>> stacy, everybody. >> coming up on booktv a look at bestsellers continues with pulitzer prize winning author isabel wilkerson on what she calls a hidden caste system in the united states. and chris wallace on the lead up to the bombing of hiroshima in august 1945. >> hello and welcome to the atlanta history center virtual author talk featuring isabel wilkerson in conversation with jon meacham to discuss her new book "caste: the origins of our discontents." i'm kate whitman vice president of community engagement and the honor to be hosting this timely and important conversation. you can purchase additional copies of "caste" from a cappella books on your screen. as isabel and john are talking please submit your questions via the q&a feature at the bottom of your screen and we will get to

about six or seven of them if time allows. is the will come to the point the total surprise and national humanities medal and is author of the critically acclaimed "new york times" bestseller the warmth of other son. her debut work of the national book critics circle award for nonfiction and was named -- as well as the new york times list of the best nonfiction of all time. she's taught at princeton and boston university and reflection it wasn't 200 other colleges and universities across the united states, europe and asia. "caste: the origins of our discg acclaim and will no doubt add to her accolades. interviewing isabel to see thise jon meacham oculus prize-winning biographer. he's a contributing writer for the new york times book review and contribute editor of time magazine. he's also a "new york times" bestseller the hope for glory, the american odyssey of george herbert walker bush, thomas

jefferson, the art of power, american land, , andrew jacksonn the white house come and american gospel as well as franklin and winston. he holds the chair of american presidency at vanderbilt university in nashville. i would be remiss if i didn't tell you he will also be joining us into an half weeks, wednesday, september 62 talked with book his troops marching on. now i think i will think isabel and jon both for being here and jon i will turn it over to you. >> thank you. appreciate it. the lead to be in atlanta virtually. it takes tennessee and has a bill to bring enlightenment to georgia, so we want to see you all making good choices going forward. there was an old wonderful moment in the early 1960s when

president kennedy made a state visit to france, and mrs. kennedy was so much more popular than he was that he simply said, i am the gentleman who escorted jacqueline kennedy to paris. i am sort of the guy who is just here to run traffic a little bit. isabel is one of the most important voices in america and in the broader republic of writers. honor to be here and i'm just going to pitch some batting practice here, if you will. isabel, i'm just going to jump in. why is this book not called race? >> it's not called race because, first of all i want to thank you for being here, and this is such an honor be here with you. it's such an honor to be doing this in this particular venue but this is where i was but the very first event that ever had as an author in 2010.

this is a particularly special attachment for me to be here, and that is -- my first book was about the outmigration of 6 million african-americans from the south to the midwest, north and northwest. i had to look into what was the history that we often don't learn that many people might not have known and so in doing so i came to have to figure it was a term is going to be using and i don't use the word racism in that book. a lot of people may assume i could because many people talk about in that way but it don't use that term. the term that i used to describe what the people were experiencing wherever they might have been in the southcom whatever the back to my defense was cast, a caste system and a caste system is an artificial hierarchy, and artificial

arbitrary rate of rankings of human value on a society get them were spent time looking at -- where blacks actually in the south during jim crow era which is basically the end of the 19th century and into the 1960s, i came away with this view that cast was the most comprehensive term to describe the world which was against the law for for a black person in a white person to live together in birmingham. [inaudible] the very word, the bible was segregated in in court so the south. that means the same sacred object could not be touched by heads of different races. when you look at "caste" you find the idea of purity and solution keeping people separate and controlling and surveilling the boundaries to keep the people separate were some

hallmark of "caste" many of the things i found about what life was like in the jim crow south fit the term and that's what led to this book. >> you have raised fascinating question. when it things were experiencing in the country now is a kind of critique of liberalism, not in the red/blue sense but in the classical jon locke since of rule of law, individual equality before the law and opportunity. your canvassers which when the things that makes the book so fast it is not simply america. could you, take a some sort of a global survey if you would about both in terms of geography but also in terms of longitude and time. is this an inmate, is "caste" innate to the human experience

