Hi everybody, together with Apple Books, welcome again to the Opers book club podcast

in our series on Isabel Wilkerson's magnificent book cast, The Origins of our Discontents.

Today we're talking about pillar eight and it's titled, Inherit Superiority versus Inherit

Inferiority.

Now, this is where the rubber meets the road.

Isabel breaks this down.

You write that beneath each pillar of cast was the presumption and continual reminder

of the inborn superiority of the dominant cast and the inherent inferiority of the subordinate.

It was not enough that the designated groups be separated for reasons of pollution or

that they not into Mary or that the lowest people suffer due to some religious curse,

but that it must be understood in every interaction that one group was superior and inherently

deserving of the best in a given society and that those who were deemed lowest were deserving

of their plight.

Wow.

Well, at every turn and in everyday encounters, signs and symbols and customs were used

to elevate the upper cast and demean the lower cast.

Can you describe some of these?

Well, we're all familiar with the colored only and the white only signs that existed

throughout this aftermath of that time.

One of the things that we may not pay as much attention to is that they went to the trouble

of making sure that the water fountains for white people, the dominant cast, were bigger,

looming over often the smaller, you know, lower, literally lower water fountain that would

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