Isabel Wilkerson’s recent work may have transformed her from a successful journalist and non-fiction author into a global superstar, but she also sees herself as something of a building inspector. “We in the Western world are like people who inherited an old house,” she tells me when we meet to talk about Caste: The Lies That Divide Us, which, since its publication last summer, has become a phenomenon, discussed passionately on campuses and at dinner parties around the globe, while garnering a host of famous fans. “We did not build the uneven pillars and joists and beams, but we have inherited it. Whatever is wrong with it, is up to us now.”
We are speaking over Zoom – she from a bright room in her house in America, framed by shelves of books and earthy green pottery. One silver lining of this new world, where almost all meetings take place on screen, is that I am able to feel like I’m with her there, while actually being in Helsinki.
My location is, in fact, a topic to which Wilkerson returns again and again. In 2019, Sanna Marin was just 34 when she was sworn in as Finland’s prime minister, making her, at the time, the world’s youngest state leader. Together with Jacinda Ardern, 40, prime minister of New Zealand, they have the distinction of leading countries that have dealt with the Covid crisis better than many others. Wilkerson thinks about this, it turns out, a lot.
“One hundred years ago, Marin and Ardern very likely would not have been in those positions. And this is the way that caste hierarchies, these fixed assumptions of human value, hold the entire species back,” Wilkerson explains, “because people are not permitted to rise on the basis of their true abilities.”
This may sound self-evident, but such is Wilkerson’s gift as a writer that she leaves you looking at the world differently. In Caste, she takes readers on a journey that drives home in devastating ways how our arbitrary systems of dividing societies – whether the hierarchies of India’s caste system or Nazi Germany – have, as she puts it, retarded the progress of our entire species.
Through the language of “caste”, Wilkerson believes she can find “the origins and evolution of classifying and elevating one group of people over another”. In so doing, she illuminates the structural and entrenched system which created, for centuries, a legal architecture to keep African Americans in a subordinate position, while artificially propping up whites.
When it was published last August, Caste became an overnight sensation. The book has been described by The New York Times as “an instant American classic”, and named one of the best books of the year by a host of titles including The Washington Post, Time and Publishers Weekly. Award-winning director Ava DuVernay is adapting it into a film.
It has found itself on the bedside tables of celebrities from Mariah Carey to Barack Obama. Oprah Winfrey even went so far as to send a copy of Caste to 500 of America’s most influential governors, mayors, CEOs and college professors. This book, Winfrey exclaimed, “might well save us”.
Although only in her late fifties, and appearing younger, Wilkerson comes across as someone with old-fashioned manners and charm. Despite her friendliness and warmth, it feels inappropriate to address her by her first name – it is always Ms Wilkerson. And although our appointment lands early on a Saturday morning in her time zone, she is impeccably dressed, her long hair blow-dried to perfection, her smooth complexion beautifully made up.
It is easy to see why Wilkerson is, as she describes herself, someone “interested in the origins of things”. As a Black woman excelling in her field, she has broken many barriers. A New York Times writer for many years, she became the first African-American woman to win a Pulitzer Prize in journalism, for pieces about the Great Flood of 1993, and a profile of a 10-year-old boy from the South Side that she wrote while the paper’s Chicago bureau chief in the mid-1990s. She has lectured on narrative non-fiction at the Nieman Foundation at Harvard University and has taught at Princeton, Emory and Boston universities.
Her first book, The Warmth of Other Suns, tells the story of the Great Migration – the movement of six million African Americans from southern to northern states – through the lives of three people. Like much of her work, it was powered in no small way by her life story. Wilkerson’s mother grew up under Jim Crow laws in a small town in Georgia and moved north for university, where she met Wilkerson’s father. Her parents, she has written, “made me who I am and inspired The Warmth of Other Suns”. The book, published in 2010, was voted one of The New York Times’s best non-fiction works of all time, and Wilkerson was awarded the 2015 National Humanities Medal by Barack Obama “for championing the stories of an unsung history”. It had taken her 15 years to write.
Any reader of Wilkerson quickly understands why her work takes time – its meticulous scholarship is palpable. (She interviewed some 1,200 descendants of the Great Migration for The Warmth of Other Suns, including members of her own family.) “They have the gestational time frame of an elephant,” she says of her books, laughing. “So much research goes into these works. And because it’s narrative non-fiction, there’s also scene-setting and character development, even if it’s just a singular example that I’m giving. So, it takes a very long time to do this kind of work.” Her books, then, are not written in response to the news cycle. Yet, the pain that inspired the Black Lives Matter movement – which reached new levels of prominence in 2020 – is baked into her motivation.