or is it such an early force in the formations of tribes and nations that seems to me the struggle against cast is something, it's hard to imagine anything more elemental really. >> well, i think it is deeply human to want to categorize, with the subconscious wants to simplify to make it safe. it's deeply human to categorize and to make distinctions among ourselves, sadly. this can have catastrophic consequences the course when taken too far. one of the things i was looking for, this book is about america but in order to do that, in order to dig deep and try to understand how to -- how the hierarchy works in the country i wanted to look at others, one thing was deeply recognizable

passages in the world and to understand how that came to be, how there's are set appear where are the point of intersection that was in their casts a stint at ours. was the main focus of my research, which was caste was essentially determined the respect, since of the doubt, access to resources or lack there of or deprivation of some people's confidence and beauty sometimes intelligence come all these things that the crew through no fault of one's own and, of course, nobody alive today is responsible for the inherited rankings antivivisection what we now live with today and we live in the shadow of the originating want that started the founding of what was the trend of america, the colonies, the british colonies which is where the divisions and the categorize

people occurred. in a caste system that could be any number of connections you could delineate and categorize people. in india, for example, of course it's based on religion and inheritance and then attached to occupation. it could have been in the founding of the united states and the exploration of the world by europeans where they came in contact with people who look different from then and then began to categorize the people that they found and in building this country bringing in people from africa to be enslaved to build the country for free,, created a bipolar caste system. so that is what happened in this country. it could easily been any other number of metrics. in fact, religion and hedonism as is known was considered the first categorization to put one group over another. the colonists used indigenous

people that found to be heathens and then africans arrived come they brought to be slaves also heathens. the initial impulse to categorize started with religion and then it moved into what we now know as race. the race is a construct is fairly new going on about four or 500 years. raised as a know it now, remember, color is a fact. call it a reality but race is a construct, it could've be any number of limitations and categorizations. in book i made reference to the idea that height could avenges as a designated category to divide human beings so that's also equally dependent upon genetic inheritance to whether you are tall or short. these are creations. so caste is the infrastructure of our divisions, the invisible bones, i call caste is the bones

and race is the skin. race is make you aware one is assigned in the caste system from the bipolar caste system. >> so is caste intrinsic to the human experience that is going farther back even in jamestown? has there been, is there an edenic moment where there are societies, there were societies rather, that were egalitarian, when hitler egalitarian and the economic, demographic and cultural forces somehow corrupted that? >> every country has come and culture raises, i'm not suggesting all of the same, i am saying go there are often religious boards and some of the divisions we see, one of the

reasons, one of the justifications for the caste system that was created here was the story of noah, where one of his sons happened happened to come across his father naked and for that reason he was encouraged. people who were the children of ham were slaves. this is part of the justification that occurred in the caste system. there is a very long-standing, long-standing patterns of dehumanizing people, categorizing people going back to biblical times, if that's what you're getting at. >> and so what has been the most effective strategies for combating caste distinctions

that limit justice, opportunity? >> you know, i think i should probably say that one of the challenges of a caste system, one of the challenges we faced i think as a country is we often have not really known, we do not have the benefit to know the conference of history of our country. .. >> i want to say when it first came out and people started to read it, i started to hear the same thing over and over and over again for people no matter what their background was or what part of the country i might have been in. people said to me over and over, i had no idea. i had no idea that these things happened.

i lived in this era and had no idea. and there are some now. we have not had a chance to hear from all segments of our society throughout history and there have been many that we had not heard from. at the warmth of the sun, and i interviewed 1200 people, and for the wook i was writing. no one talked to them about their experiences of surviving the jim crow system so there's so much coming out now, once we become more aware, then we can have a better chance at really understanding it. as i approached this book i essentially viewed myself as like a building inspector. i mean, here, i was, approaching what i would call our country as an old house as we are like people who have inherited an old house that has

