Isabel Wilkerson

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[3] Welcome, welcome, welcome to armchair expert.

[4] I'm Dan Shepard.

[5] I'm joined by miniaturist, mousomis.

[6] Maximus, Mousamist.

[7] Well, you're all things.

[8] You're maximus, minimus, and middlemiss.

[9] And mightiest.

[10] Is middlemiss the word?

[11] Yeah.

[12] It's rare that we record the intro immediately after we've recorded the gas.

[13] I kind of like it.

[14] I do too because I'm so passionate about her right now.

[15] And when we hung up with her, you and I just geeked out on how awesome she was.

[16] Yes, she's phenomenal.

[17] Her name is Isabel Wilkerson.

[18] Isabel is an American journalist and the author of The Warmth of Other Suns, The Epic Story of America's Great Migration, and her new book, which is phenomenal, cast The Origins of Our Discontent.

[19] she was the first African -American woman to win the Pulitzer Prize in journalism.

[20] Wow, I didn't know that.

[21] You didn't know that when we were talking to or you didn't know that?

[22] No, I'm glad I didn't know that.

[23] I would have felt unifially and threatened.

[24] I didn't even mention that she also taught at Princeton.

[25] She lectured at Northwestern.

[26] That would have also had you on edge, right?

[27] Oh, my God, big time.

[28] Too much.

[29] You wouldn't have been able to keep you cool.

[30] I wouldn't have.

[31] But good news, Armcherry's.

[32] She kept her cool because she didn't know any of that shit.

[33] Because I'm stupid.

[34] Please enjoy Isabel Wilkerson.

[35] Now we get to do our favorite thing.

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[39] Now, I love this because you can be comfy and professed.

[40] Oh, what a dream.

[41] Rarely did those two things meet?

[42] Almost never.

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[56] He's an upsharexper.

[57] He's an option to be.

[58] All right, here we go.

[59] People are super interested in Cass.

[60] How does the reaction from Cass differ from the warmth of other suns.

[61] Is it comparable or is this seem different?

[62] It's obviously a different context now from 10 years ago.

[63] Yeah, that's for sure.

[64] I would say COVID -19 changes everything.

[65] Obviously, I would be out on the road and instead, you know, I'm just in one spot.

[66] I'd normally be out meeting with lots of people and, you know, there's that.

[67] Of course, in the larger scheme of things, This is nothing compared to the people who are suffering from it.

[68] So I don't want to even compare when it comes to that.

[69] It's also 2010.

[70] They're not mass BLM demonstrations.

[71] The topic of systemic racism is not every third interview.

[72] So I just imagine the timing of this is much different.

[73] Oh, for sure.

[74] It feels like it was a different country.

[75] It was a quiet time by comparison.

[76] It was before Trayvon Martin.

[77] It was before Tamir Rice and Eric Garner.

[78] Before Black Lives Matter, before Me Too, before Ahmaud Arbery and George Floyd.

[79] I mean, it's before so many things.

[80] That was 2010.

[81] Right, that was 2010.

[82] It's kind of mind -blowing.

[83] What a difference.

[84] A decade makes.

[85] Yeah, it is.

[86] Yeah.

[87] It should go without saying, but maybe it doesn't.

[88] I would imagine, how do I say this?

[89] All that was happening, it's not like we've gotten more racist as a society in the last 10 years.

[90] It's just we were not seeing it as much.

[91] and we weren't aware of it as much.

[92] You know, we're about to elect Barack Obama, so I think there was some optimism and stuff.

[93] But it was all still there, right?

[94] Because this is what your book explores.

[95] The infrastructure, the system was fully built.

[96] We just weren't paying attention to it.

[97] Well, so 2010 was the middle of Barack Obama's first term.

[98] 2010, he was elected in 2008.

[99] And it was kind of like the lull, but the beginnings of the pushback that he was experiencing as well.

[100] Oh, right, what the birther movement was happening around then?

[101] Yes.

[102] Yeah, the tea party, all of that was bubbling forth.

[103] So it was this calm, but a storm was brewing.

[104] Yes.

[105] That was the era.

[106] Yeah.

[107] Yeah, I think for all of us, maybe in my bubble, we were all feeling very optimistic, and this is all going in the right direction.

[108] I think it was also then terrifying for people who are afraid of that future.

[109] But maybe they weren't vocal or we couldn't hear them at that time.

[110] I think they were operating at the margins when you think about the tea party and the birth movement.

[111] And a lot of people might not have been taking them that seriously because it seemed to be at the margins.

[112] But it ended up being far more significant a part of the country than people might have realized at the time.

[113] Yeah.

[114] And we now know.

[115] So I just have a couple of quick questions because I have not ever gotten to speak to you.

[116] And this is a great honor.

[117] But the warmth of other sons, which was your book from 2010, we keep referencing, the epic story of America's Great Migration.

[118] This is just personal stuff I'm interested.

[119] You researched that book for 15 years, and I cannot imagine me harnessing drive for 15 years.

[120] I want to say, like, year 10, if I had even made it there, I'd be like, I'm just never going to finish this thing.

[121] How did you keep your commitment to, you know, finishing that?

[122] You interviewed a thousand people?

[123] Yeah, the people I interviewed was the casting call.

[124] You know, I was auditioning people for the role of being a protagonist in this book.

[125] So that was part of that.

[126] And that took like a year and a half just to narrow it down.

[127] They had to be the people who would best represent the story I was trying to tell so that it took a long time, had a chance to hear lots and lots of stories.

[128] You might say these were like my tour guides through the era that I was writing about.

[129] I often say it took so long to finish the book 15 years that I'd say that if it was a human being in high school and dating, that's how long it took me to finish this book.

[130] Yeah, it'd be about to borrow your car to go somewhere.

[131] Exactly.

[132] With the learners permit.

[133] But that book looked at three geographical routes that African Americans took out of the south to the north.

[134] And I have a selfish curiosity being from Detroit, what drove that migration?

[135] Were those people seeking auto worker jobs or what happened there?

[136] The migration began during work.

[137] World War I. And that was when the North had a labor shortage because the North had been depending upon cheap labor from Europe.

[138] And with Europe at war, then that meant that the North couldn't rely on it because immigration came to virtual halt.

[139] So they started to look for a cheap labor because the war effort meant that there was a great need for labor, munitions, factories, and that sort of thing.

[140] So they actually went to look for cheap labor, cheapest in the land, which would be African Americans in the South, many of whom were working for the right to live on the land that they were farming.

[141] They were not even being paid.

[142] Like sharecroppers?

[143] They were right for recruitment.

[144] Their sharecroppers, exactly.

[145] Yeah.

[146] So that's how it started.

[147] And then once the people there who'd always wanted to escape, I mean, they'd been wanting to escape for decades, but they didn't have that window of opportunity where they could see that there could be a chance to actually make a life for themselves.

[148] So the first people who arrived actually in large numbers were recruited from the north.

