‘I Hope That We Are on the Cusp of an Awakening’

Isabel Wilkerson is a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist and two-time author, but she is also in a sense an archeologist. She does not just tell stories of the past, but excavates them, sifting through archives, narratives, and testimonies to exhume the truth.

This summer Wilkerson—whose previous book, The Warmth of Other Suns, came out in 2010—released Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents. The New York Times called it an “instant American classic.” Oprah picked it for her book club and made a podcast about it too. It has been a New York Times best-seller since August.

And in the meantime, it has made thousands of readers hold their breath, as Wilkerson traces the ideological and social roots of some of the same virulent forces that have dominated the news this summer: the enduring inequalities that persist (and are enforced) between white and Black Americans, the subtle biases and blatant discrimination that have been used to marginalize Black Americans, and the extent to which race relations in America can be compared to other hierarchies of oppression around the world.

Throughout her career, the playwright Lynn Nottage has considered similar issues in her own work, focusing on groups of people who don’t tend to be immortalized on the stage. In 2008 she debuted Ruined, a play set in the Democratic Republic of Congo. In 2017 The New Yorker deemed Sweat, which premiered at the Public Theater in New York, “the first theatrical landmark of the Trump era: a tough yet empathetic portrait of the America that came undone.” It netted Nottage a Pulitzer later that year—her second.

But more than shared interests or similar approaches to their respective fields, Wilkerson and Nottage have used their work to ask the same essential question: How did we get here?

Here, Wilkerson and Nottage discuss the new book, the trauma of racial violence, and their small, blooming hope for a better future.

Lynn Nottage: To start, I was wondering whether you could talk a little bit about how you came to caste—and the caste system—as a concept for describing and understanding race in America.

Isabel Wilkerson: Well, I came to the use of the term caste with my first book, The Warmth of Other Suns.

Which is an amazing book.

Well, thank you, and that means so much to me given the nature of your work and how connected you are to the Great Migration in your work and I assume also somehow in your family lineage.

To answer your question, though, it happened in the process of learning what life was like for people who were living under the Jim Crow regime. I came to realize that it was so much more than just pure hate for a group. It was so much more than just not liking these people. It was even more than just what we would think of as structures that were set up to hold people back. There was an investment in keeping people at the lowest rung of a ladder that was deeper than just emotion, which is sometimes what gets attached to racism.

It was once against the law for a Black person and a white person to merely play checkers together in Birmingham [Alabama]. There were separate Bibles in courtrooms because that same sacred object could not be touched by the hands of people of different races. There’s something deep-seated and bigger and more powerful underneath that. That is what I was discovering in the process of working on that book. Then it turned out that there were anthropologists and ethnographers who had gone into the Jim Crow South while this was actually in progress. They emerged from their research with the word caste, and that’s how I came to be aware of it. That’s the word I used in The Warmth of Other Suns. I don’t use the word racism in that book.

Why is that?

I say that caste is the bones and race is the skin. A caste system is the idea of an artificial hierarchy, a fixed ranking of human value that determines one’s standing and stature. Here, race has been used as the signifier, the tool, the identifier of where a person fits in the hierarchy. Other caste systems might use different metrics, but that’s the metric that has been used here.

Could you explain the distinction between class and caste? You do it so well in the book.

So if caste is the bones and race is the skin, then class would, in my view, be the clothing and the accent, the diction, the education. It’s the things that we can change about ourselves that can help, in our view, lift ourselves up in a hierarchy, but which are the changeable things. Caste, however, is fixed. One way of looking at it is if you can act your way out of it, it’s class. If you cannot act your way out of it, it’s caste.

You have that anecdote in your book where Forest Whitaker, who is an actor, goes into a deli and has this horrific experience. It was harrowing. I’ve certainly been in those positions in my life where I enter a space with a certain set of assumptions, and I’m reminded very clearly by what you call the “upper caste” that I belong to the “lower caste.”

Yes, so in Forest Whitaker’s case, he went into a deli to get something. They didn’t have what he wanted and he turned to go out, and the staff stopped him at the door and then put him on the ground and searched him assuming that he was a criminal, assuming all the stereotypes that come to mind. We all have been so well programmed to know what those stereotypes are, and they treated him like a common criminal. Here he was one of the most esteemed actors of our time; an Academy Award winner. But it did not matter what his class was. It did not matter what his success had been. It didn’t matter that he had an Academy Award on his mantle. They saw him for the caste to which he has been assigned.

This is not ancient history. This is not going back to colonial times. It’s not going back to enslavement. It’s not even going back to Jim Crow. This is happening now.

In the book you list the pillars of caste. There are eight, and I found them all fascinating. One of them was concerned especially with access to water.

Right. Purity versus pollution.

When I was growing up, my father never learned to swim. He grew up in Harlem with little access to water. I remember very specifically when my daughter was about three years old, we were on the beach and I said to my father who was sitting on the towel with her, “Why don’t you watch her? I want to go and swim.” I swam out into the water and when I turned around, I saw all of the people on the beach rushing into the water and they were dragging out my daughter and father. My father explained that when I went into the water, being little, my daughter ran out after me, and he jumped into the water to save her, but he couldn’t swim and they both began to drown.

He sat on the shore afterwards and wept. The incident made me think about how he didn’t learn to swim because he’s of the generation where we, Black people, didn’t have equal access to water.

Yes, entire generations of African Americans never learned to swim in public, because they were forbidden access to public beaches and public pools, and so therefore they had no access to water. That’s on a concrete level, but also I’m sort of going back generations and centuries in my mind and heart, and I’m thinking about how the water was the first barrier to our human selves, because we had to cross the water. We were forced to cross the water. We were forced across this huge ocean to enslavement.

