YouSaid · the spoken record

Isabel Wilkerson

lines on the record: 55
first: 2020-08-21
most recent: 2020-08-21
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“And that's one of the steps that someone can take toward dismantling in our everyday life every single day. This is a challenge that we could take on for ourselves. As individuals, we may not be able to dismantle hierarchies globally, but we can all do something every day in our own lives to resist the embedded hierarchies and the messaging that we all receive.”
2020-08-21 · Intelligence Squared · The Hidden Power of Caste, with Isabel Wilkerson and Yassmin Abdel-Magied · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“to be hardworking or lazy, whatever it may be, and so we absorb these things, and even though we did not wish for them to be there, this is what we discover. I don't know if that's answering the question, but I just want to emphasize that these are not choices that each of us make when you're born into Ohio. But I think that we each have a choice each day as to whether we choose to adhere to these embedded messages. Once you become aware of the messaging, then you can begin to work to recognize that the need to see the common humanity in all of us and to see that these are man-made divisions. These are not real. They were created for the purpose of dividing and creating hierarchy. And if we refuse to see those and choose to see one another as individuals, as the unique and beautiful and amazing individuals that we all are, then”
2020-08-21 · Intelligence Squared · The Hidden Power of Caste, with Isabel Wilkerson and Yassmin Abdel-Magied · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think that I mean I can see how if you're in a subjugated group then it does a fix it turns a neutral trait neutral traits whatever they may be into a disability because then you it should be neutral and it should be meaningless but suddenly it's accorded negativity it's accorded a value that's devalued just because you have nothing to do with it. I mean again the focus of this work is to say that none of us chose where we would be in the hierarchy, the embedded inherent hierarchy in whichever society we're born and we are born to our families and then we're all innocent children and then as we grow up and come into awareness we become we learn that just because of what we look like we are assumed to be a certain way we're assumed to be intelligent or not intelligent we're assumed to be resourceful or not resourceful”
2020-08-21 · Intelligence Squared · The Hidden Power of Caste, with Isabel Wilkerson and Yassmin Abdel-Magied · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“in the majority, even though they may come from many different backgrounds. And so this is an existential question for the country. This is a moment of should be or hopefully will be a moment of deep reflection to imagine, to reimagine what American, what it means to be in community in a different configuration. And so all of this is to me bound up in this current moment.”
2020-08-21 · Intelligence Squared · The Hidden Power of Caste, with Isabel Wilkerson and Yassmin Abdel-Magied · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The white majority would no longer be the majority in the United States, and this predates the current administration. This is something that came out more than twelve years ago. And that put into motion a tremendous amount of uncertainty for many, many people. And not just people who would be viewed as being dominant caste. It's a whole different way of even trying to imagine what the country would look like without the historic majority as we have known it to be. Going back to colonial times. And so this raises questions about what happens when there is not the numerical majority that has always been there in a country that prides itself and is known as a beacon of democracy throughout the world as a democracy that's built upon the majority rule. So what happens when the majority changes? What happens when people who do not look like the majority, historic majority then are now numerically”
2020-08-21 · Intelligence Squared · The Hidden Power of Caste, with Isabel Wilkerson and Yassmin Abdel-Magied · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, the thing is throughout American history there have been moments where there are moments of great progress followed sometimes by resistance and even backlash and then things going backward of contention and conflict to such a degree that then there is a moving forward. There's always a backward motion and then a forward motion that's characteristic of very likely almost any society, but I'm speaking of America, of the United States more particularly. And so the current situation is one that has been building for quite some time. And around 12 years ago, there was an important report that came out of the census that indicated that the United States by 2042 would move into a demographic configuration that the country has never known. And that would be that for the first time in American history,”
2020-08-21 · Intelligence Squared · The Hidden Power of Caste, with Isabel Wilkerson and Yassmin Abdel-Magied · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That was not going to be possible. But what I would say is that if it can be created by human beings, by man, then it can. I believe, and I trust and have faith that it can be dismantled, that these hierarchies that actually hold all of us back, even though we may not be aware of it, can be dismantled, but they can't be dismantled unless you can see them to begin with. You have to be able to see a problem in order to solve a problem. And that's why I'm trying to shed light here. I'm trying to shine a light on what we may not otherwise be able to see, holding up an x-ray so that we can then look and diagnose it and see what can be done. And the approach to addressing this will take everyone because everyone is affected by it. Everyone has absorbed whatever the encoding is and it will take everyone, the work of everyone in order to rise above it, to transcend it in order to heal. It will take everyone.”
