Copies at the link and the chat at the right of your screen and the link provided on the website. As isabel and john are talking please submit your questions there is a q a feature at the bottom of the screen and we have six or seven of them or until time allows, the pulse o pulitze in new york bestseller, her debut work when the National BookCritics Award for nonfiction and was named ten best nonfictions of 2010 as well as in your time nonfiction of all time. She has taught at princeton and Boston University and more than 200 other colleges and universities across the United States europe and asia, half the origins of her discontent receiving critical claim and no doubt want to accolades, interviewing this evening is john meeting appoints a prizewinning biographer he is a shooting writer for the New York Times book review and contribute in editor of Time Magazine in the New York Times bestseller the hope of glory, the american odyssey of George Herbert walker bush, Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson in the white house and american gospel, he holds the american presidency at Vanderbilt University in nashville had be remiss if i did not tell you he will be joining us into an half weeks september 2 to talk about his new book the truth is marching on john lewis and the power of hope which is a partnership of the in jc and now i will think isabel and john for being here and i will turn it over to john. Thank you, i appreciate it and im delighted to be in atlanta virtually, it takes tennessee and is about to bring enlightenment to georgia so we want to see you all making good choices and Going Forward, there was a wonderful moment in the early 1960s when president kennedy made a visit to france and kennedy was so much more popular than he was that he simply said im the gentleman who escorted Jacqueline Kennedy to paris i am the guy who is here to run traffic a little bit, isabel is one of the most apart invoices in america in the broader republic of letters, it is an honor to be here and im just going to pitch some batting practice if you will. Isabel and why is this book not called race . It is not called race because first of all i want to thank you for being here and its an honor to be here with you and its an honor because this is where i was for the very first event that i ever had this is an experience for me and the one obviously about the migration in the south and the history that we often dont learn that many people might not have known and so in doing so i had to figure out what was the term i was going to be using and i dont use the word racism in that book a lot of people may assume that i did because many people talk about it in that way but i dont use that term, the term that i used to describe what the people were experiencing wherever they mightve been, whatever their background mightve been was a past system in a hierarchy in article of human value in a society and the more i spent time looking at what was it like in the jim crow south during the years of jim crow basically from the 1960s i came away with the move that it was the most comprehensive term to describe the world that was against the law for a black person in a white person and to put that together in birmingham it was a world in the very word of god, the bible was segregated in portland throughout the south and that means they had not been touched by different races and when you look at the originating system you find that the idea of keeping people separate and controlling and surveilling the boundaries to keep people separate from hallmarks in many of the things in our town about what life was like in jim crow and thats what led to this bo book. You had a billion fascinating questions, one of the things Rick Springsteen and the country now is a critique of liberalism, not in the red blue sense but in the classical john locke sense of rule of law individual equality before the law and opportunity, your canvas which is one of the things that makes the book so fascinating is not simply american, can you take us on a Global Survey if you would in terms of geography but also in terms of longitude, time, is this is cast innate to the Human Experience or is it an early force in the formation of tribes and nations that seems to me that the struggle against caste, its hard to imagine anything more elemental really. I think is deeply human when you want to categorize and simplify to make sure it is safe so is deeply human to categorize and among ourselves sadly, this can have consequences, one of the things i was looking for this book is about black america but in order to do that and to dig deep into understand how the hierarchy works in our country i wanted to look at the originating recognizable in the world which is in india into understand how that came to be, how the character is set up and how they came back and i would like to do a little bit about things that i found that was the main focus of my research was caste was determined the respect and access to resources or lack thereof or deprivation in confidence in beauty, all these things that accrue of no fault of ones own, nobodys lives today is responsible for the inherited ranking and infrastructure of the things that we now live with of them is shadowing originating that started with the founding of the United States of america on the british colony which is where the divisions and people occurred, in a caste system there could be any number of categorize people, in india for example there was an inheritance and it could have been the founding of the United States and the expiration of the world of europeans where they came in contact with people different than them and begin to categorize the people that they found and in building this country, bringing in people from africa to build a country in the process of doing that, that is what happened in this country, it could have been within a metric, religion and humanism was the first categorization to put one group over another, the colonists knew Indigenous People to be heathens and then