[149] In the succeeding generations, we can see that, the North wanted the labor, but did not necessarily want the people.

[150] Oh, yeah.

[151] The history of Detroit, as I know it, is that we had a huge influx, and that's when the birth of the suburbs started.

[152] Exactly.

[153] People started a mass migration out of Detroit.

[154] And we can also see that with migration from south of the Rio Grande, where the labor is actually needed.

[155] Yeah.

[156] But the people, you know, that becomes an issue.

[157] So that's sort of an enduring issue when it comes to migration in general.

[158] But, no, the migration unfolded in three beautifully predictable streams, and Detroit was in the Midwest stream.

[159] So the East Coast stream was people from Florida, Georgia, the Carolinas, and Virginia up to Washington, D .C. and Baltimore, Philadelphia, New York, and on up.

[160] And I'd imagine that's your own family history was a part of that migration?

[161] Yes, that's my family's migration stream.

[162] Then there was a middle stream, which was people from Alabama, Tennessee, Arkansas, primarily.

[163] to get to Detroit and Cleveland and Chicago and Minneapolis, the whole Midwest.

[164] Then there was the West Coast Stream, which carried people from Louisiana and Texas out to California.

[165] Even to this day, if you were to go to Detroit or Cleveland and you were to meet or talk to an African American long enough, you would very likely find that their family came from Alabama or Arkansas or Tennessee and primarily Alabama.

[166] My whole side of my family came from rural Kentucky, like poverty -stricken Kentucky in search of a similar thing and found themselves in a community with all Southern Baptists.

[167] It's kind of interesting how people will follow those same streams.

[168] And I think it's almost as if people independent of one another begin to hear that there's this opportunity.

[169] There's this breakthrough that they then all jump on and they all create this flood of people like these rivers are.

[170] people and then they carry the culture with them and that's what creates these new cities.

[171] I mean, the cities are essentially the merger of all these different people coming together and not always coming together, sometimes pit it against one another, unfortunately.

[172] Well, that's what I was going to say, and that's something I hope we can talk at length at later, but I want to set up cast, which is your new book, the origins of our discontent.

[173] And I think it would be first helpful to just talk about cast as a concept really quick because I think a lot of us grew up in elementary school learning that India has a caste system and that way you were born into a strata and you are not allowed to transcend that.

[174] I think even now we're aware that in China, if you're born in certain areas of China, you are expected to stay in that area and you need something very specific to allow you to travel to a city and this is being monitored.

[175] So I think we have a notion of caste that's maybe almost medieval in origin and we think that's one thing.

[176] and then we think we don't have anything resembling that.

[177] And through your work and upon closer inspection, you see all the markers of a cast system here.

[178] Is that an accurate summation?

[179] Oh, yeah, absolutely.

[180] In fact, I started using the word cast in the warmth of the suns.

[181] I mean, that's how I came to be aware of that word.

[182] I was tasked with having to make that era come alive for the reader, for the audience.

[183] And in doing so, you know, I was hearing all the stories, as I mentioned before, in that 15 years period of time.

[184] And I became aware of aspects of that era that we don't hear about a lot.

[185] In fact, there are no references to water fountains and restrooms in the book because that was, you know, first of all, every second graders learns that in February.

[186] So why would I spend 15 years to tell you what a second grader can tell you in March?

[187] So no, I don't make mention of those.

[188] But I do talk about the other aspects of what life was like for really anybody in that world.

[189] So in Alabama, where many African Americans who ended up in Detroit were from, it was against law for a black person and a white person merely to play checkers in Birmingham.

[190] You could go to jail if you were caught playing checkers with a person of a different race.

[191] And that shows you the level of specificity and the investment in keeping people apart and keeping these boundaries fixed and secure.

[192] Right.

[193] I mean, someone had to have seen a black person and a white person playing checkers together in some town square or something and maybe the wrong person was winning or they were having too good of a time and they took the time to write that down as a law.

[194] I mean, checkers.

[195] Yeah, yeah.

[196] Checkers.

[197] Very, very lethal game as I understand it could lead to a revolution for sure.

[198] Clearly, clearly.

[199] Especially if you get into double checkers or King's Corner, whoo, atomic bomb.

[200] You know, the entire foundation of Southern civilization wasn't.

[201] It was that vulnerable.

[202] It was that vulnerable.

[203] And you describe cast as, in the simplest term, an arbitrary grading or ranking of human value in a society, right?

[204] This assumes that we're not all born of equal value and that there are going to be things we can distinguish why people should or shouldn't have more or less value than others.

[205] And then there's many, many outcomes of that, right?

[206] I'll let you list them, but I heard you list a tremendous amount of things that someone might not think of right away when you're not in the right.

[207] cast.

[208] Well, when you have an artificial graded ranking of human value, then that assigns certain responses.

[209] Like, we have been trained.

[210] We've been programmed to have a certain response when we see a person who looks a certain way.

[211] I mean, if you imagine what the person in a C -suite of a corporation CEO looks like with a first image that comes in mind or someone who would be in that same corporation's mail room or janitorial staff yeah exactly so you can start to a man i mean those are the roles that have been in place for longer than they have not been in place in other words for most of our country's history i immediately saw a bald slightly overweight white male when you said ceo okay so the bald i might not necessarily like that could go either way but yeah okay i you know And again, as you say, we inherit this, right?

[212] I didn't go out and decide to create an icon for a CEO, but somehow that's what I see.

[213] I didn't pick that.

[214] No, that's actually what I mean by the programming.

[215] I mean, none of us chose to have this imagery be at the forefront just beneath the surface of the subconscious.

[216] I mean, it's just there.

[217] We've inherited it from commercials and billboards and magazine covers and movies.

[218] Movies.

[219] who is the first person to die in a movie is like...

[220] Oh, yeah, yeah.

[221] Birth of a Nation, is that what you're referencing?

[222] Yeah, well, I'm just meaning like even in Alien or something.

[223] I mean, like...

[224] Oh, sure.

[225] In a lot of movies.

[226] But if people don't know the history of cinema, Birth of a Nation is one of the very first movies people could go see.

[227] And there are clan members riding horses.

[228] So, I mean, it starts at the inception.

[229] Just think about that this seminal cultural contribution that the country has made that we all depend upon film itself and that the very first film was about the clan and about the uprising of white people that I would define as dominant cast asserting their dominance after the Civil War.

[230] That was the first film.

[231] And I got to say, I've been on a path of having been incredibly ignorant and then reading certain biographies that I was interested in the person that I accidentally am picking up all this context.

[232] And I'll just say, you kind of grow up learning.

[233] We had this terrible history of slavery.

[234] But then this guy came along, Abraham Lincoln.

[235] He abolished that.

[236] And we're kind of good.

[237] And then, well, then we realized that some civil rights were at issue.

[238] But 60s, Martin Luther King solved that.

[239] So you kind of think all those things are over.