2020-08-21 · Intelligence Squared · The Hidden Power of Caste, with Isabel Wilkerson and Yassmin Abdel-Magied · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It cannot be said actually in my opinion that we know of cases where it has actually been truly vanquished. I would love to be able to think that it's been truly absolutely without question vanquished because of the interconnectedness of human beings. I mean, as I said, I mean, you move about the world. We've received these inputs. We've received them from the society at large, from commercials and from sitcoms and from billboards of who is valued in a society and who may not be valued in a society. And I think that's what makes it harder. But when you look at, you know, and I looked more intensely at these three countries, but I did not, I was not presenting myself as being as knowing about all manifestations of caste in every single country where it's ever existed. I preferred to and chose to go deep rather than wide if I'd gone any wider I would still be I'd be working on this for the next 20 years.”
2020-08-21 · Intelligence Squared · The Hidden Power of Caste, with Isabel Wilkerson and Yassmin Abdel-Magied · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I absolutely agree. I mean, I think that, you know, it's a hard history. It's hard to look into one's own background. I mean, you mentioned therapy or you mentioned one example that I have is in the book is of going to the doctor. When you go to the doctor, the very first thing that they will do in the office, at least my experience, our experiences in the United States is the first thing.”
2020-08-21 · Intelligence Squared · The Hidden Power of Caste, with Isabel Wilkerson and Yassmin Abdel-Magied · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Through me, and I think the same reaction, the goal is to have the readers have a similar kind of reaction, you're just kind of scratching your head. Where does this come from and why? So, yeah.”
2020-08-21 · Intelligence Squared · The Hidden Power of Caste, with Isabel Wilkerson and Yassmin Abdel-Magied · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, it never did because I was on deadline and I need to get back and write the story. It didn't include him. You know, the thing is it was part of a larger story in which there were many other people that I'd interviewed. I was really hoping to interview him and he was very excited to be interviewed, but he didn't get interviewed and I never heard anything was I had to move on to the next story and was one of those things that happened. And again, these are the things that I mentioned in the book are not even the most, these are not the worst things that have ever happened to me. They're not even necessarily the most pointed things that have happened to me. They're just things that seemed to be, I didn't really wasn't seeking to have myself on this book anyway, but these were examples that seem to be, I thought, could be of use for readers to see how this happens on a daily kind of everyday, the everyday ordinariness of it and how it can impact us. It also is one that is so, it's kind of, it's so unexpected.”
2020-08-21 · Intelligence Squared · The Hidden Power of Caste, with Isabel Wilkerson and Yassmin Abdel-Magied · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In this moment that we happen to be in is to attempt to bring in an awareness of what had happened. I often describe myself as like a structural inspector of the building, an old house I describe the United States as an old house, probably any country could be viewed as an old house. And when you have an old house, the work is never done. There's always something that has yet to be done. As soon as you fix one thing, then something else is popping up. And so you don't expect the work to be done because you have an old house and you know you'll have to be inspecting it constantly. And the idea is to shed light and to illuminate those spaces that we otherwise would not know. You know, after rain, you don't want to go into the basement. You don't want to think about what is there awaiting you. But whatever is there is not going to go away just because you don't look at it. In fact, whatever is there will only get worse if you don't look at it. I think when you have an old house, it calls upon everyone to recognize.”
