The Problem With Jon Stewart - America’s Caste System With Isabel Wilkerson

Episode Date: March 31, 2022

The season finale of The Problem With Jon Stewart is now streaming on Apple TV+, so we decided to go out with something light and noncontroversial: Race! Who could have guessed that even after a full hour of TV, there would still be more to discuss about race in America? Jon is joined by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and best-selling author Isabel Wilkerson to discuss race, racism, and America’s caste system. Staff writers Jay Jurden and Kasaun Wilson also talk to Jon about their experiences writing this episode with him.We want to hear from you! Call in your questions or comments to our hotline: [phone].To watch our latest episode, visit https://theproblem.link/AppleTVCREDITSHosted by: Jon StewartFeaturing, in order of appearance: Jay Jurden, Kasaun Wilson, Isabel WilkersonExecutive Produced by Jon Stewart, Brinda Adhikari, James Dixon, Chris McShane, and Richard Plepler.Lead Producer: Sophie EricksonProducers: Caity Gray, Robby SlowikAssoc. Producer: Andrea BetanzosSound Engineer & Editor: Miguel CarrascalSound Mixer: Ignacio BonetSenior Digital Producer: Kwame OpamDigital Coordinator: Norma HernandezSupervising Producer: Lorrie BaranekHead Writer: Kris AcimovicElements: Kenneth Hull, Daniella PhilipsonTalent: Brittany Mehmedovic, Haley DenzakResearch: Susan Helvenston, Andy Crystal, Anne Bennett, Deniz Çam, Harjyot Ron SinghTheme Music by: Gary Clark Jr.The Problem With Jon Stewart podcast is an Apple TV+ podcast, produced by Busboy Productions.https://apple.co/-JonStewart

We'll talk for a little bit and then we'll bring our more erudite speaker on. Not that Jay and Kason aren't erudite. Kason is interesting. Runner up for the Pulitzer, I think. What year was that Kason? 1998. I wrote a dissertation on Ms. Frizzle.

Ms. Frizzle. Come on. All right. Welcome everybody to the podcast, it's The Problem. We're here with our writers, Kason and Jay. We had an episode this week. I don't know if you guys are familiar. Do you have Apple TV Plus, Jay or Kason?

We do. Yes. Absolutely. You have that? Okay. Yeah, I have not. I have right now, I've got Cinemax and I'm thinking of adding Showtime to the package. Okay.

You got to get stars too, John. Stars is the only one I watch. We had an episode this week, The Problem with White People. Turns out it's kind of a problem. The episode itself played out as ironically the actual problem. We thought it was going to be relatively productive, but the white people couldn't handle themselves. Well, I don't want to say this is the problem with the culture, but something, I think it's about the breakdown of the white family.

There's just something there that I was not, I understand that. I was raised by a single mother and look, it affected me in ways that I can't tell you. I've ever been able to get rid of, but I'll tell you who's going to tell us is our guest today, journalist and author, Isabel Wilkerson is going to tell us, but guys, I want to make sure Kason and Jay, your work on that episode was phenomenal. I'm really proud of it. I hope you guys are too. You did incredible work on it.

Oh, gosh, thank you. Thank you, John. Well, my instinct, you know, for a lot of us, we're more comic than man. This was about as emotional an episode that we could even put together just in the process of it. We all had to kind of really hear each other in a way that I think is unusual even for our process. Would you guys agree with that?

From the beginning, I think that everyone said, okay, if we do this one, let's make sure that every step along the way we're checking in and not like in a weird, we have to like bite our tongue way. But in a very like, let's be honest, is this funny? Is this helpful? Is this more helpful than funny? Is this funnier than it's helpful and when do we kind of pendulum shift? Is it precise?

Is it what we're doing? And you look, I relied on you guys. I'd throw a joke out there and I'd look over and I'd just see Kason. All three of those jokes made the show, by the way. But you know what was interesting for me is whenever we got to a point of tension, there was a certain trust and grace that was always in the room that allowed us to kind of chew through it in a way that I was pleased with. I think that grace and that ability to understand that we're all working towards the common

goal is something that you wish you could replicate in real life and real time and real conversations between people. But as we saw on the episode, make sure to watch the episode. Sometimes that doesn't happen. I almost wish there was a documentary about the discussions we had leading up to the episode. Because like you said, John, like so, so many conversations that didn't even make the episode that just made this process like so fun. That's right.