[240] Or at least I did.

[241] You think it's something that were post.

[242] And then I read Grant's biography and learn about reconstruction and learn that black voters are being murdered.

[243] at polls.

[244] And I said, oh, okay, I guess it didn't end in 1868.

[245] And it didn't end here.

[246] And it's still not ended.

[247] I often will have to remind people of the civil rights legislation of the 60s, the 1860s.

[248] There's civil rights legislation called Civil Rights Acts of the 1860s and early 1870s.

[249] That's how long this effort has been to try to create a fairer society.

[250] We had that legislation and then made this tremendous regression after the civil rights movement of the 1860s and then had nearly 100 years of formal Jim Crow segregation, which is what I'm calling a caste system because of the hierarchy and the investment in keeping people in a fixed place.

[251] And then we had the civil rights legislation of the 1960s, so a century apart.

[252] And now we're living in the aftermath of that.

[253] When you look at the long arc of American history, you can see these larger patterns of an effort to try to move toward a just, fairer society with this regression that occurs afterward.

[254] Yeah.

[255] It may not be repeating, but it's certainly got some parallels.

[256] Well, you make a great metaphor at the beginning of the book about something that happened in Russia, which is these, I assume, reindeer carcasses or some kind of carcasses that had been infected with anthrax.

[257] come to the surface because of some geological event and it releases anthrax and now it's here again.

[258] It didn't go away.

[259] It was just sitting there waiting to be brought back to life, right?

[260] And that's kind of this cycle we're in.

[261] It gets brought back to life and comes out of the earth.

[262] Thank you for mentioning that.

[263] That introduction, that opening was, you know, a lot of research went into being able to tell that.

[264] But yeah, I remember first hearing it, it was a side story, like just a little snippet on the news back in the summer of 2016.

[265] and as soon as I heard it, I just realized that is a parable right there for our times.

[266] It's a parable.

[267] So it's in the Siberian tundra.

[268] They had this massive heat wave and it melted the permafrost.

[269] I mean, it sounds epic and dystopian.

[270] When you first start the story, I was like, how do they have a record of the last Ice Age regression?

[271] And then I'm like, oh, no, no, this is current.

[272] Okay.

[273] Yeah, this is current.

[274] This is in our era.

[275] Yeah.

[276] So it melted the permafrost and then came these reindeer carcasses that then melted.

[277] They had been buried in World War II.

[278] They rise to the surface and then release anthrax, which then sickens thousands of reindeer.

[279] And then that gets into the food supply of the indigenous people.

[280] They get sickened with anthrax.

[281] I mean, it was just this massive moment that brings together global.

[282] warming and pathogens.

[283] Generally, who suffers the most from all these mistakes?

[284] It's generally not the bald white CEO?

[285] It's generally not the people who are making the decisions that lead to these outcomes.

[286] Yeah.

[287] And it also was happening at a time when there was greater rupture in our country over issues of race and identity.

[288] So all these things were coming together.

[289] And who knew?

[290] I had no idea that at the moment when this book would finally make it out, that we would be in the midst of a pandemic ourselves.

[291] Right.

[292] It's crazy.

[293] It is.

[294] It's crazy.

[295] Now, in India, there's nomenclature for every strata, right?

[296] So how would you break down the caste system in the U .S.?

[297] So there are four main Varnas in the ancient caste system of India?

[298] And it has had to make adjustments over time as new people come in to their country.

[299] But it's primarily four main Varna's, Brahman's on top, and Khashatria, Vizya, and then Sudra, and then outside of that are the outcasts known as the Dalits.

[300] Then beyond them are the indigenous people.

[301] The Monica Padman's of society?

[302] I'm in a very high cast.

[303] How dare you?

[304] Underneath all of them are thousands and thousands of subcasts underneath each of them.

[305] So it's extremely.

[306] complex.

[307] There's not a cast -for -cast analog for each one, you might say.

[308] It could be said, particularly because of the many thousands of subcasts.

[309] But generally, in our country, it's viewed as a bipolar caste system, starting with before there was a United States of America, Virginia colony, the English colonists arrive, and they are obviously almost ill -equipped to even survive there.

[310] So they then turn to the indigenous people, but they then decimate their numbers and then drive them from their land.

[311] And then they need to build this country.

[312] And so what they do is they turn to Africa and they begin to transport Africans to be enslaved.

[313] We all know that that's what happened.

[314] But in doing so, they were creating a hierarchy, a hierarchy in which the English colonists were the dominant group, by definition.

[315] They made the laws that determined what anyone beneath them could do.

[316] And they positioned at the very bottom, the Africans that they were enslaving.

[317] They restricted every single thing that the enslaved Africans could or could not do.

[318] They could not even, they had no control over their bodies.

[319] They had no control over anything.

[320] It was not even against the law to kill an enslaved person.

[321] There were reasons where they were permitted to do that.

[322] And these things are analogous in their own way, to the things that befell the people at the very bottom of the caste system in India, formerly known as Untouchables and now known as Dullets.

[323] And so in the United States, though, there were these two poles, the people who were at the very top, the dominant group, the English colonists, and then the enslaved people beneath.

[324] Then over time, anyone who entered into this bipolar hierarchy had to find a way to survive and to navigate within this bipolar structure.

[325] And with human nature being as it is, anyone who could in any way connect themselves with the dominant cast would do so.

[326] There was this desire to be as close as one could be, this human nature.

[327] But they also found that when they arrived, no matter how they might have perceived themselves, they were assigned to what was a fairly new concept known as race.

[328] The idea of race, as people often will say nowadays is a social construct.

[329] color is a fact, but race is a social construct.

[330] And so when people arrive from Ireland or from Poland or from Hungary or from Lithuania, wherever they might have been coming from, they didn't perceive of themselves as white because they wouldn't have needed to me back in Europe where everyone pretty much had a somewhat skin color, skin color was not the primary identifier for who you were.

[331] You were Irish or you were Hungarian, whatever you were.

[332] And only when coming here where the identity, identifier was based upon color, because color would then determine where you fit in the caste system, which rights and privileges you would have.

[333] And so that's where people they arrived.

[334] And while they may have arrived as Irish or Lithuanian or Polish or Hungarian, they were assigned to the category of white.

[335] And then that's how race became real, how a social construct had real life ramifications.

[336] Yeah, there was a race theory, which is, of course, debunked by any person.

[337] biologist, which we've talked about a bunch on here.

[338] It couldn't be a worst distinguishing criteria because genetically, it's just irrelevant.

[339] How we've lined it up, there's really no genetic parallel to any of those classifications.

[340] So it's a race theory, which is bogus, but then it becomes a practice, right?

[341] Now it's in practice despite it being a bogus theory.

[342] Yeah, the word Caucasian is a totally made up word.

[343] It has no meaning.

[344] The word Caucasian grew out of the mind of an 18th century German physician who had this affinity for collecting skulls.

[345] Ah, okay.

