America has a history of oppressing people of color,

it's most often blamed on systemic racism.

That's the term most often used in Black Lives Matter protests

against the police and the justice system.

But Isabel Wilkerson says that doesn't do justice to a social construct

that's older than the very idea of race or racial difference.

She's talking about the ancient system of caste in India,

with an echo in Nazi Germany.

Wilkerson is a Pulitzer Prize-winning veteran of the New York Times,

author of The Warmth of Other Suns,

which won a National Book Award for tracing America's internal migrations during

the 20th century. Her latest book is Cast, the origin of our discontents. Isabel Wilkerson, welcome.

Oh, thanks for having me. Thanks. So cast, that's the title of the book, of course, and that's the

term you prefer to systemic racism. That's a term

most often associated with India. So how does it apply to the United States? Well, it goes back to,

in some ways, the work that I did with the Warren Father Sons in which I was studying essentially

the infrastructure of the world that the people were fleeing, six million African

Americans fleeing the Jim Crow South. And I decided, and after speaking to over 1,200 people

and also looking into what had been written before about that era, I merged from the research

with the word caste as opposed to the word racism. The word racism does not appear in the book.

And that's because racism did not seem sufficient to capture what they had endured in a world where it was against a law for a black person and a white person to merely play checkers together.

It was, there were actually separate Bibles in courtrooms throughout the South that meant that the very word of God was segregated in that era,

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