africans arrived, the initial impulse is to delineate and categorize with religion and then it moved into what we now know as race as a construct its barely knew going back for 500 years as a race as we know it, color is a fact, it is a reality but it couldve been any number of millennials, and the book i make reference to that type as the designated category would divide human beings up that are also equally dependent upon genetic inheritance, these are creations but caste is the infrastructure of our division, the invisible phone, caste is the bone in races the skin in races the signifier, the queue of where one is assigned in our culture. Is caste intrinsic to the Human Experience that is going farther back in jamestown, is there idem a moment where there are societies, were societies rather that were a gala tehran and the economic demographic cultural forces corrupted that . Every country and culture im not suggesting that all is the same, i am saying there are religious origins and so much of the religions that we see in one of the reasons of the justification that is created here was the story of noah who one of his sons happens to have seen his father and for that reason he has been cursed and is viewed that the africans were the children, this is part of the justification that occurred in a caste system so there is a very longstanding patterns of the humanizing people categorizing people going back to biblical times if thats what youre getting at. What is been the most effective strategies for combating caste distinctions that limit justice opportuniti opportunities. I think i should probably say that one of the challenges of a caste system in one of the challenges that we face as a country we often have not known, we do not have the benefit of comprehensive history of our country and the tremendous part and clarify. I appreciate but as you say i have not done a good enough job. [laughter] we are trying. I want to say when people start to read it i started to hear the same thing over and over again from people no matter what their background was or age or what part of the country, people said over and over i have no idea that this is happening and i lived in the air and had no idea, there is probably someone reading it right now that i had no idea and ill probably get an email and that is because we have not had the chance to hear from all seven of our societies throughout history there are many voices that we have not heard from, i interviewed over 1200 people in the right role i was writing about, they have not been, no one has talked about their experiences of surviving the jim crow system so there is so much coming out now, once we become more aware then we can have a better chance at understanding, as i approach this book i viewed myself as a building inspector, what i would call our country and we are all people have inherited an old house with misshapen walls and cracks in the foundation and with an old house, none of us alive today had anything to do with the building of this old house that we now live in, none of us are responsible for the misshapen world or the broken beams that we might find but once we become aware of what the circumstances are, once we are able to see the bones in the infrastructure of the building, once we received a report then it becomes a covenant to take responsibility for, we are not responsible but what happened before but once we take it we are responsible so i would say thats one of the ways that i have approached this to try to say, it is not about a new kind of language to think about ourselves, it allows us to liberate ourselves from the language that we cant even hear anymore because its accrued so much. The idea of the focus on structure and the architecture and the bones take out the emotion of the guilt and shame and blame and allows us to see what we thought we knew. I view this as an xray as her country of what we could see beneath what we thought we mightve known and i think theres a great deal shining a light in these places that might not up before. Its a metaphor. I would argue a rhetorical device as i have heard as we go through this. A potential reckoning, we have the possibility of reckoning and we also have a remarkable capacity to move on quickly, one of my favorite moments in tom sawyer, a preacher came through town and tom sawyer said the preacher was so good that huck finn was saved until tuesday. [laughter] we have to figure out a way to get saved past tuesday. Talk a little bit about what inspectors from other cultures particularly the 20th century learned critically from the american south. One of the places that i knew when i was trying to unpack and understand this phenomenon and find ways that apply to us, india was one of the obvious places that was very deeply but then charlottesville happened in in charlottesville we saw before our eyes the merging of a symbolism of the confederacy and the people who were protesting the removal of the statue in charlottesville and we saw before our eyes people who were carrying these symbols, the symbols actually cause us to have to think about what is memory, memory as the civil war and of our country, how is it that we are remembering and what does it mean, these people the protesters were bringing the symbol together they were connecting to cultures across the ocean so i became interested in germany and realize that germany was significant, they made it significant by seeing a connection and i set out to try to understand how has germany remembered, how has germany dealt with its history and how does it reconcile it and how Going Forward . Thats what that was of germany and the deeper i looked i discovered things and came across them and one of them it turned out that german democrats actually turned and consulted in the years and decades leading up to their life. I found i discovered the american was providing books that were bestsellers huge sellers in germany now course the not these needed no one on this earth to teach them. What they did they sent researchers to america