandhi. They arrived there, and he said whereas in other places he might have arrived as a tourist or a visitor, here he arrived as a kindred spirit. He was well-received. He was invited to a school for children who were then called ‘untouchables.’
The principal, very excited to welcome him, introduced him as a fellow untouchable from America. When Dr. King heard that term applied to him, he was a bit peeved. He did not consider himself to be an untouchable. But after giving it some thought, he recalled the experience of his people, the people he was advocating and fighting for, who were at that very moment not being given the right to vote. He thought about the positioning of African Americans in the States at the time, particularly in the south. He said to himself, ‘Actually, yes, I am an untouchable. Every Negro in America is an untouchable.
He spoke about this revelation at a seminal sermon that he delivered at Ebenezer Baptist church in 1965. He expressed his revelation—his recognition—that there was in fact a caste system in the United States, and that African Americans had been consigned to the very bottom of that hierarchy.
Shifting gears a bit, can you tell us about what Oprah said to you when she called to tell you she’d selected your book for Oprah’s Book Club?
I was overcome by the generosity of her words. She told me that this was one of the most important books she’d ever read. I was blown away by what she said and the language she used to describe it. It’s so difficult to talk about it now, because it felt like a tearful recognition of what the country had been through. She told me it was “exquisite,” that “all the angels are working with you on your side, that you are highly favored." She said in writing it I had “responded to a higher calling, a calling from the ancestors, and that the ancestors were very pleased.” I have no words for the honor she is bringing to this book.
Caste ends with these words: “A world without caste would set everyone free.” It’s a very hopeful sentiment. Can you explain what your hope is for the impact of the book?
My hope is that we can see that these false walls of division were erected generations ago, centuries ago, and that none of us had anything to do with the building these barriers between us. My hope is that through open-hearted understanding, through seeking to engage with the history, by a willingness to really look at our country—which I describe as an old house that needs constant work and reassessment and often repairs—that we seek to set right and transcend the divisions that were erected so long ago, to illuminate the walls so that we can scale them.
One of the great consequences and biggest losses as a result of caste is that we don’t get a chance to truly know fellow members of our same species. We don’t get to see the many ways humanity manifests itself. This is our inheritance, and it’s up to each of us to decide what to do with it.
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