2020-08-21 · Intelligence Squared · The Hidden Power of Caste, with Isabel Wilkerson and Yassmin Abdel-Magied · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“in the middle of Berlin to a monument, a memorial to those who perished in the Holocaust, and one of the central, I mean, messages of that memorial is that there is no explanation, that there's no description. It's just there. And the power of that is that it's a reminder that the country has worked very hard to make sure everyone knows the history so that there's not a need to have an explanation of what happened because everyone now knows it was also built and designed by an architect, an American architect of Jewish ancestry. And so that was powerful as well. And so the decision was made that there needs to be said nothing except that the monument itself, the memorial itself does the speaking because people have been educated to know the history to begin with. And I think that the effort of myself and many other historians”
2020-08-21 · Intelligence Squared · The Hidden Power of Caste, with Isabel Wilkerson and Yassmin Abdel-Magied · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think one of the things that's happened since World War II is this attempt to reckon with understand, learn, and educate the population about what truly happened. The idea of everyone getting on the same page about the essential facts, the essential experience, and how the country came to that point. And so one of the things that Germany has done and done so effectively is that they have converted the spaces of such horror, you know, the Nazi headquarters, various headquarters for the various departments that they had. They've converted those buildings into spaces of education. They've converted them into museums and into spaces of learning so that they also have converted them into spaces that now honor those who perished under the Nazi reign. They have devoted an entire massive section”
2020-08-21 · Intelligence Squared · The Hidden Power of Caste, with Isabel Wilkerson and Yassmin Abdel-Magied · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That would be the subjugated lowest caste. And so this is how it operates, that there it's often said that again, you are born to a particular ranking, but you do not have to remain there in terms of how you perceive yourself. The issue is how other people perceive you and may create these boundaries over you.”
2020-08-21 · Intelligence Squared · The Hidden Power of Caste, with Isabel Wilkerson and Yassmin Abdel-Magied · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Look, the inherited look of someone who would be viewed as potentially upper class to begin with. And you also, I think that there was a recent story a few months ago about what had happened to the editor of British Vogue who walked into his building, clearly one of the best-dressed and best presented people on the planet by definition. He walked into his own building and was told to use the freight elevator, the freight lift, his own building. And that is where you can reach the highest levels of one's class status in one's society in terms of success and achievement. And in an instant can be reminded or positioned or surveilled or policed into a space of that.”
2020-08-21 · Intelligence Squared · The Hidden Power of Caste, with Isabel Wilkerson and Yassmin Abdel-Magied · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I mean, it certainly can, but I want to say something about class because that thing that was the underlying question that you had. So I describe caste as the bones, race as the skin, and then class, the third rail on the three-legged stool of identity is the clothing, the accent, the diction, the education, the things that we can change about ourselves to move up or down in how we're perceived and how we move about and navigate in a caste system. And so one way of looking at it is if you can act your way out of it, it's class. If you cannot act your way out of it, it's cast. If you think about Pygmalion, you know where they were actually able to take Eliza Doolittle and take someone who would be lower in class and literally transform her into an upper caste or upper class person, but she first would have to have the same basic”
2020-08-21 · Intelligence Squared · The Hidden Power of Caste, with Isabel Wilkerson and Yassmin Abdel-Magied · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Absolutely true. And as you mentioned, your own multiple identities and origins, that is where you get these points of intersection that can move you up or move you down depending upon what the factors. I mean, there could be a long, long flowchart that would pull in all the possible characteristics an individual might have and then try to place them in the hierarchy. And I'm dealing with the bipolar hierarchy in the United States that emerged out of colonial Virginia. But to your point, and I want to make sure I get your point, your question was exactly.”
2020-08-21 · Intelligence Squared · The Hidden Power of Caste, with Isabel Wilkerson and Yassmin Abdel-Magied · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“With all inputs to the contrary, all evidence to the contrary seems to override the impulse to designate and to rank in spite of all information to the contrary.”
2020-08-21 · Intelligence Squared · The Hidden Power of Caste, with Isabel Wilkerson and Yassmin Abdel-Magied · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Disrupt ordinary interactions. And actually, if you multiply that times millions of people who may experience this in any given time or act upon these impulses at any given time, these autonomic subconscious impulses, then you can see how it disrupts interactions. It hurts businesses. It hurts communities and ultimately entire societies when you multiply at times millions of transactions or interactions in a given day in a given society. In this case, an actual purchase was being threatened because he was focused on someone. The other thing I would add is that, you know, for someone who looks like me to make it all the way to India means that there have to be some level of resources, some little level of resourcefulness, some level of planning. Someone like me does not just sort of just pop in the middle of a country across the ocean, wherever it may be.”
