Isabel Wilkerson on America’s Obsession With the Term “Race”

CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR: Can I ask you, do you think that everybody’s too obsessed with the word race?

ISABEL WILKERSON, AUTHOR, “CASTE: THE ORIGINS OF OUR DISCONTENTS”: Well, I think that we tend to use the language that we’re accustomed to that has been the defining nature of interactions in our country. And with the use of the term caste, the word that is the focus of this work, it allows us to have new language for the divisions that we have inherited as a country. In this era of upheaval, we need new language in order to understand how we got to where we are and how we might be able to find a way to push past it, to transcend the boundaries that have been created for us long ago.

AMANPOUR: I mean, again, you obviously wrote this before this moment of reckoning and before, obviously, George Floyd was killed. So, what made you, apart from finding new language, define and differentiate caste and race? I mean, you say caste is the bones, race the skin. What does that mean?

WILKERSON: Well, it means that we have been trained and socialized to see ourselves by what is defined in our country, has been defined for 400 years as race, the division of people on the basis of what they look like, primarily, which was essentially the view of what one’s ancestry might have been. And one of the things that brought me to this book is that I wrote a book before, and my first book was “The Warmth of Other Suns.” And that book was the outpouring, the migration of six million African-Americans from the Jim Crow South, essentially defecting what I came to call a caste system. And that was because the word race, racism that we are so accustomed to using did not seem sufficient to capture the world as it existed that — in that way, the hierarchies into which people have been born, the multilayered forms of controlling and repressing people on the basis of what they look like, this artificial hierarchy. And so that’s how I came to the use of the term caste in reference to the United States.