Since the killing of George Floyd, we've seen not just a protest movement, but something like a historical reckoning.

A lot of white Americans seem willing, at least more willing, to address the reality of systemic racism in the present day.

We're learning terms like tone policing, white fragility, and anti-racism.

Isabel Wilkerson would like to introduce another term to our lexicon, and that's the term

caste. Wilkerson argues that what we have in the United States is a rigid social hierarchy

akin to the caste system in India. She writes, we cannot fully understand the current upheavals or most any turning point

in American history without accounting for the human pyramid encrypted into us all. Wilkerson's new

book is called Cast, The Origins of Our Discontents. It's just out this week, and she's previously

the winner of a Pulitzer Prize and many other awards.

Now, your first book was a masterpiece on the Great Migration, and it was both history

and personal stories of families who made that essential journey. This book is personal,

too, in many ways, but in some ways it's a book about the search for a metaphor,

search for a better, more accurate description of what American racism is. Why is racism

somehow insufficient as a description of the way we've lived in this country for centuries, really?

Well, it's so interesting that you put it that way, and that you

mentioned the Warren for the Sons, because that book, as you know, was about the people who were

fleeing Jim Crow repression. And in writing that book, you know, I was having to discover the many

ways that the Jim Crow South repressed this entire group of people.

And in fact, all people were repressed under it.

They just weren't aware of it.

You know, it was a world, you know, as you know, in which it was against a law for a black person

and a white person to merely play checkers together.

...