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

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

Today we're talking about pillar six and pillar seven. Isabel titled pillar six dehumanization

in stigma and the seventh pillar is called terror as enforcement, cruelty as a means

of control. So let's talk about dehumanization and how it worked.

Yeah, dehumanization is a fundamental mechanism that allows everything else that happens in

a cast system to occur. Once you have dehumanized an entire group, you don't have to focus

on an individual. There's not this focus on the individual because if you dehumanize

the entire group, then everyone will be of the same mind about how anyone in that group

should be treated. And there were many ways of, first of all, inserting or creating the

illusion that human beings were actually not human. And all of the various hierarchies

that I'm looking at, when you think about what happened in Germany, for example, the

idea of when people arrived at those concentration camps, they would shave the head, they would

eliminate all of the distinguishing characteristics that would allow an individual to stand out

from others. They would then give them uniforms, the most horrible, often ill-fitting uniforms

that which would also emphasize that they were not even fit to be clothed in certain

kinds of attire and uniforms. And then they were no longer too respond to necessarily

too their name, but to a number. There was a number that they had to memorize. And of

course, this happened in the 20th century, but going back in the United States history,

again, for 246 years of enslavement, before there was even the United States of America,

there was an effective effort to dehumanize those who were being put at the very bottom

forced to work for free, for as many as 18 hours a day, people not realizing how long their

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