[346] I learned it as Caucasoid in anthropology.

[347] Well, that's true, but before the word Caucasoid was actually applied in a pseudoscientific language, it actually came from this physician, Blumenbach, out of Germany, who collected skulls, and the skull that he thought was the most beautiful happened to come from the Caucasus region.

[348] And he described that one as the most prized of his many skulls, the most beautiful of the skulls.

[349] And didn't he was measuring facial proximity and he had the golden rule of how far your nose should jut out and your chin and all that?

[350] And your eyes, yeah.

[351] And so on the basis of that, he assigned himself as part of the same group as the Caucasus, the Caucasian skull that he had.

[352] And then over time, that word was applied to all white people.

[353] Interestingly enough, at the end of the 19th century, early 20th century, the American immigration laws began to restrict people who were coming from anywhere outside of northern Europe.

[354] And thus, that meant that actual Caucasian people were not permitted to be citizens because they did not fit the new adjusted definition.

[355] of a word that had started from a mad scientist's mind anyway.

[356] Oh, my goodness.

[357] Yeah.

[358] Oh, my goodness.

[359] Interesting history.

[360] Man, Germany cannot catch a break in the history of race.

[361] What is astounding, Monica, that you say that is like it becomes really clear how many people can be affected by just a couple of doofuses, right?

[362] I mean, when you just track down.

[363] Let's say the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand, you can track modern -day terrorism as a ripple effect of two bozos, you know?

[364] That's what makes life so scary is, yeah, one person can have some erroneous science upon which a whole worldview is built.

[365] You could track it down to just a few people, you know?

[366] But if enough people are willing to buy into it, that's how it becomes real.

[367] If they're incentivized to, if that gives them the proof for which they receive more than other people, then it's, They're very incentivized to believe in that.

[368] Yeah.

[369] So I think we all would maybe know that, you know, as Italians entered, as Irish entered, they were lower than the Anglo -Saxons and then they moved up, right?

[370] There was, as you say, there's all these different variations within the two polares of black and white.

[371] What would you say is the modern day breakdown of what we have in the country?

[372] It changes over time because I look to what have the laws stated.

[373] So the laws stated that, as you described, people from Eastern and Southern Europe were viewed as outside the formal, an original definition of who was white in this country.

[374] That means people who were actually Caucasian did not fit the definition of the 1924 Immigration Act because they were not from northwestern Europe.

[375] So there are gradations within the dominant caste.

[376] And then over time, other people have, you know, from other parts of the world, have made it into the United States, have migrated into the United States.

[377] And they are what I would consider to be the middle caste if they do not fit that either poll.

[378] This is all a social construct.

[379] It's all a creation.

[380] The fact that they came from a nation state, which is only a 150 -year -old concept to begin with, like it's all brand new, and yet we're filing everyone into these rivers based on this new invention.

[381] Yeah.

[382] So the middle castes have changed over time because they would have been Irish and the people who were outside of Northern Europe would have been considered middle caste when the country had fewer people from outside of Europe or Africa.

[383] But as people have come from other parts of the world, they enter into this bipolar system and have to figure out how are they going to navigate in the early 20th century, the 1924 Immigration Act.

[384] There were people who were from parts of Asia in particular who were petitioning for citizenship, because they had been in this country for decades.

[385] And then with the 1924 Immigration Act were suddenly also being excluded.

[386] And they were appealing, partly because many of them were close to the caucuses mountains.

[387] People talked about there was a Japanese man who petitioned the Supreme Court because he said, my skin is lighter than white people.

[388] I'm whiter than white people.

[389] And he lost because they then changed a definition to make it not just skin, color, but European origin.

[390] I mean, all of this was being, in some ways, made up on the spot.

[391] And this is where it gets into the systemic nature of it, that I don't know that everyone fully grasped, which is these are now written into laws, and these will find their way to courts, and they will ultimately be enforced by law enforcement.

[392] So the impact is baked in, and you can't really fight against it.

[393] And then also, if the laws are in place for long enough, then they become part.

[394] of the framework for thinking, they become part of the received assumptions about who belongs where in a society, who is viewed as American and who is viewed as not worthy of being seen as American.

[395] Who comes to mind when you think of an American gets embedded in these laws that essentially were restricting who could be American in 1924 and how we still live with that.

[396] It also showed how race was created in the country because if you began to assign people or to put people in a certain group and then those people are encouraged to see themselves a certain way and then they intermarry, then that's how the white, quote unquote, white race was created as a people from all over Europe who might not have seen themselves as having anything in common before then came together and were encouraged.

[397] And then that's how you get what is called a melting pop, but primarily one that was focused on one group in particular.

[398] And then others as they came in, you know, they also had to, what I described, the middle cast, people who did not fit on either poll.

[399] And over time have been, in some ways, used as buffers between these two poles.

[400] It's a very fraught, intrinsically divisive framework for understanding how the groups have been pitted against one another over time.

[401] Very sad.

[402] I hate to compare us to dogs, but I'm going to.

[403] I don't know if you've had a lot of dogs and you take it to a trainer and they say, well, you know, if it's an alpha, it's going to be kind of fine and steady.

[404] If it's super submissive, it's going to be fine.

[405] It's these middle pack dogs that are going to fight the whole time you own them because they're just so struggling to figure out that much more gray area between the two poles of even like canine society, you know?

[406] Yeah, well, it purposely creates a sense of insecurity on almost everyone's part because everyone has got to figure out how to navigate in a society where a lot of these things are unspoken but real.

[407] You know, everyone knows that these things are real, but they're unspoken, and you have to figure out how you're going to manage in that.

[408] Stay tuned for more armchair expert, if you dare.

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[449] So some of the things that you detail about the cost of being in a different hierarchical zone is benefit of the doubt.

[450] Yeah.

[451] And when you said that, I was like, wow, there's so much in that.

[452] And I can just see myself role playing in my head and how different my benefit of the doubt would be for different people.

[453] I see a lot of this stuff personally through a socioeconomic lens simply because I grew up in a largely white, almost exclusively white area, but huge income disparity and watching how the poor people got treated, how often they were pulled over on the side of the road, when they were out of the car, when they got pulled over, all these things that I witnessed that if you were poor, you were going to have a much different time in my town, even if you're just going about your business, the cops were going to assume you were drunk or they were going to assume this.

[454] and based somewhat in the fact that, yes, the alcoholism rate was higher in the poor neighbor.

[455] So it's all, it's so dense and complicated.

[456] But that's the thing I witnessed kind of firsthand.

[457] And so, yeah, benefit of the doubt, if the guy was in, you know, had no shirt on and torn up jeans and he said, I didn't take that pack of cigarettes, I'm not going to believe him the same way I would believe the fat white bald guy in a suit.

[458] Yeah.

[459] Well, thank you for picking up on benefit of the doubt because it's much bigger than just the phrase.