And big swings, man. Like this was a big swing that was like, look, because I do think there was that tendency after George Floyd for white people to be like, is there a problem here? Or do we have an issue? Is there something going on that you guys want to say to us because they're white people were literally like, let me clean this off. Are you telling me this is not the America? There's smudges all over this.

I thought we were square. I thought everything was, you know, we had a hip hop halftime Super Bowl show. I thought we were square. John, you think square and hip hop Super Bowl halftime show, that's a very good impression of the people who were like, I thought everything was cool, Jack. Right. Wait, I thought it was cool. There's still a racism with Crip walking on NBC.

What are we doing here? Thank you. You got white people, older white people saying, I thought we were croaking. I thought it was OK. I thought everything was. I thought everything was crunk. No. But to do it, it really was interesting to say, like, maybe we don't need to be taught.

This is clearly, and I think the Toni Morrison quote, you know, the idea was it's time for us to listen to black voices and just sort of rolling back and showing like maybe pretty consistent for like 400 years. Like this is bullshit. I mean, I'll say reparations, but also give us some Ricola. We've been screaming. That's right. White people are a horse.

That Toni Morrison clip was devastating. My feeling is white people have a very, very serious problem and they should start thinking about what they can do about it. Take me out of it. Devastating. As a black person, I was like, I need to sit until I forgot I was black when I saw that clip. Because it was just like something about Toni Morrison and like Maya, Angela, like these

just. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Power. They've got such power. Leave me out of it. I was like, oh my Lord, leave her out of it, people. Yeah. That was a definitive word.

It makes me wish that I hadn't used spark notes when I was supposed to do my book reporter on Beloved because I did go back and read it. I did go back and read it and I watched the movie. But I'm sorry. I'm sorry, Toni. I'm sorry, Queen Toni. It's so interesting that you got Beloved because I was only assigned Schindler's List and Diary of Anne Frank.

Turns out they only assign you the book about your people getting fucked over. But the whole idea was there's something holding progress back in white people and I thought that conversation would be productive and ultimately I thought it was, and I'll tell you why, making Andrew Sullivan, who played the role of the white person who doesn't understand that this is being taped. You have him on Oscar for that role too. Holy shit. Oh boy, here we go.

But as you drill down to it, I think the racial construct, they create these layers of distance from their opinion to justify it. And if you just keep peeling one layer after the other, one layer after the other, they become trapped in that our culture is better than theirs. Like ultimately, when you really drill down to it, there was no escaping the bigotry of his opinion. Yeah. And it took two questions.

It took, it took, it took, John, it's all you had to say was go on, continue, all right. There you have it folks. The most powerful question in all of it was, and why is that? My favorite part is watching you trying to end the segment and then him saying, we got to figure out culture and you being like, oh, another 10 minutes. All right. Here we go, editors. I was so nervous, honestly, of fucking the whole thing up for everybody that had worked

so hard on the show. Like, because it was such a, you know, there's, there's one aspect of this where you're like, don't platform a guy and he's going to derail it. The point of the episode, literally all we said was white people need to start having this conversation. And that that's what the conversation could sound like at home at work in the car. Like that. Good luck.

Cause this isn't, you didn't want it like, this isn't some, you know, the stereotype of like a Confederate flag waving David Duke support. Like this is a relatively mainstream person thinker who has been out there. And I, you know, look, we had talked early on, like, I don't want this to be, you know, Geraldo getting his nose broke with a chair getting thrown and two grand wizards. So like, I wanted it to be people to keep it classy. But I think it's important to expose that academic patina that is pasted over bigotry, that idea that this is an authentic and learned and studied point of view that can be justified

through some kind of high mindedness and just peeling that away and looking at it for what it is. And there's a new version of I'm helping black people that usually uses that kind of language. They go, no, I'm helping black people. I'm not looking at them as if they're any different than you and me, but they are different than you and me. And you go, no, you keep budding up against your own logic. So part of the reason that I'm glad that he was part of the panel is that the Andrew

Sullivan's of the world are so much more common than you think they are professors. They have degrees. They love black people, at least in their brain in a very odd way. They do in a paternalizing way, in a way of like, I've got to help them overcome their shortcomings. That's the reason why I think having Andrew was so important, why it turned out the way that it did is because I think when we have these conversations, so often just stay on the dog whistling conversation and then it just becomes shouting at each other.

