“Caste is like the wind. You may not be able to see it, but it’s a quietly destructive force”
Ellie Cawthorne: Your new book argues that the history of the United States is best understood if we view it as a caste system – with many traits in common with other caste systems, most notably India and Nazi Germany. How do you define caste, and why do you think that it’s a useful way of describing the divisions that have run through American society?
Isabel Wilkerson: I define caste as an arbitrary artificial hierarchy. In the American context, this hierarchy has meant that people’s life chances and what they are permitted to do have been related to and dependent upon what they look like.
It’s also important to say that I distinguish caste from race. While caste is a concept that’s thousands of years old, race is fairly new in human history. It only really dates back to the era of the transatlantic slave trade, when it grew out of the desire to categorise people in order to build the ‘New World’. When it came to trying to build this New World, there was an imperative to find a way of saying that one group was better than the other, and the most readily available way of distinguishing one entire group of people from another was skin colour. That was the beginning of the American caste system, in which race was the signal or cue that determined where people would fit into the hierarchy.
How did this caste system take root in North America?
When Europeans first