[460] I mean, the benefit of the doubt is one of the reasons why we see all these videos about some people sitting at a coffee shop like Starbucks in Philadelphia and someone calls a police on them.

[461] They were not given the basic benefit of the doubt that would have been accorded to other people who are sitting at a Starbucks waiting for a friend.

[462] Or how about black women in the hospital system not being given the benefit of the doubt that their pain was real and that a white woman's was, which is totally documented.

[463] and we know much different outcome and what they're prescribed.

[464] Absolutely.

[465] How that one phrase spreads and percolates throughout society to often catastrophic effect because if you're going to frivolously call the police on an African American as the case of the guy who was a bird watcher in Central Park who is concerned because there's a dog loose and he mentions it to the dog's owner and then she calls the police on him.

[466] I mean, that could be a dangerous situation.

[467] for a black person and you're calling the police on them on the basis of you're not giving that person benefit of doubt that would be accorded someone else.

[468] And that's one of the many ways that these boundaries can be assigned to or enforced on people on the basis of the benefit of the doubt that's perceived that they deserve.

[469] Now, this is not my opinion, but I know for certain many people will be listening to it and going, well, hold on a second.

[470] It would be illogical to assume if we know a certain group of people has a higher crime rate, it would be illogical and dangerous to not acknowledge that, right?

[471] So let's say the police in my town with the poor white guys and they know they're in way more domestic dispute calls.

[472] They have this justified suspicion of them.

[473] How do we address that?

[474] Well, the examples that I've given you are people who are not in the middle of committing anything that's close to the appearance of a crime.

[475] These are just ordinary people going about their day.

[476] One guy that I make mention that in the book, there's so many examples, but one guy, he's a business guy, is a marketing executive who's just trying to get into his condo building in St. Louis.

[477] And he's opening the door and a woman blocks him from getting in the lobby.

[478] She blocks him from getting into the lobby of his own condo building in St. Louis.

[479] Now, she's not afraid.

[480] She actually follows him.

[481] He has a key, so he opens the door.

[482] She follows him onto the elevator.

[483] So it's not fear.

[484] She's not fearful of a potential black criminal.

[485] She is responding to a sense that he is out of his place in her view.

[486] He doesn't belong in the building.

[487] She's not convinced that he lives there.

[488] And she's policing him herself.

[489] Yeah, I'll go further.

[490] There is implicit in her worldview that she will be protected in this scenario.

[491] So when the cavalry arrives, they'll believe her that she'll be protected because why else would a woman challenge a man physically unless she's felt so safeguarded by the system.

[492] And so he, actually to protect himself, knowing the dynamic that was at play there, he began to record this on his phone because he knew that he could be in danger, should this go any further.

[493] She actually followed him all the way up the elevator onto the floor where his apartment was and followed him to the point where he opens his door and closes the door, and she's standing there on the hallway, still trying to convince herself or to assure herself that he actually belongs in the building.

[494] Right.

[495] Now, at this point, he maybe stole the key from, oh, he had a key.

[496] That's weird.

[497] He must have to stole that somewhere.

[498] She's just having to constantly recalibrate.

[499] Wow, he knows what floor his elite lives on.

[500] That's weird.

[501] Not to make a joke of it, but that was what was happening in her head, I'm sure.

[502] But that's how embedded the assumptions are.

[503] They're so embedded that to all evidence to the contrary, the subconscious assumptions are calibrated to such a degree that they will override rationality, rational thought.

[504] Yeah.

[505] We get in these confirmation bias loops.

[506] We get info that's saying we're wrong and we've got to figure out another explanation because there's no way our gut is wrong.

[507] We just have to keep working it, the formula, until it fits how we feel inside.

[508] Yeah.

[509] So a benefit of the doubt, which is a great one to shine a light on, and then I think access to resources is a little more well known, unless I'm wrong in that.

[510] I think people understand some of the barriers.

[511] Well, like Flint, for example, this has been going on since 2014.

[512] Flint has been dealing with this.

[513] We know that a lot of the toxic waste dumps will often be near places where marginalized people are living.

[514] I mean, where are they going to go?

[515] I'm sitting right now in Michigan, so I'm currently 50 miles from Flint, and I'm also 15 miles from Birmingham, and I can promise you that there would not be a six -year water crisis in Birmingham.

[516] It would not possibly exist.

[517] It would be unthinkable.

[518] In addition to the idea that the food deserts tend to be in the areas where marginalized people are more likely to live, there may not be a supermarket, but there's a payday loan business there.

[519] So these are the ways that access to resources, are very much front and center.

[520] I mean, you can see that in any, any neighborhood you can go to.

[521] Could you break down a couple of examples of assumptions of competence?

[522] Because I think that's a really intriguing area to think about.

[523] This is sort of a related story that brings together benefit of the doubt and competence in assumptions about who belongs where, what I experienced when I was a national correspondent at the New York Times in Chicago.

[524] I had made arrangements to interview all these people for a pretty routine story.

[525] So I called them on the phone and they knew to expect me. And all day, I'd been interviewing these people and everything had been fine until I got to the last interview.

[526] At the last interview, I showed up at the establishment.

[527] It was a retail establishment, small.

[528] It was a quiet hour of the day.

[529] So there weren't lots of people there.

[530] There actually was no one there except for the store clerk who told me that the manager was not there yet, but that he would be there any minute.

[531] And this is a person I was to be interviewing.

[532] So a few minutes later, this man walks in and he's in a hurry.

[533] He's clearly flustered.

[534] He's running late.

[535] And the clerk tells me that I should go up to him because this is the man that I'm there to interview.

[536] And so when I go up to him, he waves me away.

[537] He says, oh, I can't talk with you right now.

[538] I'm getting ready for a very important meeting, very important interview.

[539] And I said, I think I'm that person.

[540] I have an appointment with you.

[541] He said, No, you don't understand.

[542] I'm Isabel Wilkerson with the New York Times.

[543] I'm here in New York.

[544] He said, well, how do I know that?

[545] How do I know that?

[546] How do I know that?

[547] And I said, well, we had an appointment, and it's, you know, it's supposed to be a few minutes ago.

[548] We had an appointment.

[549] I'm here.

[550] You have the notebook.

[551] He's like, this woman attacked poor Isabel and took her day calendar.

[552] Somehow absconded with her day calendar.

[553] Poor Isabel is somewhere.

[554] crying for help.

[555] So he says to me, well, do you have a business card?

[556] And it just so happened that it was the end of the day.

[557] And I mean, people don't even use business cards now anymore.

[558] At least I don't know.

[559] But it had been all day that I've been interviewing people.

[560] He was the last of the day.

[561] And so I said, I'm sorry, I'm actually out of business cards.

[562] But I'm here.

[563] I have the notebook.

[564] He's ready to interview.

[565] There's no one else here.

[566] I'm ready to interview you.

[567] And he said, well, I'll need to see some ID.

[568] And I said, I shouldn't have to show.