mace shapen walls and cracks in the foundation. they have cracks in the foundation, it's an old house, a very old house and we are not-- none of us alive today had anything to do with the belled building that we live in. and none of us are responsible for the misshaken walls or the broken beams that we find. once we're able to see the bones and the infrastructure of the building, once we have received the report, then it's incumbent upon us to take responsibility for it. we're not responsible for what happened before, but once we take possession, then we are responsible. and so i would say that that's one of the ways that i have approached this to try to say that, it's not-- it's not about the beauty of a new kind of language to think about ourselves. allow us to-- and liberate ourselves from the emotion-laden language that we're accustomed to, which we

can almost not hear anymore, so the idea of caste focuses on structure and the architecture and the bones of the thing and take out the emotions of guilt and shame and blame, and allow us us to make it, to see what's underneath what we thought we missed. i knew this as an x-ray of our country to see the need, what we thought we might have known and i think there's a great deal of potential in signing it into places that they might not have seen beforements it's a brilliant metaphor. and i would argue, as efficacious is restore cal device as i've heard as we go through this period of potential reckoning, right, we have the possibilities of reckoning with it 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 even huck finn was saved until tuesday. we have to figure out a way to get saved by tuesday. talk a little bit about what inspectors were other cultures, particularly the 20th century, learned from particularly the american south. >> okay. so one of the places that i knew i needed to go if i with as trying to unpack and understand this phenomenon of caste and find ways to understand if it applied to us, i was going to-- it was obviously a place i was going to steady very deeply. but you know, then charlottesville happened and in charlottesville, there we saw before our eyes the merging of these-- of symbols. the symbolism of the confederacies and the nazis,

protesting removal of the robert e. lee statue in charlottesville and we saw before our eyes, the people carrying these symbols, the symbols that caused us to have to think about what is memory, memory of enslavement, memory of the civil war, memory of our country's history. how is it that we're remembering it and what these symbols mean. these protesters were bringing the symbols together and meshing two cultures across time and across the ocean so as a result of that, i became interested in germany and realized that germany was significant. they made it significant by seeing the connection and so then i set out to try to understand how has germany remembered, how has germany dealt with its, you know, its history. how it's reconciled it as the past and atoned for it. and that's what made it germany and the deeper i looked, i

discovered things and came across things i found, and one turns out that germany genesis actually with american genesis in the years and decades leading up to their lives. i found that america were writing books that were writing books, huge best sellers leading up to the third reich. the nazis needed no one on earth to teach them how to hate. that they knew. they knew that all along. what they did, they sent researchers to america and focusing on the jim crow south to study how the americans have subjugated african-americans and they looked at anti-defamation laws, and i must add existed in the majority of american states and it wasn't limited.

nazis came and studied the laws and segregation laws to see how was it that america segregated and subjugated african-americans and they went back and debated the laws that were the american laws and they were crafting what would ultimate i will become the nuremberg laws. this is a stunning-- >> and one of the beneficial global lessons, actually, if you go forward about, well, a very few years when howard thurmon went to india. is the indian experience in forming the movement that was so important in atlanta, based so much there. can you talk about what we learned from india? >> welcome, you know, we cannot be talking about anything related to atlanta without

mentioning dr. king's role in this. so, thank you for reminding me. that, you know, dr. king went to-- so inspired was he by the work, the nonviolent approach that was taken by gandhi that he wanted to go very much to india. he went in 1959. he was received as a visiting dignitary. indians had been following the civil rights movement and many indians, particularly the people known as untouchables, are now called zealots and when he arrived he was recognizeded on the street and grated with and had dinner with the prime minister so a lovely trip he had there. durling the trip he was invited to visit a pool that was attended by and run by untouchable people, known untouchables. upon arriving there, the principal introduced him to the

students there and he said, young people i want you to introduce a fellow untouchable from america. and when dr. king heard introduction, it didn't land so easily on the ear. it's something he hadn't thought of himself in any way. he had had dinner with the prime minister, he had been received as a visiting dignitary and so, he-- at first he was a bit peeved to hear that term and then he thought about the work that he was doing. he thought about the lives of the 20 million african-americans and 20 million black people he was advocating for, marching for and leading in the civil rights moment and even at that moment the majority were not permitted or allowed really to vote, that they were segregated and separated or were facing great danger as they were

