It's the L.H.O.P.H.H.O. with Stephen Colberg.

Right now, folks, my next guest is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, an author of The

Warmth of Other Sons and Cast, The Origins of Our Discontents.

Please welcome to the L.H.O. isabel Wilkerson.

So lovely to have you on.

Thank you for having me.

The, as I said, the new book is Cast, The Origin of Our Discontents.

It came out two years ago, but it's now out in paperback. The New York Times review called it

the keynote nonfiction book of the American Century thus far.

For those who don't know, explain the concept of Cast and how you perceive that within our own

cultural context.

Well, first of all, Cast is essentially an arbitrary, artificial, graded ranking of human

value in a society, and we often think of that word applied to India, the most recognizable

Cast system in the world, and yet it turned out that our founding fathers actually replicated

or created a parallel kind of hierarchy, but what they did was you could use any number of metrics

to create a cast system. You could use religion, you could use ethnicity, you could use immigrant

status, language, all of that. But in our country, what the colonists chose to use was this

the metric of what people look like, meaning race. So race was the tool that was used to divide

and to rank people, to determine who would be slave or free, who could own property, or who

could be property, and we still live with the after effects of that.

And what was the evolution of that idea? Because my understanding, and please correct

me if I'm wrong, is that our concept of race, the modern concept of race that still sticks with us

...