This is the New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker.

Welcome to The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick.

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 cast.

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 War and Throw 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

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