2020-08-21 · Intelligence Squared · The Hidden Power of Caste, with Isabel Wilkerson and Yassmin Abdel-Magied · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Emotions, it's not about guilt and blame and shame. It's about what is it that human beings do when they've received messaging about who fits where, who's to be expected where, all these assumptions and stereotypes, and these assumptions and stereotypes can block and impede and”
2020-08-21 · Intelligence Squared · The Hidden Power of Caste, with Isabel Wilkerson and Yassmin Abdel-Magied · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You are not helping me. Would you come and help me? I need help. I'm interested in this necklace and I need you to come and help me with this necklace. So while he was focused on trailing me, he was not doing what he should have been doing, which would have been helping someone else. And she got upset because she was being harmed by the assumptions that were being made about me. And all of this, I want to say, is not personal. I do not take this as personal. I take this as this is the encoding that we as human beings have received about the artificial arbitrary ranking of value among human beings in the world that we live in. I don't cast blame or in fact the beauty of the focusing on structure takes us away from the emotion laden language that we may be accustomed to. In other words, it's not about feelings.”
2020-08-21 · Intelligence Squared · The Hidden Power of Caste, with Isabel Wilkerson and Yassmin Abdel-Magied · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I didn't say anything. I wasn't speaking anyone. I just entered a pretty large shop, and the clerk came over to me immediately and began to follow me from place to place to place. If I made two steps to the forward, then he made two steps forward. If I made three steps to the right, he made three steps to the right. He didn't say anything. He just tracked me and shadowed me from the moment I entered. And it was very uncomfortable, although for people who look like me, it's not an unusual experience sadly, but it was especially, you know, it was demoralizing to happen outside of a place that I'm accustomed to this happening. And then an interesting thing happened. While he was shadowing me, and he was following me everything that I was doing, there was a British woman, a white woman, who got very angry and came over to him and said, I need help.”
2020-08-21 · Intelligence Squared · The Hidden Power of Caste, with Isabel Wilkerson and Yassmin Abdel-Magied · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And perceived race, which is a social construct and is not real. In other words, where is you perceived to have been originally descended from? Are you of African descent with then sadly in the Western context be perceived as putting any of us in a subjugated position? I have had experiences when I'm outside of the United States where because these prevailing hierarchies have been exported to the rest of the world, people will still respond to me as being from the subjugated group, even without hearing anything about me. I actually had an experience in India where I was at the airport there and I was going through just going through shop to shop while waiting for the flight. And I went into this one shop and the clerk there, upon entering.”
2020-08-21 · Intelligence Squared · The Hidden Power of Caste, with Isabel Wilkerson and Yassmin Abdel-Magied · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I love that. I actually have spoken with people who share some of the characteristics that you have. And say, for example, they are born in, say, Morocco, they are Muslim, they immigrate to, say, the United States where they then fall into a particular group. Then if they go to, say, Dubai or someplace where there's a larger Muslim community, then they move in a different space. So it is some of it is, I call it situational caste, situational hierarchy, depending upon where you happen to be. I would say that a lot of it, particularly in the Western perspective, is how you are perceived in the moment based upon your phenotype, sadly, because people make assumptions on the basis of what they can see. And that's the tragedy of caste to begin with is because you don't know anything about the person. You know absolutely nothing, but you know what you can see. And so the first assumption is based upon you a general.”
2020-08-21 · Intelligence Squared · The Hidden Power of Caste, with Isabel Wilkerson and Yassmin Abdel-Magied · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The story said, Well, so do you have a business card? And it just so happened that I've been interviewing all day. This is the end of the day and I was out of business cards. And generally it's not required anyway. But anyway, that was what he asked for. I didn't have a business card. He said, well, do you have some ID? Could I see some ID? And I said, I shouldn't have to show you my ID, but here's my driver's license. So I gave him the driver's license. And he said, you don't have anything with the New York Times on it. And I said, I happen not to have anything with the New York Times, but here we are, the two of us. I have an appointment with you. I know that I have an appointment with you. You know you have an appointment with the New York Times. There's no one else here. We're already late into the interview. I should be interviewing you at this very moment. And we should be having the interview right now. And he says, he said, I'm sorry, I'm going to have to ask you to leave because I have to get ready for this interview. She'll be here any minute.”