focusing mainly on the jim crow south to study how the americans have subjugated africanamericans they looked in research the nation law which i must have had existed in the majority of the american state that was not limited to the south so they came the not these came and they studied the segregation laws to see how was it that america segregated in subjugated africanamericans and then what they did, they went back and they debated these laws that were the american laws as they were crafting what was ultimately the common number of law, this is a shocking to the summer is. One of the beneficial global lessons if you go forward, just a few years when they went to india, is Indian Experience informing the movement that was so important in atlanta based on that there, can you talk about what we learned from india. We cannot be talking about anything related with doctor kings role in this, thank you for reminding me. , doctor king went to the work of the nonviolent approach that was taken that he wanted to go to india and he went in 1959, indians had been following the Civil Rights Movement and many were very interested in the people who are now called seles and when he arrived he was recognized on the street and he was greeted and had dinner with the Prime Minister of a lovely trip that he had there, during the trip he was invited to visit a school that was attended and run by people and upon arriving there the principal introduced him to the students and he said young people i want to introduce you to a fellow from america and when doctor king heard that, it couldid not land so easily it ws something he did not take of itself anyway, he had dinner with the Prime Minister and the dignitary and he was a bit pleased to hear that term and then he thought about the work that he was doing in the lives of the 20 million africanamericans, the 20 million black people that he was advocating for and marching in leading the Civil Rights Movement in the fact that that moment they denied the majority or allowed to vote and not use many public facilities that they would segregate in separate or great danger as they were with civil rights, he thought about it and said yes, i am and im every black person in america untouchable because he made that recognition any later spoke about it during the sermon in 1965 about his revelation, doctor king himself made the connection between the indian system in the hierarchy in the United States. What in your view as the most illuminating example of addressing the problems, the injustice of the caste system, is it india . I think because the work that they have done in the year after what happened in world war ii that the 12 years unimaginable of horror that occurred there, in the decades they have worked very hard to reconcile the history, nothing is perfect, there is no perfect answers to everything but they worked very hard to make sure the central part, everyone was on the same page about what exactly happened, how did this occur, they converted the former that their rights and locations into the museums so people would always remember and everyone can be on the same page about what happened there. They also have small plates, brass plates that are embedded in the cobblestone in front of the last known address for the people in the terrorists and the holocaust, they are seated there everywhere, theyre all over the city in berlin and when you come across them because they are embedded in honor of them and in such a believable tribute to people who lost their lives in that horror and theres things that can be learned how did one remember in getting on the same page about what happened. Where do you stand at this point on the capacity of the american experiment, the constitutional experiment in selfgovernment . Going back to the central metaphor of the book, there are lots of metaphors in the book but i would say you think about the old house and after it rains you dont want to go into the basement and you dont want to have to think about what is in the basement but if you do not go into the basement, whatever is in the basement you will have to deal with it whether you go in there or not and you have to deal with the consequences, whether you do or not, whatever you are facing, i would say, i would never give up because as we have seen in recent months we seem to be on the cusp of an awakening and awareness and we have to live with the consequences everyday and awareness of a sense of reaching out and there were protest and all different states after what we saw with george floyd several months ago, every state, south dakota, idaho, alaska, vermont, whatever state there was not necessarily, it was not about race, it was about humanity and as long as we recognize how much we have in common then there is a trance to transcend the barriers there is hope as long as we can recognize our common humanity. Im going to go to questions that have been submitted from our colleagues in atlanta. What were you most surprised to learn through your research . I have to say there are so many things that is hard to narrow it down, i think one of the things that stayed with me is how across century and oceans the have the same culture and find similar impulses is creating a division in the structure and similar approaches to enforcing, similar ways of policing the boundaries of them, what i mean by that, the importance of purity and protecting anyone being in the dominant caste from a potential collision of those who were supportive of the caste, the idea that water was essential feature that was being critical to maintaining the purity of the group so all of these caste systems ended up having that of many ways to maintain and for example in india formerly known as untouchable to not drink from the same cup as dominant caste people into all these places in the United States and they swim in the same pool with the rules and laws against that and there was a similar rule and law and the United States where in chicago a young boy was swimming in Lake Michigan and he happened to wade in a w