Hi everybody, together with Apple Books, welcome again to the Oprah's Book Club podcast

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

Pillar 4 is title, purity versus pollution.

And I think Pillar 4, who shook many readers to their core, I read that on many posts

on the Oprah's Book Club Instagram page, is about you explain in the book that the dominant

cast has an obsession with purity and live in fear of what they believe is pollution from

the lower cast. Can you speak about that for a moment?

Yes, historically in the early creation of a cast system, one of the abiding features of it

is the maintenance of the purity of those who are in the dominant cast and being protected from

the potential pollution that could come from exposure to those assigned to the subordinated cast.

And the length to which people will go in any of these cast systems that I've looked at

go to such extremes as to in the Indian case, the subordinated cast was to remain as many as

96 paces away from those in the dominant cast that the very shadow of the people who were deemed

subordinate could pollute those who were deemed as dominant in the cast system.

And that even in our own country that this went to such extremes as, for example,

in courtrooms throughout the South, into the 1960s and 70s in fact, there was a separate Bible,

there was a black Bible and an altogether separate white Bible to swear to tell the truth on

in court. The very word of God was segregated in the Jim Crow South into the lifespan of some

people who are alive today. This was one of the prevailing most readily enforced aspects of

maintaining a cast system, to keep the groups apart and separate for the protection of the purity

of one against the pollution of the other.

Melba, our little rock nine. I see you're nodding your head there when she was saying the

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