After that, Prime Ministers questions. Then, the texas 21st Congressional District debate. Guest the main thesis is that we live in an old house. We focus on what we think we can see, but the may not be for focusing may not be focusing on the structure underneath. We may have inherited a torarchy that harkens back enslavement and live today with the consequences of that hierarchy in which people at the very beginning were put into assigned categories, that were part of creating what would become the United States and that we live with the aftereffect of this day. When we think about the United States, the word caste language apply to other civilizations, human creation that give us away viewing ourselves in a different lens. Host you write in the acknowledgments, this was a book that i had to write in the air that we find ourselves. Can you talk more about that . Caste ining the word which i was writing about the migration of 6 million african americans, i came to realize through my research that i was not running about leaving, but they were defecting a caste system. I use that to describe the jim crow south and in doing so, i i would find that readers would truly understand and see what people were living under in the jim crow south from a for much of the 20th century. It was after writing that book and going on and talking about the book that i then begin to think about the idea of caste. Then, trayvon martin, the young man in florida who was killed as he was coming back from the store wearing a hoodie. He did not fit in that suburban division in florida. He was suspected based on what he looks like. About how these assignments and assumptions about who people are, where people belong, whose expect it and viewed as worthy, and so i castea piece connecting to that experience and i have been aching about that ever since. We have seen a metronome of names of people unarmed People Killed at the hands of vigilantesomegrown who have taken upon themselves to take the lives of people, unarmed people in places where they were not expected to be. This became an era that seems to suggest that there was a way of looking at what we were going through through a different lens. You write about the two conferences that you attended at amherst and london, coalescing the ideas. Can you tell me more about that . Amherst wasase in when i was invited to give a keynote about caste and race. Of people result beginning to hear that this africanamerican woman was researching this topic, have been in india and they had heard about it and invited me to the conference. It was there at amherst that i began to test out some of the thinking that i had come to recognize as a result of the research. Were quite fascinated with the idea that i had written about the africanamerican experience in the south without using the word racism, a word that does not appear although people would assume that, the word that i used was caste. It was a moment to explore and share the views that i had come to recognize, not only is someone who has researched it, but also was experiencing it as well. All of these things came to coalesce in that space and as i talked about it, it turned out that i had a deep connection to formerly known as untouchable. The conversations came with the record should have shared experiences across time, across oceans, a shared experience. Thee were some of experiences that led to my feeling that this actually was something that needed to be written. About warmth of other sons celebrating its 10th anniversary. You think the secret sauces for that book . Peoplei think that to a muchl drawn phenomenon in our country that does not get much attention as it should. A time period between the end of reconstruction to the civil rights movement. That era does not get as much attention as they might otherwise. This is a way for people to understand it. Of our sonswarmth reflects that. It is the process that a reader will get to being another person. Getting to know three people, very deeply, providing them with getting to know them deeply and being able to share their experiences from a well of deep understanding because they share so much with me and being able to go along a journey with them and in going along in that journey, you get to experience what they experience. Which a humann being response to the circumstances that they might be born into and they may have to this pivotal decision. These are uniquely human circumstances and a human being can identify with the yearning to be free, the learning to break from the restrictions that they might have been born into. The hopes and dreams that they might carry as they make it across the country. Story thatuniversal is in our background no matter where we might come from, to experience some type of migration, so i think that is what speaks the people. Is theve nonfiction closest we might get to being another person. That fiction allows us to build empathy as we get drawn to the characters we are learning about in experiencing that unfold the story of a novel. Nonfiction, wee seek to allow the reader to experience that journey that comes from that we often associate with fiction, but it is true, it is real, it is verifiable. This gives people the best chance that they ever will get to be another person, to be inside the heart and mind, the spirit, the dreams, heartbreaks and setbacks that people might go through. One of the reasons why people are drawn to it. People whonces of ,ere survivors of jim crow their experiences become deeply familiar to those of us who may see what happens with george floyd and many others. A lot of people look at the so there sons suns, is the combination of story and truth unfolding before us. Describe theld you style of caste . It is very different in your approach. Pcs there are many pieces that i explored and. Esearched anthropology, all in order to better understand the phenomenon that is very old and an ancient phenomenon, one that can surface in other cultures where we might not be looking for it or expecting it to be. I was pulling from different many previously written works, many different ways of looking at it, references to the old testament, to einstein, pulling all of this together in order to create a quilt that would give us