seeking civil and human rights and he thought about it and he said, yes, i am an untouchable. i'm every black person and negro is an untouchable and he later spoke about it on july 4th, at ebenezer church about his recognition. made the connection between the indian caste system and the hierarchy in the united states. >> what in your interview is the most illuminating example of addressing the problems, the injustices of the caste system? is it india? >> i think that, you know, because of the work that germany has done in the years after -- you know, what happened in world war ii, that, you know, that the 12 years of

this unimaginable horror and terror that occurred there and in the intervening decades. they have worked very hard to reconcile that history. nothing is perfect. there's no perfect, you know, answer to everything, but they worked very hard to make sure that it's a central part of education, that everyone is on the same page about what exactly happened and occurred. and they have converted the former sites that have been the third reich locations into museums and places of education, so that people would always remember. and that everyone could be on the same page about what happened there. and they also have these-- what are called stumbling stones. these are small plates, brass plates that are embedded in the

cobble stones in front of the last known address for the people who are in the holocaust. so they're everywhere, they're all over the city in berlin and when you come across them, it's because they're embedded in the cobblestones, it forces you to bend in honor of them and it's such a beautiful tribute to people who lost their lives in that horror. and so, there are things that could be learned about how does one remember. so a lot of this has to do with memory and getting on the same page about what happened snoot where do you stand at this point on the capacity of the american experiment? the constitutional experiment in self-government? >> going back to the central

metaphor of the book, and there are lots of metaphors in the book. it says a lot about so many things. but i would say that when you think about that old house and after a rain, you don't want to go into the payment, you don't want to have to think about a space, what's in that basement, what the rains have wrought. if you don't go in the basement it's at your own peril, because whatever is in the basement, you'll have to deal with it whether you want to or not, or whether you know it or not. you're against the protections of the consequences of what you're facing. so, i would say that i would never give up. i would never give up because as we have seen in recent months, we seem to be on the cusp of awakening, a growing awareness, particularly on the part of people who might not have the consequences every day and awareness in the sense of reaching out and there were

protests in all 50 states, you know, after what we saw with george floyd, on memorial day weekend, every state, south dakota, idaho, alaska, vermont. whatever state where there was not necessarily-- it wasn't at that point about race, it was about humanity and i think as long as we recognize how much we all have in common, then there's a chance to transcend the barriers and boundaries that were built which we still live with the aftereffects of as long as we recognize our common humanity. >> great, i'm going to questions that have been submitted from our colleagues in atlanta. what were you most surprised to learn through your research? >> you know, i have to say that

there's so many things that it's hard to even narrow it down. i think one of the things that i -- that stayed with me is how across centuries and across oceans and land masses that three distinct cultures could find similar impulses as they were creating the divisions and the structure, the hierarchy. and similar approaches to enforcing. similar ways of policing the boundaries of that. what i mean by that is that the importance of purity versus solution. the importance of protecting anyone that's viewed of being in a dominant caste from those who were deemed to be in a coordinated path. the idea that water was a

central feature as being critical to maintaining the purity of the dominant group so that all of the-- all of these caste systems ended up having that as one of the main ways-- one of many ways to maintain and for example, in india, it was the zealots or formerly untouchable not drinking from the same as dominant caste people and in all of these people in the united states, and the third reich, know the allowed to swim in the same pool as the aryans were. and. were similar rules and louse in the united states. cases in chicago where a young boy was swimming in lake michigan and he happened to wade what was viewed as the whitewater and he was stoned to death as a result of that. there are many, many cases of

the strict adherence to this centrality of the water as an element of amend tang distance and purity between the groups. and i'm just struck by how, you know, across time and space they seem to have come to that same recognition or conclusion. >> host: fascinating. related, what do you think perpetuates the behavior and ideas that continue to lead to caste and human ranking? >> again, you know, these are not the creations of anyone alive today. in fact, the caste system in the united states as i call it was not something that happened overnight, it was an evolution of ideas, an evolution of law that the colonists find or fine tuned or clarified as they were building a new nation and so, these are the kinds of things that we -- that existed long