[569] show you ID.

[570] We should be interviewing right now.

[571] This is a waste of time.

[572] I shouldn't have to show you ID.

[573] So I give him the ID.

[574] I give him my driver's license and he looks at it and he says you don't have anything with the New York Times on it.

[575] And I said we are supposed to be in the middle of an interview.

[576] I'm here to interview you.

[577] And he said, I'm sorry.

[578] I'm going to have to ask you to leave.

[579] She'll be here any minute.

[580] No. No. I mean...

[581] You handle that so generously.

[582] Oh my God.

[583] The last half of your story in my head, I was saying, well, fuck you, partner.

[584] I'd be happy to report this in the New York Times.

[585] The story wasn't about that.

[586] It was just a quiet little, you know, like a routine story.

[587] It wasn't supposed to turn into something like that.

[588] I ended up leaving and I just was stunned by what was it that just happened?

[589] And I still try to figure out like, how did that happen?

[590] I ended up writing the piece without him because.

[591] it turned out it wasn't necessary for him to be in it.

[592] It would have been nice.

[593] I would have liked it.

[594] And of course, he would have been a beneficiary of that.

[595] And I ended up sending him, I sent him the article with the business card after I finished it.

[596] That's what I ended doing.

[597] I wish I would have been there when he opened that up.

[598] So yeah, yeah.

[599] So that was what I did.

[600] But the reason I mentioned that is because this is an example of how everyone's really harmed by it in ways that we may not realize.

[601] I mean, if you multiply that times, you know, thousands of transactions on a given day and, you know, hundreds of thousands of businesses, then you can realize how miscommunication may be occurring, missed opportunities are happening, people are thrown by the odd interactions of assumptions and stereotypes that just are toxic and they are disruptive and they hurt everybody.

[602] This is a guy who wanted to be in it.

[603] He wanted to be in it so badly that he told me to leave.

[604] Well, yeah, and I'm going to go further.

[605] You're already at the apex of everything you could have transcended, right?

[606] You're already representing the New York Times.

[607] I'm assuming you're dressed smartly.

[608] Yes.

[609] You're speaking in the manner that they would desire.

[610] You know, everything's been done.

[611] Right.

[612] And you can't shake that.

[613] You can't transcend that.

[614] And that's why I make a distinction between class versus cast and race.

[615] So I will say that cast is the bones, race is the skin.

[616] And class is the accents, the diction, the education, the clothing, the kind of things that we can change about ourselves.

[617] in order to move up or to reposition ourselves.

[618] And so I often say, too, that if you can act your way out of it, it's class.

[619] But if you cannot act your way out of it, it's cast.

[620] Oh, interesting.

[621] So that's the distinction.

[622] Will you repeat that?

[623] So if you can act your way out of it, it's class.

[624] If you cannot act your way out of it, it's cast.

[625] There's nothing more that I could do.

[626] So then clearly African Americans are most obviously the ones that can code switch.

[627] You can do all that.

[628] you couldn't have done anything there.

[629] So that would demonstrate Cass.

[630] Yeah.

[631] Who else are we putting in that category?

[632] I would say females, right?

[633] Yes, absolutely.

[634] And that's why I use the word cast to focus in on the infrastructure that is underneath all of it.

[635] Because Cass is not only about race.

[636] It's about gender.

[637] It's about immigrant status.

[638] It's about the physical manifestation that is a signal to the subconscious of anyone we might meet as to where you belong.

[639] what is expected of you, where you presumably do not belong.

[640] And since I've been talking about this book, a lot of times if there is a call -in show, I often will hear from someone who's Latin X who will say that they went someplace and someone assumed that they were the maid.

[641] They were actually, say, a customer of a shop, but they were assumed to be the person working at the shop and were expected to provide a service to another customer because they had to be someone who was on staff working there at the shop, someone to go get them the merchandise that they wanted.

[642] But that people would get angry when they did not respond appropriately because they expected them to be someone to serve them.

[643] So it would have applied to many groups.

[644] Well, I've asked someone if they work there and the person was offended.

[645] I can't even remember of what ethnicity they were.

[646] But, of course, I'm immediately embarrassed.

[647] And so as soon as I'm embarrassed, I'm now very defensive.

[648] and I'll start, you know, building a case for why this was a very innocent mistake.

[649] Yeah.

[650] That's, I feel like human nature to some degree to get defensive.

[651] This is the programming, though, because where did those ideas come from?

[652] Where do these stereotypes and assumptions come from?

[653] They're coming from some place.

[654] Yeah.

[655] They're coming from our society.

[656] And the society trains us as to presumably who belongs where, what the roles are.

[657] Well, and that's why I really, really like the emphasis of your book because it's not enough to just be right or to have the moral high ground.

[658] I think we also have to understand how humans act and respond to new information.

[659] And I think it's incumbent upon us to head off things that would just take us down the wrong road that we don't want to be on.

[660] It wouldn't be productive.

[661] So I think really delineating the difference between systemic racism, what that means, right, is that we all grew up in this system that has laws, that has courts, that has police, that has a class that hires, that has incarceration rates, that has all these things.

[662] I think it takes a little bit of the own us off the human when they hear that.

[663] Because I do think many people are hearing systemic racism, everyone in America is racist.

[664] And then they're fighting back against that, understandably, because they certainly don't think of themselves as racist.

[665] And I think an argument of, no, no, no, no one's saying anything about you.

[666] We're saying that this system is creating, as all systems do, an outcome.

[667] And we can kind of measure this outcome.

[668] And it's pretty black and white.

[669] It's clear.

[670] We know what the incarceration rate is, what the sentences are.

[671] We know what life expectancy is.

[672] We know all these things.

[673] So we know what the outcome is and we have to acknowledge the system produces that outcome and the system has to be examined and tinkered with.

[674] Your analogy is fantastic.

[675] We all inherited a house.

[676] Yes.

[677] And the house was not built to code and it's fallen apart.

[678] And no one here's fault that the house is a piece of shit.

[679] But it's all of our responsibilities as the dwellers of this home to refurbish it.

[680] Yeah.

[681] And that there actually is responsibility that each of us have.

[682] to recognize the programming and to take responsibility for reprogramming ourselves, to recognize the programming and reprogram ourselves.

[683] And that's something that each individual person has to do.

[684] And also to know the history, so you'll know how we got to where we are.

[685] Well, you just tell me really quick, I just found this fascinating, situational elevation.

[686] Ah, situational elevation.

[687] That has to do with when people are in the subordinated caste.

[688] And they enter or visit a place where they are still visibly from the subordinated cast, where, for example, an African American who goes to South Africa, for example.

[689] And if they go there as I have, and you will find yourself elevated because you look like the people who are subordinated there, but because you come from the outside and because to get there, you're successful, you then are elevated and not.

[690] recognizing you may not, if you're not aware of it, if you're not thinking this through, you will start to believe that you actually truly deserve to be elevated.

