On Being with Christa Tippett is supported in part by the John Templeton Foundation,

funding research and catalyzing conversations that inspire people with awe and wonder.

Discover the latest findings on neuroscience, cosmology, and the origins of life at Templeton.org.

Here's what I so deeply appreciate about Isabel Wilkerson's voice.

She trains an unflinching eye on histories we are only now communally learning to tell,

and she holds that with a huge heart for humanity, a devotion to understanding not merely who we have been,

but who we can be. Her most recent offering revolves around caste, a recurrent pattern of human

societies across the centuries, though far more malignant in some times and places than in others.

Cast is nothing more and nothing less than a ranking of human value.

Who matters the most and who matters less? It is communal infrastructure that becomes internalized

and perpetuated at every level along the hierarchies that result. It is like grammar,

figuring absolutely reflexively, yet guidingly, into our sentences, the words and structures of our being.

In the American context, as Isabel Wilkerson proposes, this helps us understand why race and racism

continue to shapeshift and regenerate every best intention and effort and law notwithstanding.

But beginning to see caste also gives us fresh eyes and hearts for imagining where to begin and how to persist

in order finally to shift that. I'm Christa Tippett and this is on being.

Isabel Wilkerson won a Pulitzer Prize while reporting for The New York Times. Her first book,

The Warmth of Other Sons, brought the under reported story of the great migration of the 20th century

into the light and she published her bestselling book, Cast, The Origins of Our Discontents in August

2020. We spoke in Seattle before a packed house at Beneroy Hall at the invitation of Seattle Arts

and Lectures.

Well, we're not used to that anymore. How amazing is it to be together?

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