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Welcome to the LRB podcast. I'm Adam Shatz, and my guest today is Hazel Carby, a professor emeritus of American and African American studies at Yale and an influential scholar of the

culture and politics of the Black

Atlantic. The subject of our conversation today is Isabel Wilkerson's much-discussed book

about anti-black oppression in the United States, cast. Wilkerson's book, published in the last

months of the Trump presidency, has drawn much attention for its

argument that America's system of racial oppression is best understood in terms of caste,

which she calls the hidden grammar behind the language of race. In that book, Wilkerson likens

the way that racism works in the U.S. to other systems of domination,

including caste in India and anti-Semitic persecution in the early years of Nazi Germany.

But Carby argues that Wilkerson misses, and indeed erases, the most important comparison,

namely the domination of black and indigenous peoples in the Americas from the era of slavery

onward. Her piece is more than a review. It is an invitation to think about racism in the

states and in the Americas in broader and more global terms. Hazel, you begin your essay on Isabel Wilkerson's book with a revealing anecdote about a visit

that you made to the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, D.C.

Can you tell us a bit about what you saw there in the rotunda of the fourth floor. It was a specific figure,

...