“It was the Trayvon Martin killing that first got me to recognise that an ongoing point of inquiry like this was needed,” Wilkerson explains, of the death of the Black schoolboy in 2012, at the hands of white neighbourhood watch captain George Zimmerman. “Then there was Eric Garner, Tamir Rice, Jonathan Crawford, so many people… That’s what I would consider to be the first of a wave of attacks on young Black men that galvanised the nation’s attention and the world’s attention.
“This needed more unpacking,” Wilkerson continues. “I wrote an op-ed in The New York Times, describing this as a continuation of caste… that’s where I started to speak out more directly about caste as a language for better understanding what we were seeing in the US at that time.”
One of the most revolutionary aspects of Wilkerson’s book is the way in which she compares the centuries-old Indian caste system with the one invented to exploit and control Black Americans. Wilkerson described Indian scholar BR Ambedkar – the champion for the rights of the lowest caste, the Dalits, once known as “untouchables” – as “India’s Martin Luther King Jr”. In so doing, she triggered a bout of soul-searching in the Indian media, which questioned why it took an African American to bring this comparison to such widespread attention.
“Race is actually only 400 or 500 years old, it’s a fairly new concept in human history,” Wilkerson explains. “Caste is many thousands of years old… it allows us to see yet another dimension of the inequalities that were built into the structure, from the very beginning.”
Wilkerson’s comparison of caste in America with the anti-Semitism of Nazi Germany offers a sometimes shocking clarity. She reveals evidence, for example, that the Nazis looked at the legal architecture of the Jim Crow South for inspiration, only to reject aspects of the American system as too extreme. “The Nazis actually sent researchers to the United States to study anti-miscegenation laws, that forbade people to marry across racial lines,” Wilkerson says. “Forty-one of the American states, at some time or another, had laws against intermarriage across racial lines. Those prohibitions lasted from the 17th century until 1967.”
In fact, “Alabama did not get around to passing a referendum on interracial marriage until the year 2000,” she continues. “And 40 per cent of the voters wanted to keep the law.” In short, this is a history that could barely be more recent.
“Think about those cotton and tobacco fields, and rice and sugar plantations,” Wilkerson suggests, referring to the experience of African-American enslavement. “You realise that there were poets and novelists and opera singers and jazz musicians, playwrights… who were consigned for hundreds of years, in this country alone, to the very bottom.
“Extend that to other parts of the world, where colonisation and other forms of caste hierarchies have held entire populations in a fixed place,” she says, “and you think about what was lost to those individuals.”
The consequences of organising society along the erratic, irresponsible lines of caste, Wilkerson believes, are impossible to quantify. “Think about what humanity has lost. If those people had been permitted to rise and to develop their innate talents, who’s to say where we could be as a species? I mean, we might have already found the cures for cancer.”
The optimism embodied in Wilkerson’s approach, in spite of the troubling truths it reveals, is all the more remarkable given the personal tragedies she has endured in recent years. Still living in the American South, she lost her mother, who died in 2016, and her husband, who passed away unexpectedly a year earlier after a period of illness. Wilkerson called those losses, “an incomprehensible vanishing of the two people, after my father’s death, that I had loved most in this world”.
Yet, when you engage with the beauty of her storytelling, it is Wilkerson’s lightness of spirit that helps explain the book’s stunning success. She, however, seems too embedded in the integrity of her work to take much time to revel in glory. “When you’re working on something, really deep into the research, it’s very singular, somewhat isolating work,” she smiles. “You don’t know what will happen when it gets out there, how people will respond to it. You hope that you will find similar people, like-minded souls, open-minded spirits, who will appreciate it for what it is. That’s all you can hope for.”
In addition to Wilkerson’s humility, the Covid period has created an unavoidable distance between the author and her readers, which she also laments. “It’s so hard to truly be in touch with the full response to the book, because normally, you know, I’d be at libraries, giving talks, signing books, getting a chance to actually feel and hear and engage with people personally.” The pandemic has meant that she hasn’t been able to visually appreciate the book’s omnipresence. “I have to say,” Wilkerson confesses, “I’ve not even seen it at a bookstore.”
Wilkerson is warm, fluent and full of passion for her work, which makes the strange circumstances of her book’s release all the more poignant. She comes across as someone driven by the ambition to reach people, and in reaching them, change them.
“Tolstoy says that art is the transfer of emotion from one person to another,” she tells me. “I love that definition of art, I love it so much. Because that means that something that you produce, that you create, that somehow finds a way to connect to another person – that is art.”
Ultimately, Wilkerson’s message is one of hope. “I wouldn’t have written the book if I did not have some hopefulness for the future,” she says. “I am not making an argument in this book. This book is a prayer. A prayer for this country, a prayer for humanity and a prayer for the planet.”
Caste by Isabel Wilkerson is out now.
