Understanding caste as a ranking of human value, similar to grammar, helps explain the persistence of race and racism in the American context.
Metaphors such as caste as a toxin, an old house, and a long-running play provide insights into the system's ability to perpetuate itself and shape-shift.
Acknowledging and dismantling the inherited caste system is crucial for creating a just and compassionate society, requiring awareness, connection, and repairing of systems.
Deep dives
The Importance of Understanding Caste
The podcast episode delves into the concept of caste and its role in societies across history. Caste is defined as a ranking of human value that creates divisions and hierarchies, similar to grammar in language. The episode discusses how understanding caste helps to explain the persistence of race and racism in the American context. By recognizing caste as an infrastructure of divisions, fresh perspectives and solutions can be found to address and shift these harmful hierarchies.
Metaphors for Understanding Caste
The podcast explores several metaphors that shed light on the nature of caste and its impact on society. These metaphors include caste as a toxin in the permafrost, an old house that requires constant attention and repair, and a long-running play in which individuals play fixed roles. These metaphors provide insights into the system's ability to shape-shift, mutate, and perpetuate itself. By embracing these metaphors, it becomes possible to approach caste as a systems-level issue rather than a personal one.
Recognizing Our Inheritance and Taking Action
The episode emphasizes the importance of recognizing and acknowledging our inherited caste system in order to address its harmful effects. By understanding that caste is a social construct that can be dismantled, individuals can take responsibility for their role in perpetuating hierarchies. Breaking free from assumptions and investing in repairing the systems that maintain caste is crucial for the well-being of all people, regardless of their position within the hierarchy. Building awareness, fostering connections, and highlighting the consequences of divisions can create a more just and compassionate society.
The Creation of Race
Before the creation of countries in the West, Europeans did not identify themselves by race. Race became a metric used to create hierarchies and caste systems.
The Impact of Cast and Race
Cast is like the bones and race is like the skin. Race serves as the visible division for a caste system. A caste system requires enforcement to maintain the hierarchy, even if individuals within the same racial group are targeted and devalued. The exposure to videos of violence and systemic injustices can desensitize and numb us, affecting our empathy and connections with fellow humans.
In this rich, expansive, and warm conversation between friends, Krista draws out the heart for humanity behind Isabel Wilkerson's eye on histories we are only now communally learning to tell — her devotion to understanding not merely who we have been, but who we can be. Her most recent offering of fresh insight to our life together brings "caste" into the light — a recurrent, instinctive pattern of human societies across the centuries, though far more malignant in some times and places. Caste is a ranking of human value that works more like a pathogen than a belief system — more like the reflexive grammar of our sentences than our choices of words. In the American context, Isabel Wilkerson says race is the skin, but "caste is the bones." And this shift away from centering race as a focus of analysis actually helps us understand why race and racism continue to shape-shift 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.
Isabel and Krista spoke in Seattle before a packed house at Benaroya Hall, at the invitation of Seattle Arts & Lectures.
[Content Advisory: Beginning at 21:16, there is a discussion of Nazi terminology and a quotation from Hitler with an epithet that is offensive and painful. We chose to include this language to illustrate the heinous nature of the history being discussed and Hitler’s admiration for it.]
Isabel Wilkerson won a Pulitzer Prize while reporting for the New York Times. Her first book, The Warmth of Other Suns, brought the underreported story of the Great Migration of the 20th century into the light, and she published her best-selling book Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents in August 2020. Among many honors, she was awarded the National Humanities Medal from President Barack Obama.
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