2020-08-21 · Intelligence Squared · The Hidden Power of Caste, with Isabel Wilkerson and Yassmin Abdel-Magied · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He does not realize it, he does not recognize it, he does not accept it, he does not see it. He doesn't. He tells me, I can't talk with you right now because I'm waiting for a very important interview with the New York Times. And I said, I'm Isabel Wilkerson with the New York Times. I'm the one that made the appointment with you. He says, well, how do I know that?”
2020-08-21 · Intelligence Squared · The Hidden Power of Caste, with Isabel Wilkerson and Yassmin Abdel-Magied · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To wait, he would be there any minute. And minutes later, the door opens, the front door opens, and this man walks in. He's very flustered. He's in a hurry because he's late for an appointment, the appointment with me, and he is very anxious about making sure that everything is right. So he bristles in and the clerk says that's him going over to him because that's him. And so I go over to him. I introduce myself to him and he says, I can't talk with you right now. I can't talk with you right now. I have a very, very important interview with the New York Times. I cannot talk with you right now.”
2020-08-21 · Intelligence Squared · The Hidden Power of Caste, with Isabel Wilkerson and Yassmin Abdel-Magied · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, in a lot of ways, because again, the signifier where you rank is based upon what you look like. So you can enter into any space and you might, you know, everything might be perfectly wonderful. And then there could be some disruption that you didn't see coming. And one of the examples that I include in the book is one where I was when I was a journalist working for the New York Times. And actually, the title was a national correspondent out of our Midwest Bureau. And I went to make, I made an appointment over the phone with someone that I was going to be interviewing. He was very excited to be interviewed by the New York Times, very excited, no problem whatsoever, made the appointment. When I got there to interview him, I arrived a little early and he wasn't there at the time. I'd been interviewing people all day long and by that time this was the last interview of the day. And when I got there, the establishment, there was no one there in the establishment except for one of the clerks, and she told me to, you know,”
2020-08-21 · Intelligence Squared · The Hidden Power of Caste, with Isabel Wilkerson and Yassmin Abdel-Magied · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It came at tremendous, tremendous cost. I mean, enslavement lasted for so long, it lasted for two hundred and forty six years. It lasted for twelve generations, so people of African descent who were descendants of enslavement experienced 246 years of enslavement, followed by another nearly 100 years of what would be considered the Jim Crow caste system. And so the idea of the African Americans being able to actually enter into the mainstream of American life legally after the civil rights movement is a fairly new phenomenon, very, very new. It's going back within the lifespan of many, many people alive today. The civil rights legislation was from the 1960s. And so that was the beginning of African Americans being able to finally break free of the legal state-sanctioned restrictions on them. And that's what gets us to today.”
2020-08-21 · Intelligence Squared · The Hidden Power of Caste, with Isabel Wilkerson and Yassmin Abdel-Magied · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“the land was and then bringing in the people to Africans to be enslaved to build the country and all of this going back for 400 years back to 1619 and then by establishing a new world on a new hemisphere creating a whole new system that then identified people on the basis of what they look like as opposed to what their innate gifts and talents might be and and so it was it was I want to emphasize that it was a form of it was a slow building up as they had to make decisions about what was necessary in order for the colony to survive this is not to you know this is to say that this is in some ways many of these questions and laws that they created were laws that grew out of a sense of wanting to survive and having to be in their view pragmatic about what was necessary to make this work”
2020-08-21 · Intelligence Squared · The Hidden Power of Caste, with Isabel Wilkerson and Yassmin Abdel-Magied · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, well, the thing about it is that the Cassus and the developed was not an overnight phenomenon. This was not, they didn't arrive on the shores the very first day in colonial, what would be Virginia, and then start saying we're going to create one. In fact, the issue was survival. And we know that the horrific history of the vanquishing of the indigenous people upon arrival that occurred over the decades and then decimated so many the numbers and then ultimately exiling the indigenous people from the caste system that emerged. I mean, ultimately forcing them off the land into what are now reservations. And so there's a very long, difficult history when it comes to that. But the caste system was one of developing over time as the British colonists began to first assure their own survival in a forbidding wilderness, which is what the country was.”
2020-08-21 · Intelligence Squared · The Hidden Power of Caste, with Isabel Wilkerson and Yassmin Abdel-Magied · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And actually debated these things as they were creating what would ultimately become the Nuremberg Law. So I had no idea this was wrenching to discover these interconnectedness between these two cultures to see what the connection was. But also, you know, there's hopefulness in the fact that obviously the United States and the Allies were also the reason why the Nazis were vanquished. So there's a very complicated, complicated history.”