[691] But actually, what's happening is you're being used as a foil to affirm or justify the subjugation of the people in the society you just moved to.

[692] Because people will say, well, look, if this person could go and do this, this, this and this, then what excuse do you have?

[693] You, the people who are subordinated in our country here.

[694] And the same goes for if someone comes from another part of the world to the United States joins this hierarchy, and they actually look similar to other people who are subordinated.

[695] And as a result of, to get here, you have to have resources.

[696] To get here, you often have more education.

[697] To get here, you may know multiple languages and be very accomplished.

[698] So that person then experiences situational elevation because they can be used as a foil against the people who are here already, African Americans, for example, who do experience higher unemployment rates, who live in food deserts, who go to segregated schools that have less funding, you know, all of those things.

[699] And this can be used against them to say, what's wrong with you?

[700] We have someone who's come in from someplace else and look how well they're doing.

[701] And so this is a request, actually, to people who are from other markets.

[702] marginalized groups to be aware of the dynamic that happens in a caste system in which the caste system will use whatever means there are to justify the preexisting hierarchy and will use people to affirm that.

[703] I mean, same thing happened with, say, Irish, when earlier going when Irish arrived or Italians arrived, they would use the same stereotypes.

[704] And to say, these other people have done, well, what's wrong with you?

[705] What's wrong with this group?

[706] What's up, guys, this is your girl Kiki, and my podcast is back with a new season.

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[723] When I argue with people, that seems to be a common hallmark where they'll go, well, look, the Irish did it, the Italians did it, I'll go further.

[724] I learned in an L .A. geography class that 50 % of all second generation Mexican Americans are middle class.

[725] So they'll go, oh, they're the Italians of today.

[726] And I think it discounts what you're saying, which is there's a cast.

[727] So those people are for whatever reason allowed to transcend.

[728] But there's other factors at play that has not allowed that because the African Americans are the bottom of the poll.

[729] Yeah.

[730] You could argue that it's necessary that they transcend.

[731] It's necessary.

[732] to have some groups that will be in a position to justify the bottom -place position of the people who have been assigned to the bottom from the beginning.

[733] While at the same time, those people at the bottom are being disrupted in their current day as they're sitting at a Starbucks waiting for a friend, because that's a reminder.

[734] And it's a justification for what we may see happen to George Floyd or to Rihanna Taylor or to Ahmaud Arbery.

[735] As long as the society and the caste system can point to those who've come in and been seen as exceptional, even being encouraged to be exceptional, to justify the circumstances of those who are at the bottom, it could be argued that you need to have people in the middle who serve as a buffer and serve as an exception to prove the rule of those at the bottom.

[736] Yes.

[737] So we have an example.

[738] Well, look at Barack Obama.

[739] Okay.

[740] Yeah, great.

[741] It all boils down to Chris Rock's greatest joke ever, which is like, he lives in a neighborhood.

[742] He's the best comedian of all time.

[743] He lives next to the best rapper of all time.

[744] And then between them is an average white dentist.

[745] It's just like, sure.

[746] You can, yeah, you can get there if you're the best ever at one thing.

[747] Sure.

[748] Weirdly, when you're talking about it, I'm immediately reminded of Lennox Lewis, the heavyweight fighter, because he had that British accent, and when he would come here, even the way the commentators would talk about him, like he's the professor of boxing.

[749] There was like this, all this elevated stuff.

[750] And I think it was kind of situational elevation, which this British accent for some reason, it did something bizarre to everyone's opinion of him.

[751] Yeah.

[752] It's just this idea that the caste system has been in place for 400 years, and we have grown so accustomed to it.

[753] You could say that our minds have been, our subconsciousness have been reshaped to expect certain things.

[754] And as you were mentioning about the confirmation bias, we will look to affirm what we have already been told.

[755] And it takes a tremendous amount of data and inputs other than what we have been exposed to to get us to break free of what we think we know.

[756] I think that's really key.

[757] I don't think a lot of Americans understand immigration in general and that it is very hard to come to this country.

[758] It is not easy to come to this country.

[759] Hassan Minaj has this wonderful special where he says that.

[760] He's like, people think you can just like slip right in.

[761] it takes eight years to come here and you have to be getting a PhD, you have to be contributing to the sciences.

[762] There's all these levels that I think most Americans just think, yeah, people are just coming here and they're just getting in and it's fine.

[763] It's very hard.

[764] So yeah, the level of, quote, talent that comes in from other countries is very high.

[765] And then it leads, you know, it's a trickle down effect to their kids and their kids and their kids.

[766] It's not just this thing of like, well, these people are doing it.

[767] Yeah, they're doing it because they're doing it because they came to get PhDs.

[768] Like, that was the only way they could come.

[769] If they didn't have them already, actually.

[770] If they did, exactly.

[771] At this point, probably, yeah.

[772] Yeah.

[773] Well, and I'm just now, as you're saying that, Monica, thinking what disruptors Indians are in general, right?

[774] Because you're brown and then you're yet associated with higher education.

[775] Yeah.

[776] What a bizarre group for us to slide into this fucked up arbitrary system.

[777] Right?

[778] It doesn't even fit.

[779] It's like, no, no, you're brown.

[780] You should be over here, but you're my doctor.

[781] That's, I'm confused.

[782] Well, that's why they really like when they own gas stations, right?

[783] Because it's like, that makes more sense to me. A brown person is associated with the gas station.

[784] They don't even really know, like, those people own like 10 gas stations and are millionaires.

[785] Yeah, exactly.

[786] You know, they're just like, yeah, they're categorizing based on skin color, really, ultimately.

[787] I so agree with what you're saying, because that is an example, too, of how the cast system can recognize and rely upon the positioning of people, but still wanting them to stay in a fixed place, you know, the idea of the people who own hotels.

[788] And as long as you're in something of a service industry, that's a comforting place.

[789] Or even as programmers or engineers.

[790] That's my mom and my dad.

[791] But then to be CEO, to be someone who is actually in charge and running things.

[792] That's where you could say there's a glass ceiling that begins to, in my view, affect many people in what I would call the middle caste in this country, because a lot of it is determined by what you look like.

[793] I mean, what you look like is sort of the signifier as to presumably how a person should be perceived.

[794] I mean, of course, the idea of people who are questioned and question and question about where they're actually from, to answer the question and say Phoenix or Cleveland is not acceptable.

[795] You have to say, like, well, you have to justify The idea of justify, where are you from?

[796] Exactly.

[797] Where are you from to justify one's existence as an American in this country?

[798] I mean, that's why I think we have a long way to go in getting people to let go of these assumptions and stereotypes so that everyone can be who they're intended to be.

[799] There also, I just want to speak to the pressures on immigrant children who are expected to be the physician, the lawyer, the engineer.

[800] That's like it.

[801] There's nothing else.

[802] there's nothing else.

[803] And yet I get so much joy out of seeing Indian comedians in particular because that's a way of breaking free and being able to say, no, this is who I am.