I just think about the role of water in the history of African Americans, the history of people who have been enslaved. And that image came to mind: just the fraught nature of water—a beautiful part of our planet that became a source of danger, fear, and dread for an entire group of people over centuries.

In Caste, purity and pollution is the fourth pillar, and that is the longest section in the book because there was so much to say about it. It’s so universal. It’s so endemic to hierarchies. Among the untouchables in India, they could not share the same cups that the upper caste would use. They had to remain as many as 96 paces away from a dominant caste person. In the Third Reich, Jewish people were not permitted into the same pools as Nazis.

You actually open Caste with this moment in Nazi Germany—a man is standing in a crowd and everyone around him is giving the Heil Hitler salute. He is the only person who refuses to join in. It’s this stunning act of bravery and resistance. I’m really curious as to why you begin the book with a small gesture.

I think that the entire book is calling upon us to awaken to what has been made invisible, because it’s so much a part of our lives that we don’t see it. It’s like the joints and the pillars in the buildings that we live in—you can’t see them. They hold up the structure, but we don’t see them. The book is asking people to see them and then ask themselves: What is it that you are then obligated to do? What is your ethical or moral responsibility once you know?

The individual at the start of the book is August Landmesser, who identified as an Aryan, German citizen. This was in 1936 in Hamburg, Germany, and there was a scene that would have been common in that time; as you said, everyone around him was giving the Hitler salute, and he’s the one man in the crowd who has his arms folded. He is also the only one in that photograph whom we know now is on the right side of history.

What would it take for any of us to be that person? We would all like to believe that we would have been him. With the benefit of hindsight, most people would say, “Oh, yes, I would have known.” But numerically speaking and realistically speaking, not everyone can be that one man in the crowd.

He stood up because he could see through the distortions and the myths that he had been told about Jews; he could see through the propaganda that others were believing. He did not believe in the hierarchy that was forming. He knew that the lies that were being told about Jews were just that—they were lies. He knew firsthand because he was in love with a Jewish woman, and they were being affected directly because of the laws that were saying that they could not marry. I had no idea about him until I started doing the research in this book. I’d never heard of him. I’d never seen the photograph. I saw it on one of my many trips to Berlin, and it just inspired me.

When I was five years old I used to visit my grandmother, who lived in Harlem. She lived on Fifth Avenue, just off of Mount Morris Park, in one of these railroad flats that the family lived in for 65 years. It was a multigeneration house, so when I would visit and sleep over, I used to have to lie in bed with Aunt Rover. She was frail, elderly, 106 years old.

Wow.

I remember lying next to her bony fragile body, and resenting her. I was really scared of her, but it’s only as an adult that I now realize that Aunt Rover was born into slavery. I’m the last generation to have that direct tactile connection to slavery. My great-great-aunt was born an enslaved person, and it just made me realize that history is not remote.

No, not at all.

What we’re talking about, the struggle, is so present in our DNA and it is part of the way in which we move through our life. I have a lot of relatives who lived to to be very old. My grandmother lived to 97, my great-aunt lived to 100. They were both born in the early 1900s. My Aunt Bertha witnessed firsthand the trials and tribulations of the 20th century and all of the ramifications of the caste system. When I asked her questions about her life, she was so reticent and reluctant to even talk about her past. One of the things that I so appreciate about the work that you’re doing is that it’s resurrecting some of these stories that we as Black people didn’t even bother to share with each other—because of the trauma and the pain.

Exactly. I would say that many of them were experiencing post-traumatic stress disorder. I feel as if they were protecting themselves, and also I think they were protecting successive generations in their own way. Now we can say, “Well, we actually want to know; we would actually be better off knowing.” But I think it was just too painful for them. One reason why The Warmth of Other Suns took so long was because it took a long time for people to feel comfortable enough to share with me some of the things that they did.

No one wants to live under the threat and terror that so many African Americans have had to live under throughout history. People who have endured that don’t even want to talk about it. The time that it took me to do The Warmth of Other Suns is proof that people do not want to talk about it, and they do not want to trade on anything. They do not want to exploit in any way. So when people talk about the “race card” and people just trying to “make the most” of this, it’s the exact opposite.

Just looking forward through the filter of history, do you think that this movement and this moment that we’re in right now has any real traction?

That is such a good question. I hope that we are on the cusp of an awakening. There’s something about this moment that feels as if it could—it could—be a turning point. But history is always there to remind us that we’re on this continuum. Something reaches a breaking point and people recognize it, and then there are efforts to change, and then there’s a backlash to that change. Then there’s also a very long period of entrenchment, and that builds up to yet another cycle.

So where are we in the cycle? How meaningful is this? Where and when might humanity transcend all of this and recognize that we all have more in common than we have been led to believe? Our species depends upon people getting together and recognizing this. We are in the middle of a pandemic, we have challenges, and everyone on the planet is facing challenges. I mean, this is not the time to be cleaving to divisions that were man made.

One of the things that makes me feel more encouraged is just that there’s language that’s being used out in the open that people have been really resistant to using in the past. And the fact that that language is being used in all forums—not just during protests, but on television, in classrooms, over dinner. It feels very different and substantial in ways that I’ve never experienced until this moment.

That is true. Language is important because language is how we formulate and express how we feel. I think that what is important is to make sure it doesn’t lose steam. When you’re a person in a marginalized group, you very often have to deal with these issues every single day. You’re constantly reminded of how urgent this is. But if you don’t have to deal with it every day, then it could be that once the crisis has passed, you could easily slip back into those all-too-comfortable grooves of not thinking about it. It has got to be recognized that this is not a one-off, this is not a moment; this is what the country has been living with for a very long time.

This interview has been edited and condensed.

Mattie Kahn is the culture director of Glamour.

Originally Appeared on Glamour