2020-08-21 · Intelligence Squared · The Hidden Power of Caste, with Isabel Wilkerson and Yassmin Abdel-Magied · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Was they actually sent researchers to the United States to study the Jim Crow laws that I've just referred to? They sent researchers to study how the Jim Crow South and the country at large had managed to subjugate and subordinate African Americans. So they were looking at the anti-miscegenation laws, which would be in the, for example, in the Indian context, endogamy, laws that meant that each group could only intermarry with people such as themselves. So there were many, many states in the United States. The majority of the American states had at one time or another anti-miscegenation laws, meaning laws against intermarriage between the races. And also the Nazis came to research the ways that Jim Crow South had managed to segregate and keep the groups apart. And they were studying these things and they contemplated these things.”
2020-08-21 · Intelligence Squared · The Hidden Power of Caste, with Isabel Wilkerson and Yassmin Abdel-Magied · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I had no idea. And it wasn't even what I was looking for. I was looking for the ways in which Germany, as I indicated, had begun to atone with and remember and educate their population about what had happened during the war. So I was not looking for this in at all. I kind of stumbled across this much deeper interconnectedness that I hadn't realized. One of the things that I hadn't realized is that German eugenicists were in continuing dialogue with American eugenicists. And also I might add British eugenicists in the years leading up to the Third Reich that American eugenicists were writing bestsellers, that German eugenicists were consulting, but also that became bestsellers in Germany in the years leading up to the Third Reich. Now, I have to say and emphasize that the Nazis needed no one to teach them how to hate. They absolutely were not relying on, nor did they need, nor do they look to the United States to learn how to hate. But what they did”
2020-08-21 · Intelligence Squared · The Hidden Power of Caste, with Isabel Wilkerson and Yassmin Abdel-Magied · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Separate books, even the books, the school books for black children were kept separate from the schoolbooks of white children. That's how seriously the separation was retained, that the books could not even be in the stored in the same place.”
2020-08-21 · Intelligence Squared · The Hidden Power of Caste, with Isabel Wilkerson and Yassmin Abdel-Magied · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In the city of Chicago, there actually was a beach where there was an invisible dividing line between the whitewater and the black water. And a young man, a teenager was swimming and in the natural world, Lake Michigan, there was no line, and he happened to swim into the water that was seen as the white water. And he was stoned to death for having done so. And this is one out of many, many, many stories of the enforcement and surveillance of the boundaries, which in some ways becomes a hallmark of a caste system, if nothing else, is that the maintaining of the boundaries between the various ranked groups at all costs in order to maintain the hierarchy that has been created. And that was one out of many, many examples that I came across in the book and wrote about in order to describe this. There were separate ambulances for people, if you were white or if you were black.”
2020-08-21 · Intelligence Squared · The Hidden Power of Caste, with Isabel Wilkerson and Yassmin Abdel-Magied · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Formal effort to keep the people apart. There's this, you know, in the book I write about these eight pillars of caste that were the characteristics that I compiled and recognized and began to collate to try to better understand how a caste system, how a hierarchy develops, is justified and is maintained and enforced. And one of the central pillars is security and pollution, the idea that the dominant caste must be remained separate and pure lest it be polluted by those who are deemed beneath them, the subjugated caste. And so this runs through all of the caste systems that I was studying. And as an example in the United States, which might have been not as well known, is that there's an example, several examples about how the power of water was viewed as the element that where people had to be kept separate at all costs. And one example is one where in”
2020-08-21 · Intelligence Squared · The Hidden Power of Caste, with Isabel Wilkerson and Yassmin Abdel-Magied · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, let me say that when the warmth of other suns came out, one of the immediate responses that I started to get and continue to get when people read it is that they will say to me, I had no idea. This is not just people around the world, but this is people in the United States whose lives actually overlapped with the experiences that are described in that book, things that African Americans experienced up until the 1970s. I mean, and of course, into the current era, but more intensely formally into the 1970s where the laws are on the books. And just because the laws are in place does not offer blanket protection. But this is when it was formally accepted. And so many people will say that they had no idea because they really truly didn't know and perhaps could not have known because these are not necessarily commonly taught. Now they are, the book is out, and so people are more aware, but before they hadn't been. And so there were such a”
