Hello listeners, please note that this episode contains strong language.

Hi everybody, together with Apple Books, welcome to the Opers Book Club podcast.

Episode five in our series focused on Isabel Wilkerson's book cast, The Origins of Our Discontents.

Pillar five is titled Occupational Hierarchy. It explains how the lowest cast,

the bottom wrong of people are forced to do the menial or lowest labor.

So Isabel explained the history of how people from Africa became a target for free labor

as far back as we arrived in 1619.

Yeah, that's when it started.

Well, before there was the United States of America, there was this hierarchy,

and the basis of that, the foundation of that, was what a senator from the south,

during that era of the 19th century actually described as the mudsil,

the mudsil being the central part of the foundation of an instructor,

in which everything else is built upon that.

And so everything else in the hierarchy was built around and upon this bottom

wrong of people who were brought in to do labor for free, starting in 1619, before

there was the United States of America.

And that meant that there was this delineation of occupations, of roles that won my play in the

economy on the basis of what one looked like, one's heritage, one's background, and that's what

said in motion, what ultimately became a codified formal cast system with laws that

controlled what people could do on the basis of what they look like.

Yeah, that's what established the hierarchy actually.

Yeah. So how has being the laborers for centuries impacted Black Americans today?

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