another way of looking at ourselves. Host how did you decide on the subtitle . The subtitle was actually the working title for most of the time that i was working on it. It was the immediate purpose and , and that wasrk to understand what was unfolding around us. In the recent years, to understand what was unfolding around us and to try to wheretand how and why and understand ther origins of our discontent. That is the goal, the purpose to try to get underneath the divisions and tensions that we are living in now. That the word caste is one you are wanting readers to use to change the lexicon, but other race andt you use our racism, which you write as one of the most contentious and misunderstood words in american culture. What are you saying there . I am saying that racism is a word that is a phenomenon that is real and has affected our country for as long as there has been a country. There is no question about that. What i am saying is that that word has become so contentious and i think a lot of everyday people may not even realize that there are formal sociological definitions that any scholars have created their lifes work to understand this phenomenon, but because it has so many meanings tomes different people, it is a misunderstood term that has come to be confused or conflated with hating someone or just or all these words i get pulled together. Together. T pulled what this book is saying is that underneath all of that is the infrastructure of a division to begin with. The originating hierarchies, the greatest ranking of human value that has been assigned to people based upon where they were born. What group they were born to. From a timerchy that was even before the country was founded, owing to colonial virginia. Because those hierarchies have them with us all the time, what i am doing is shedding a light on, holding up an xray to the country to show what is underneath these divisions. What is underneath what you call racism, that there is an infrastructure of division that predates race as a concept. Race has a concept is a fairly new one in history, dating back years, before there was this coming together of people either by choice or by force onto this line. Ofan beings did not think themselves in terms of what we now call race. Irish, they were lithuanian, were they were from the area known as gambia, but they were not identified primarily based on what they look like. In europe, hundreds and hundreds of years ago, you would not have needed to identify yourself as a basis of your skin color. It was not the identifying characteristic. It was only when people are , and what weher states, as the united the new world, do these external characteristics that would have been neutral or had very little meaning or then have meaning here, once people came together. This is a creation. We also hear that race is a social construct, and this is a way of understanding how it became a social construct. How it became an arbitrary characteristic to use to rank people in a hierarchy that was requiring that there be people to do the work, to build a colony, and then the country. And there had to be people to do that, of course the great tragedy is that the people who were here, the Indigenous People whose land this was was driven off the land and numbers estimated. Decimated, and then they brought in africans to be enslaved, to build this country. In doing so, they created a what was really a bipolar caste system, the africansrom brought in as slaves to be at the bottom. The Indigenous People were excluded and out casted in their own land. This was the framework for how the country, the hierarchy that we had lived with throughout the centuries. That you write in caste the human impulse to create hierarchies runs across societies and cultures. What did you learn in your research about the genesis of that human instinct . Ofst i came to the process eight different characteristics, pillars of caste. Thread, the common point of introspection in the occurringthat i saw wherever it happened. I would say that one of the originating characteristics, which is pillar number one, would be world religion. Finding the laws of nature, the way that culture must find or chooses to find justification from the laws of nature or from received wisdom from on high to degradation, the positioning of putting people. Eneath your group there is this desire to find justification for these things that are arbitrary. One of the goals is to remind ourselves of how arbitrary these divisions actually are. But to overcome the recognition and natural recognition that one come about a culture needs to have some justification, that is one of the things that i found and made reference to that as a pillar because that is the essential convincing entire groups of people that they are above others and that others are beneath them, and from that, all of the other characteristics and mechanisms that are then used to keep other groups in a particular position so that the group that deems itself above and thetain resources primacy that they have been told or come to believe are their birthright. Producer tod our put those eight pillars onto a graphic that we can show to our audience. The question that i have as we look at them, do all castes share all these characteristics . Are they necessary to form a caste . Guest it is my contention that that is the case. Ould say that in order to there was a tremendous amount of work to be able to make the case its underpinnings, that there is an infrastructure of caste in order to make that case. I identified these eight pillars, which are present in any such hierarchy. They are present. I would say that sadly, they are present because some of them are very difficult to accept in many ways. Host in order to understand how function, your research took you to two places. India and germany. Exist inst castes other places. Guest the entire book is really about us. Countryout america, our , and a better understanding our country. In order to better understand our country and these longstanding, these long shadows under which we still live, why are these things still happening . Goal,as the originating to better understand ourselves by looking at other places that had experienced what i am describing