before any of us, you know, even our ancestors were thought about. and so, this is an inheritance that we have to deal with. and so my view is that we are in a space where we are not -- we are not responsible for what we have inherited, but we're responsible for what we do with it. >> i'm not remembering with the question. >> all right. and to what we were talking about is -- henry kissinger once said of the middle east, there are some crises that must be managed, they can't be solved. and so, i guess one of the questions i would ask is, can caste be solved? or only managed? >> well, i would hope that it could be solved, but i presented myself as a building inspector and the building inspector, you've been through

that, it can be brutal. because the building inspectors can find all kinds of things that you may not want to think about and important because better to be dealt with or not and the building inspect is comprehensive in what they're looking at. that that's what i see myself. the building inspector is ultimately makes the repairs or fixes, whatever needs to be done. they're making the report and the extra of the country, and to all of us, all of us, wherever we might be in the hierarchy and the greater the investment that one has in the system, the more resources ones have, then the greater their responsibility and working toward a solution. i would like to agree there is one, but i'm presenting this as a report, you might say, so that all of us who are collectively the owners of this

old house can begin the work of coming together to see what we could not see before and work together on it. >> related, do you believe we need some sort of national truth and reconciliation process before we can, i guess, to use your metaphor, before we can implement the report or is that part of the reporting process? these folks agree with you, they think that germany and south africa have done a better job with their history. so, and i'll leave it to you. do we need that? >> oh, yes, absolutely. i think that one of the-- it's fascinating that in berlin, in prime real estate, right in the middle of the city is a massive, necessary and very moving memorial to

everyone who perrished in the holocaust and it takes up a huge section of the prime space in the city, as it should. and it doesn't-- it makes a point of not dd it was built by a jewish-american architect. an architect who happened to be jewish-american and he chose not to have in i descripter or designation or explanation of anything. it's just there and you know what it represents because everyone knows the history. everyone is taught history. everyone must know the history so that because they know the history, there's no-- there's not a necessity to have all of this additional explanation because everyone shoes clearly what has happened. and i think that the challenge that we face is that we have not all had the privilege, the

access to the full history of our country. so the first thing is to get on the same page and to know what truly has happened in our country and how we got to where we are. i think na a truth in reconciliation commission would be one of the steps that could help us get there. i think that, you know, one of the things that happened, during the civil rights movement much of the legislation was tapped, but i don't know how much we did as a country in making sure that eastern knew why this was so necessary and we had gotten to where we are. do all americans know that for most of our country's history, african-americans had been legally excluded from the most basic form of reaching the american dream, which was to get -- that the institution was talking about called redlining, just specifically excluded

african-americans and explains why we have such a huge wealth gap into our country. and african-americans were only into the home ownership, afor people enslaved followed by 100 years of jim crow legislation. i would like to see how short the history is in terms of how african-americans have been mainstreamed. people who were designated, how recent this idea of mainstreaming and being included in the full body po

potitic of our country and for many adult americans today. >> you have written remarkable books. tell us the story that got you to this point to inspect the building. >> i'm a daughter of people who were part of a great migration. a daughter of people who are survivors of jim crow and being raised by them. they migrated to washington d.c. and growing up in washington d.c. surrounded by people who were part of-- who were children or grandchildren of the great migration, everyone around me were-- everyone was somehow connected to the south. there was a deep personal family connection. people were going back to wherever they were from. in washington d.c., many people were from north carolina, and people were going back in the

summer. so, i was surrounded by the experiences of-- and the culture that they brought with them from the south. you know, they were -- i was surrounded by the ways of working, and it was part of being-- it was called actually you might say a southerner once removed -- a southerner twois removed. >> twice removed. >> you're never removed. >> so i grew up with that. they were talking about they had left and people arrived in that space. so that was one of the things that propelled me ultimately to want to write about the great migration. they were not talking. and some of them were whole, landing in new york, washington, wherever they handed to land, because that's

