Dear friends,

This week’s On Being is a rich, warm, new conversation with Isabel Wilkerson, who I first interviewed in 2016. Across the years that followed, we kept talking, and she became a dear friend. What I’ve loved most about Isabel from the very beginning is the fierce heart for humanity that resides right alongside her brilliant journalistic and literary skill: her insistence that we as a species can rise to something better. But more: her confidence that we carry a capacity for that something more readily than we know.

She says to me, in this big, public conversation we had in Seattle about her recent book, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents: “I think we all know in our bones that something's not right. We all know that things are harder than they have to be.” That is quite a statement — inviting equal parts common sense, relief, and aspirational reach that do not often enter our fraught public sphere of grappling with race.

Caste, as Isabel teaches us, is communal infrastructure that organically arises in human societies, though far more malignantly in some times and places. It operates around deep, unreflected assumptions of human value — who matters more, and who matters less. She wonderfully employs metaphors to awaken our understanding and the agency of our imaginations. That caste works more like a pathogen, for example, than a belief system. That it works more like the unthinking, automatic grammar of our sentences than our choices of words. In the American context, she says, race is the skin, but "caste is the bones."

The fascinating thing is that this shift away from centering race as a focus of analysis actually helps us understand why, in the American context, race and racism continue to shape-shift and regenerate. Beginning to see caste gives us fresh eyes and hearts for imagining where to begin, and how to persist, in order finally to transform that.

One of the revelations (to all but a few scholars) of the Caste book is the shocking admiration Adolph Hitler had for the “American ‘knack for maintaining an air of robust innocence in the wake of mass death.’” Isabel told me when she was planning to head to Berlin for this research, and some of the people I knew long ago in that place helped her there. Last summer, she joined me in Berlin for a few days, with our now mutual friends. We don’t end up talking about that trip in this week’s episode, but I think that the extended conversation and friendship between us flows into the places of the heart we were able to traverse in Seattle.