2020-08-21 · Intelligence Squared · The Hidden Power of Caste, with Isabel Wilkerson and Yassmin Abdel-Magied · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I am an American untouchable, and every Negro in the United States is an untouchable. So he made that recognition, he came to that realization, he himself, Dr. Martin Luther King, made the connection between India and the hierarchy and historic caste system of India and his experience in the United States. He recognized the connection that Dullits at the school that he was”
2020-08-21 · Intelligence Squared · The Hidden Power of Caste, with Isabel Wilkerson and Yassmin Abdel-Magied · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And when Martin Luther King heard that introduction it first landed a little oddly on his ear he was not accustomed to thinking of himself away. He at first did not take that very well. He actually was a little bit peeved actually to be seen or he thought to himself I've had dinner with the prime minister and I've been treated as a visiting dignitary. And then he thought about it. He thought about the very work that he was doing in the United States in which he was advocating for, in fact, leading the effort for liberation and equality of 20 million black people in the United States. He thought about how at that very moment the majority of black people were not permitted to vote. A majority of black people were not permitted to get access to public facilities at that very moment and that their protests were being met with tremendous resistance and in fact violence. The police dogs and the sheriff's sheriff's hoses and that sort of thing. And so he thought about it and he said yes, I am.”
2020-08-21 · Intelligence Squared · The Hidden Power of Caste, with Isabel Wilkerson and Yassmin Abdel-Magied · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A great story you're making reference to, thank you for bringing that up. In that case, in 1959, Martin Luther King made a historic visit to India, his first trip there. Of course, he had been inspired by the Indian independence movement and the nonviolent protest approach that Mohandas K. Gandhi had taken. And so he wanted to see India for himself. He was greeted and received as a visiting dignitary. And on arrival, he was recognized on the street. But during his trip, he made a trip to a Dalit school, a school that was attended by children who were then known as untouchables. Upon arrival, the principal there introduced him to the students and he said, young people, I would like to introduce you to a fellow untouchable from America. And the principal was very excited to make this connection, and that's how he introduced Dr. Martin Luther King.”
2020-08-21 · Intelligence Squared · The Hidden Power of Caste, with Isabel Wilkerson and Yassmin Abdel-Magied · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“the Confederate general, and they were resisting it and protesting it. And in their protests, the people were carrying symbols of the Confederacy, which was the part of the South that was breaking from the rest of the United States during the Civil War, and they were also bringing in the symbolism of Nazi Germany, both flags, both symbols were being brought together by the protesters there. And it was that protest that also led to the tragic, shocking death of a white counter protester, a peace protester, a horrific way in that event. And so that brought me to the idea of looking at Germany, looking at Germany to try to understand how had they reckoned with their history, how had they atoned or begun the work of atoning for what they had gone through during World War II? And all of that came together. So I ended up focusing in on those two societies.”
2020-08-21 · Intelligence Squared · The Hidden Power of Caste, with Isabel Wilkerson and Yassmin Abdel-Magied · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Really need to write the sonata book that I had planned initially to write, but it's something that I felt called to do. I then realized that I was going to be writing about something so much more than just the United States. I needed to understand the origins of our discontents, which is a term that I use also for the book in the United States. And so, of course, that meant going to try to understand the best known, most easily recognizable caste system in the world, which would be India. And that was one of the first places that I knew I wanted to look and needed to research. But I also, you know, then in the midst of all of this, Charlottesville happened, and Charlottesville, Virginia, as perhaps people know, I think it became a global awareness story, is that that was where protesters were resisting and protesting the potential removal of a Confederate symbol, meaning the statue of Robert.”