[804] And I should be able to be who I am, not what society says I should be, not what the immigrant status should put me under pressure of being.

[805] The other thing I wanted to say is that when it comes to certain immigrant groups, particularly Nigerian immigrants and Indian immigrants, because they arrive in this country so incredibly well -educated, better educated than most Americans that they will ever meet is a fact.

[806] And also, they will have the advanced degrees and they will know multiple, multiple languages.

[807] They will have traveled better and more widely than many, many Americans they meet.

[808] And yet they still have to fit into or forced to fit into this pre -existing hierarchy.

[809] And then their success could be used against them because then now what I hear saying is that because they do well financially, it's often said that they make more money than the average white person.

[810] So clearly, white people, white Americans are actually not faring well or are suffering because this other group is actually doing better than they.

[811] So this is how taking their jobs.

[812] Yeah.

[813] So this is how it all adjust itself to maintain the hierarchy to begin with.

[814] And my goal is to get everybody to be aware of this, to be aware of what is happening.

[815] At least if we're aware of it, we can see it for what it is and then begin the work of dismantling the hierarchies that are so destructive to all of us.

[816] This is going to be a dangerous one.

[817] I'm going to start by owning that this will sound very white lives mattery.

[818] And I'm nervous of that.

[819] But I also feel very compelled because, as you so pointed out, and I have witnessed it so firsthand, It's always the people with the least amount of resources that are fighting the hardest against each other.

[820] And it very much frustrates me. And it serves the hierarchy to be pitting these poor white people against poor black people.

[821] And to me, what I see, I think the right, so these militia guys that were going to kidnap the Michigan governor, right?

[822] Yeah.

[823] They arrested all the guys.

[824] And then they showed where they lived.

[825] And I think for people on the right, that was somewhat of an explanation for why they feel so disenfranchised.

[826] right?

[827] They're clearly living in extreme abject poverty.

[828] And the left was like, oh, how dare you try to justify a kidnapping and everything?

[829] And I said, look, I have a lot of sympathy and empathy for the shootings in Chicago because I understand the cycle of violence.

[830] I understand that the life expectancy is half of what mine is.

[831] I understand that the incarceration rate is going to be five times.

[832] And that the whole dynamic of life there is different.

[833] I have great sympathy for that.

[834] you know what aces are right adverse childhood experiences where you experience trauma and we know if you've got above six out of the nine that you have a very predictable path right you're not going to achieve any educational status you're going to have a higher rate of alcoholism you're going to die much shorter and i think what unifies these groups so much is this incredibly high rate of aces in the african -american community in the poor white community in the latin ex community that all these folks that are dealing with this extreme trauma are going to have this kind of predictable course and I think all people with eight of nine aces deserve a lot of sympathy and a lot of help and I feel like there's a much broader coalition to be made among all these groups that are experiencing such a different life than say I am in America.

[835] I think what unites all these groups is is that.

[836] Now your explanation of cast definitely takes the wind out of that argument and I understand how in that you can't act your way out of it and certainly the poor white people with lots of aces could act their way out of it yet I want to see some coalition that really everyone's getting fucked that's below X amount of dollars and it's serving and perpetuating this system and I'm heartbroken that trumps their best fucking voice I don't like that I wish that there was some movement that was no. A lot of people are getting fucked and a lot of people are growing up without opportunity and a lot of people aren't getting the benefit of doubt and collectively we need to address this.

[837] I actually think it's bigger than these arbitrary populations we've assigned.

[838] I just wonder what your thoughts are on that.

[839] If these people have way more in common and it shouldn't be the group that's fighting the most, it should be the group that's bonding together the most to say, this thing is not benefiting us.

[840] This system is not working for all of us and is a ton of us.

[841] Well, as long as a group has been told for so long that this is the one thing that elevates them and the one thing that they can believe in that will put them in a higher position than a group that's been assigned to the bottom for so long, then that's a hard thing to break from.

[842] There's a white entitlement.

[843] I agree.

[844] I think there's a lot of like, wait, what the fuck?

[845] How could I be poor?

[846] I'm supposed to be the boss.

[847] And a greater resentment of that reality.

[848] But it's a misplaced resentment because the resentment is not toward the people who are in position to make life better for everybody.

[849] It's directed toward those that they've been told are their rivals that they are in competition with.

[850] And one of the things I want to say is that going back to the migration that led to all the cities that we talked about is that to me, one of the great tragedies in American history is that the people who are arriving to these cities in the United States, the northern cities in the 20th century, from southern and eastern Europe, or from Kentucky, as you described in your family's story, or from Alabama, sharecroppers, black sharecroppers, all of those people arriving to the big cities.

[851] Many of them had never been outside the counties into which they had been born or the land that they were from.

[852] They were far, far often from their families.

[853] They were trying to make a go of it in a forbidding environment, factories and subways and traffic and all these things that they're trying to manage and raise families.

[854] They were the same people.

[855] They were the same.

[856] Right.

[857] They were all the same.

[858] They were all the same.

[859] They were all facing the same challenges of trying to make a go of it in a forbidding new place as they were trying to get situated.

[860] Some of them not knowing all of the culture and the ways of managing and not even, some of them not even knowing the language and still trying to make a go of it.

[861] And then what happened is that the ways that the institutions were set up is that they pitted one group against the other.

[862] Some committed to join unions and some were not permitted to join unions.

[863] Some were permitted to move into neighborhoods where they could get a mortgage for their homes and others were redlined out of it or restrictive covenants kept them from it.

[864] Others were rewarded from moving out into the suburbs with more people who looked like them, even though they originally might not have seen themselves as similar to people who presumably look like them but came from a different, originating country.

[865] These were the same people, and it's the society, it's the caste system that separated people into casts based upon what they look like as opposed to what they really had in common, which was their basic humanity of people trying to make a go of it far, far from home.

[866] And that's one of the great tragedies of our country, and we're still recovering from that, still recovering.

[867] Yeah.

[868] Well, I really, really recommend everyone read your book.

[869] We had interviewed Chelsea Handler last week, and she's, like, loving it and singing its praises everywhere she goes.

[870] And I know Amy Schumer's as well.

[871] Yeah.

[872] Thank you.

[873] Yeah.

[874] Yeah, so I just started and I already love it.

[875] You're just a fantastic writer.

[876] All the wonderful information and research aside, you're just a beautiful storyteller.

[877] So it's such an easy read, and it's really enjoyable, and the message is so important.

[878] Thank you so much for having me. I really enjoyed it.

[879] Yeah.

[880] really enjoyed it.

[881] Yeah.

[882] I'll talk to you in 10 years when you write an next book.

[883] Book three.

[884] Thank you.

[885] All right.

[886] And if you could just flash us your ID so we know we interviewed the right person, that would be great.

[887] Thank you, as well.

[888] Thank you.

[889] Bye -bye.

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