Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Isabel Wilkerson provided a virtual consideration of the disfiguring aspects of racism during a recent presentation in Fairfield University”™s Open Visions Forum”™s “Women and Leadership” series, sponsored by Bank of America.
In her virtual lecture titled “Caste: Examining Race, Culture, and Consequences,” Wilkerson expressed her view of the U.S. as a nation that hides from its dark history of social hierarchy ”” a caste system ”” which it continues to obfuscate rather than tackle through meaningful systemic changes.
Wilkerson, who first explored this thesis in her 2020 book “Caste: The Origins of Our Discontent,” defined the ancient concept of caste as “an artificial, arbitrary, graded ranking of human value in a society ”” any number of arbitrary metrics could be used to rank people in a caste system: ethnicity, religion, language, place of origin.”
As the concept of caste related to the formation of the U.S., Wilkerson noted, “What the colonists did then was that they took otherwise neutral physical characteristics and used them to assign people to an inherited role in a hierarchy before there was even a United States of America. Thus, slavery became the foundation of a hierarchy built on greed and exploitation, was succeeded by Jim Crow and manifest to the current day.”
Wilkerson believed that the concept of caste, while often seen in an Indian or European context, is appropriate given the U.S. history of slavery and colonialism and the subsequent Jim Crow era that followed the Civil War. In the current day, Wilkerson believed that the concept of caste is still applicable, which she highlighted in how authorities reacted to events over the past two years.
The first example she gave was that of George Floyd, who, it was presumed at the time of his apprehension by Minneapolis police officers, had supposedly tried to pass a counterfeit $20 bill. Floyd was later choked to death by one of the police officers, though Wilkerson observed, “This was an infraction that we learned at the trial of his assailant was not even an arrestable offense.”
Wilkerson then cited the attack by insurrectionists on the U.S. Capitol who claimed an alleged illegitimacy of the 2020 election results.
“We saw footage that showed the mob of insurrectionists actually attacking police officers and we know that half a dozen officers died as a result of that rampage,” she stated. “But at the end of that day, we saw something that was revealing about the ways in which caste and hierarchy work in our country. We saw those same people walk down the steps of the Capitol with their lives, something that was denied George Floyd.”
The presentation then shifted gears to a Q&A format between Alva J. Carter-Hasan, senior vice president and senior trust officer at Bank of America, and Nessa Englebright, director and market executive of the Merrill Lynch division of Bank of America, who were joined by Fairfield University”™s Richard Greenwald, dean of the College of Arts & Sciences.
Carter-Hasan asked Wilkerson how she differentiated between class and caste. Wilkerson answered that “caste is like the bones, race is the skin and then class, another term that we often think of as dividing people, would be the clothing, the education, the accents, the things that we can do and change about ourselves.”
Carter-Hasan also asked about how one may approach teaching such topics to a young person without overly distressing them, such as her own preteen son. Wilkerson recommended to Carter-Hasan and other parents considering teaching their children topics such as race relations to do so as soon as possible.
“If parents do not prepare their children,” Wilkerson said, “the world will prepare them, the world will intrude, the world will tell them where they quote-unquote, ”˜are assigned”™ in our society.”
Englebright asked Wilkerson, “How do you think we continue to uplift minorities, uplift women in particular, and really just help this idea of providing equality to all?” Wilkerson responded that society may help by first examining why words like “minority” are used in the first place, and perhaps substituting such terms with ones like “marginalized.”
“What can we do about language to help to, even in that very small ”” seemingly small ”” way, move ourselves to a more enlightened and transcendent way of recognizing what all of us as members of this species have in common?” Wilkerson asked rhetorically.
Englebright next brought up a passage from Wilkerson”™s 2020 book in which she characterized the Obama presidency as not being a turning point for the country, adding, “What would be that turning point?”
“I think that the true turning point would not be one election but would be a massive change at every level of our society,” Wilkerson replied. “Massive change in education, massive change in the criminal justice system, massive change and overhaul of our health care system.”
