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Hello and welcome to the History Extra Podcast from BBC History magazine, Britain's best-selling history magazine. I'm Ellie Korthorn. Today's podcast guest is the Pulitzer Prize winning journalist and author Isabel Wilkerson.

I spoke to Isabelle about her new book

Cast The Lies that Divide Us for the October issue of BBC History magazine. In the

book Isabel argues that the divisions in American society are best understood if you view it as a cast system and draws comparisons with India and Nazi Germany.

Your new book argues that American society

and the history of that society

is best understood if we view it as a caste system.

So to start us off before we go any further, how do you define caste and why do you think that it's a useful way of describing the divisions that are in American society?

Well, I describe caste as an arbitrary artificial hierarchy in which in the American context what people have historically been

permitted to do, what they have been able to do in terms of occupation and in terms of life chances have often

been related to and dependent upon what they look like.

And I distinguish cast from race in that cast

...