is caste. The first place you would think of would be southeast asia, particularly india. Goal, tothe original try to understand better how there,work, originated frameworkerstand the for the caste system there historically. In the process of working on this, charlottesville happened. After charlottesville, we all could see the symbolism of the United States, the confederacy, and nazi germany in the symbolism that the protesters used, brought together themselves as they were protesting the potential removal of the statue of Robert Ely Robert e. Lee. We saw the symbolism of another culture and another time reaching over to nazi germany in a way that we might not have seen before in such a big way because in recent times it was there that charlottesville where the protesters brought the symbols together and it was then that i began to think to myself about what is it that germany had been doing in the intervening time . What is it about germany and the protesters would see themselves in what we saw in charlottesville were questions about memory, questions about history, how do we remember our history . How have we absorbed our history . We are not on the same page about what our history has been. That is what set me on a course to look at germany and the 12 year concentrated creation of a caste system there, but the nazis did during that time. Obviously, the most terrifying, horrific crime against humanity that ultimately was called was culminated, and i wanted to understand how the german how did the germans work through their history . Thatid they reconcile history . How are they atoning for that history . My initial goal was to see how they were dealing with history because we are dealing with history very differently. I tried to look into how they were dealing with it and then i came to realize that i had no idea one of them was that it turns out that germanys genesis was turning to dialogue with an american genesis leading up to the third reich, i had no idea about that. It turned out that america you ists were eugenic writing books that were popular among the nazis and nazis were using these american books as their textbooks. The nazis needed no one to teach them how to hate. They needed no one to teach them how to hate. But it turned out that the nazis had researchers go to the United States to study exactly how the United States had subjugated africanamerican. The nazis sent researchers to that forbades marriage across racial lines in the United States. Out that there were 41 of the United States that had hard marriage across barred marriage across racial lines, not just blackandwhite mama but also asian descent. They sent researchers to study how the United States had laws,ated with jim crow segregation in public facilities, they looked for all of the ways. All of the laws in the United States and jim crow and segregation as they went back to debate those laws as they were forming what would ultimately become their laws. I had no idea. That is how i ended up focusing in on these three places because idea of spoke to this hierarchy and creating these artificial boundaries and artificial rankings that would have such horrific for what the nazis did, obviously. Host i am sure many readers will be surprised about the parallels between the jim Crow Development of the nazi code. Of course, the nazis ultimate the elimination of a group of people. Book the subtitle of the was the origins of our discontents. With an emphasis on the origins. The focus for what i am looking at is where are the originating points for introspection and what can we learn from them . The focus when it comes to the germany wouldzi 1920s,years of the interaction with the theyicists in the 30s as were forming a government. And creating that was the interesting thing, to your can bethe 12 year reign instructive for all of us wayuse it started out as a to begin to look for ways of legitimacy in the United States. But also, the fact that they took a group of people who were among the most successful and accomplished people in these countries and then converted a subordinated caste. [indiscernible] with each decision that they made, and ultimately the final decision that came later in the war. This is an effort to look at the origins of these hierarchies, with an emphasis on the origins so that we can somehow learn from them and obviously, to make sure that these things never happen again. Host thinking about indias caste system, it is still very different from the 12 year nazi rain reign. What did you learn about its structures and permanence in society and how that impacted your evolution of thinking about the american caste . Guest i wanted to understand this because it is such a complex, ancient system that is based upon four main armors dharmas, brahman at the very top thesubcastes within each of four. And then the outcast of the people at the very bottom, the untouchables. That an Additional Group are potentially exiled in a different kind of way, similar to how Indigenous People in our country were treated. There is a complex system for exactthere are not analogs because they are so aretruct but there points of introspection and things that we can learn as a result of the ways in which that up puttingm, ended its people at the very bottom, using some of the mechanisms that were shocking to me that all three of these systems ended up using, independent of one another, across time, across space, cross ocean. There were continents that ended up using similar mechanisms and that was one of the things that actually reinforced this idea that caste as a phenomenon is something that can be applied once someone understands what caste is to begin with and the ways that it manifests along these different characteristics. One of those would be the idea culturesne of these made in terms of purity of the dominant caste. That was a prime signature of their hierarchy, meaning that to protect the purity, caste became a main focus to protect the dominant caste from presumed pollution by products by proximity or interaction with those beneath them, assigned to the bottom. Across these three civilizations, these cultures, water became the central symbol of purity. Water being an element of life itself on our planet that humans require