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.

Isabel and I are joined by readers, some really great readers, who've all read the book.

So, to all you readers out there, I love to read your social posts about cast, keep posting

on our Oprah's Book Club social pages on Instagram, Facebook and Twitter.

Hello readers again. Today we're talking about pillar number three, which is titled

Indogamy and the Control of Marriage and Meeting. It's about the necessity of the upper

cast to control the love, the marriage, and children of the subordinate cast. So, let's

start with pillar three with the definition of it. What does it mean? And what has it

looked like in cast systems? Indogamy essentially means that marriage is only allowed within

the confines of a given group in a cast system. It would be within one's cast. In the United

States, there's a term that we use which is miscegenation or anti-missedination. Miscegenation

being the idea of people actually mixing. And so, at a certain point, 41 of the 50 states

at some point or other in our history have had a ban on interracial marriage, marriage

across these artificial lines that were created back in the founding of the country. And

this is an effort then to keep the relations and family systems within the confines of

a given cast. And that in doing so, it means that people are not allowed to marry across

these lines. But they're also not even to have romances across those lines or even the

appearance of romance. These things in not that long ago and not ancient history and American

life going back to the 1960s could cause someone their life if they cross this essential

pillar of cast. Yeah. And not only just, we all know the story of Emmett Till, not even

for marriage, but just to even look at a white woman or to appear to, which years later

...