2020-08-21 · Intelligence Squared · The Hidden Power of Caste, with Isabel Wilkerson and Yassmin Abdel-Magied · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In courtrooms throughout the south there was actually a black Bible and an altogether separate white Bible for people to swear to tell the truth on in court. That means the very word of God, the sacred text could not be touched by hands of different races. And so as a result of that and also as a result of the work that had been done by those that preceded me, the anthropologists and sociologists who had gone to the Jim Crow South while this was in action in the 1930s and 40s, and they all emerged from their research with the word caste. So the word caste had been applied to the Jim Crow South in the United States many decades before I began the warmth of the suns. And my own research led me to that word. So the word racism does not appear in the warmth of other suns. I use the word caste and caste system. And so in this, you know, once I realized that this was a book, this second book was a book that I was going to”
2020-08-21 · Intelligence Squared · The Hidden Power of Caste, with Isabel Wilkerson and Yassmin Abdel-Magied · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, you know, I had written a book the previous book, my first book was The Warmth of Other Suns, and it was about the outmigration of six million African Americans from the Jim Crow South to the rest of the United States, essentially a redistribution of an entire people that helped to create the cities that we know of, you know, Chicago and Cleveland and Los Angeles and New York were all changed as a result of this great migration, which went on for much of the 20th century. And so in writing about that, I ended up having to spend a tremendous amount of time in an aspect of American history that a lot of people, even Americans are not as familiar with. In other words, I was having to describe the world that they were defecting from, the world that they were fleeing. And that was a world that was so restricted and so hierarchical that it was actually against the law for a black person and a white person to merely play checkers together, that this was a world in which”
2020-08-21 · Intelligence Squared · The Hidden Power of Caste, with Isabel Wilkerson and Yassmin Abdel-Magied · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One child was found to be crying and the teacher asked what it was that had happened. He said, well, someone bullied. Human characteristic that should be neutral was instantaneously turned into something that was a negative, that was a slur even, instantaneously. And this is when you think about how quickly the children were able to pick up on the meaning of caste in this regard, the meaning of a hierarchy in this regard. You can see and begin to spread that out to begin to imagine how this affects people in entire societies over generations.”
2020-08-21 · Intelligence Squared · The Hidden Power of Caste, with Isabel Wilkerson and Yassmin Abdel-Magied · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Open their books to a particular page in their textbook. And one little girl took a little bit longer to find her page. And as she was looking for the page, someone said, you know, Lori, why can't you find the page? And another little boy in the classroom said, she's a brown-eyed. She's a brown-eyed, and that explains why. And remember, they had only minutes before thought of themselves as exactly the same once that marker, once that signifier was then turned into meaning and a negative meaning for one and a positive meaning for other, the students instantly recognized that and a caste system formed. And then, you know, it continued in which you could see the after effects of this arbitrary ranking, that the children for the rest of the day, the children who had been told that they were inferior, did not do as well in the classroom exercises, did not do as well in tests. And then one little...”
2020-08-21 · Intelligence Squared · The Hidden Power of Caste, with Isabel Wilkerson and Yassmin Abdel-Magied · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so that means that the brown-eyed students here in our class will no longer be able to get extra helpings in the cafeteria at lunchtime. They will not be able to stay out as long in the playground. It's the blue-eyed children, she said, who are intelligent and they are reliable. They don't steal. They are good people, and therefore they will get to have additional helpings at lunchtime. They will be able to stay out on the playground even longer. And it's very important to note that she said that the brown-eyed children will not be able to play with the blue-eyed children, that you cannot play with one another, and the brown-eyed children have to come in early. And so she then told them these were the new rules of how they were to interact. Now, remember, these children had known each other all of their lives, and they all, you know, looked similar in many other respects except for the color of their eyes. So she then told the children to now turn to their books.”
2020-08-21 · Intelligence Squared · The Hidden Power of Caste, with Isabel Wilkerson and Yassmin Abdel-Magied · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A third grade teacher in the Midwest and part of the United States and Iowa, she decided that she would do an experiment which was ultimately an experiment in hierarchy. What she did was she took the students third graders, so eight and eight and nine years old, and all of the students, because of where it was in the United States, it was an all-white classroom, predominantly white town in Iowa. And so she took the students and she decided that day that she was going to take an arbitrary physical trait and use that as a way to learn and to instruct the children on how artificial all of this is. So what she did was she chose, she said to the students, those of you who have brown eyes, students, children who have brown eyes are inferior. If you have brown eyes, brown-eyed children, brown-eyed people are not as smart. They are lazy. They don't work as hard. They're not as...”
2020-08-21 · Intelligence Squared · The Hidden Power of Caste, with Isabel Wilkerson and Yassmin Abdel-Magied · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source