when their life began when they had come to the place that they had dreamt up. and so, and yet, they kept the ways. the whole thing about even the discussions i would be exposed to about cornbread debate, you put sugar in the cornbread, the whole thing. do you put sugar in the greens, that's a conversation that would be a debate. and i was surrounded by that and that's one of the beautiful parts of being able to tell the story of the people dispersed all over this country and carried with them the traditions and the folk ways, the food ways, culture of the south and southern culture became embedded into what we view as american culture in that respect. so, that was what would help me want to understand the history, of course, that i was a journalist at the new york times and when i got the opportunity to write a book, the great migration was the one to write about and so affected

me. i'm one of these people who would not have existed had there not been a great migration. my mother was from rome, georgia. >> rome, yeah. >> and my father from virginia, they never would have met had there been no great migration and many, many millions of african-americans who would not have existed had there not been other migration. and it's a deeply american story, how many americans came to be descended from people who came from different parts of the world and met great-great grandparents and never would have met otherwise. it's a great person story. my father happened to have been a tuskegee airman and after the w war, as brilliant as they were

and as masterful as they were in flying well-established by everyone that they were, it turns out that they were not permitted to work at what they moved and what they were so good at. and able to get jobs out of the war, none of them were able to get jobs as pilots and so, most of them had to go and remake themselves. abandon their dreams, and then go back to school. some went back and went to went industry school or whatever they might have done and my father went and got a second degree. he became a civil engineer. so my father became a builder and i was the daughter of someone who was literally a builder of bridges and that's what i do in everything that i write. >> when did you know you wanted to be a writer? >> i would say, i haven't known a time when i wasn't. i think i always want. and writing something, wanting

to write. i don't know there's a lingle time i've done anything, but this, a single time. i've never had any kind of job, this is it. >> well, we benefit enormously. last question and we'll let you go. oh, this is a very basic one, but how many years did you spend on the research for this? >> well, you know, it's hard to say because, you know, i spent 15 years on "the warmth of the sun", and i say if it were a human being, it would be high school and dating. >> you can't just --. >> and so this one, you might say began right after i finished "the warmth of the sun", because i had been living

this and every since i'd been using the term past, and the readers of "the warmth of the sun", i've never had anyone say, i don't get it. and this is naturally flowed one for the other and kicked into higher gear, you know, many, several years ago after "the warmth of the sun" was out and i was laterally using the word caste in every talk i gave and it was a part of my personal language and it had become a part of me and how i saw the world so this needed to be written. it's not a book i necessarily intended on writing, but it was a book that i needed to write and now i'm presenting to everyone this is my report, this is the x-ray of power country and i am hoping that this will allow us to see what we couldn't see before and to be able to see past the

barriers that have been erected so, so long ago and the weakness somehow transcends themments one of the best definitions of a writer i ever came across, that the duty of the writer is to try to teach people how to see. but how to see. you've done an amazing job. i don't know if you all know this, but isabel got the-- i think she may have written the new york times review because it's the kind of review that only authors could write and then -- but isabel is one of the most decorated writers of our time and this will continue. so, thank you for letting me spend some time with you and thank you to atlanta. kate, are you there? >> i am. >> all right. [laughter] >> well, it's an honor to be

with isabel and honor to be with you all. and thank you to isabel. buy lots of copies and give them away. register people to vote. do all that. thanks so much. >> isabel and john, thank you so much and join us on september 2nd for jon meacham to talk about the man you see behind him. >> it won't be as interesting as this. stick with wilkerson. >> thank you both so much. have a good night. >> thank you, bye. >> the senate returns today at noon eastern to continue debate on overriding the president's veto of the defense programs and policy bill. at 1 p.m. they'll vote to limit debate. if that passes they'll be up to 30 more hours of debate, if they do not have a time agreement setting up a potential final vote on saturday. a veto override requires two-thirds of majority of nos present and voting. none of president trump'se