And I think at some point it got whittled down to the point of, I think they can't police themselves. I think it's something about them that inherently makes them poor, makes them violent and it makes something wrong with the black community. It is their responsibility. And it played out exactly the way the monologue said it. And that's how you go from like the marriage rate to being like, and then did you know their skulls are shaped different?

And you're like, no, see, I knew this is where we were headed. Are you going to bring out the pincers? Come on. But that is always. And this is where I think our guest today, Isabel Wilkerson, she looks at it not in terms of race necessarily, but in terms of caste, but the idea that the mistreatment has to be justified through some rationalization of the mind, whether it's a eugenics argument or some kind of divine, you know, this is how God intended, but the dominant caste always

has to justify the treatment in that way. And it's, have you guys read the book? It's a hell of a book. It's devastating. I have listened to the book. Here's what's weird about the audiobook. Sam Elliott is the one who voices it. Really interesting.

Is that who that was? Oh my God. Sam Elliott. Yeah, yeah, yeah. My Lord, I was expecting Morgan Freeman. It was disappointing. Well, so, so listen, guys, I want to bring in now Isabel Wilkerson. Isabel, are you there? I'm here.

Hello. Hey. Do I refer to you as professor? How do you wish to be addressed? Isabel. Isabel then. That'll work. All right. Isabel, thank you so much.

A Pulitzer Prize winner, New York Times bestselling author of CAST, first African American woman to win a Pulitzer Prize in journalism, former New York Times reporter, author of The Warmth of Other Suns and CAST, The Origins of Our Discontents. Thank you so much for joining us. What made you look at the experience of African Americans in this country through the lens of CAST rather than race? Well, you know, it started with that first book, The Warmth of the Suns, which was about the Jim Crow South and why 6 million African Americans would flee,

defect, seek political asylum within the borders of their own country. Why would they do that? What were they leaving? And it ended up that they were leaving a world in which was against the law for a black person and a white person to merely play checkers together in Birmingham. You could go to jail if you were caught playing checkers with a person of a different race. And maybe the wrong person was winning or they were having too good of a time, but they felt that the entire foundation of Southern civilization was in peril

and literally wrote down a law making it illegal for black people, white people to play checkers together. That's how extreme and how arcane and how very specific the rules and protocols were of the Jim Crow South. And that actually parallels with a similar impulse and set of rules and expectations within the Indian caste system. One of the pillars is called purity versus pollution where the subordinated people, the lowest caste people were not to use the same chalice, the same wells, the same waterways.

And the same thing happened here where actually the water was segregated throughout much of the country, you know, where black people could not use the same pools, the same beaches. In fact, there was a case in Chicago where a teenager waded into what was called the white water. You know, water has no color and yet he was stoned to death for having waded into what was perceived as the white water. And that set off one of the worst race riots in our country in Chicago in 1919. So I came to the idea of looking at our country focusing in on the system of hierarchy that was enshrined in this country going back to the 17th century that created a hierarchy

that put primarily British people at the very top and anyone who looked like them. And then at the very bottom were people who were brought in to be enslaved and to build this country for free. And then, of course, that all began with the theft of the land and the genocide of the people who were here to begin with, of indigenous people. So all of this was creating a hierarchy and we live with it to this very day. Isabel, I'm curious if it was purposeful in the sense that if you're building a new country, do you believe hierarchy then is a necessary element?

Must there be in a society a dominant caste and a subordinate caste? And is this something that all societies suffer from just not to the obscenity and perversion? I mean, to give people a sense of it in terms of perspective, the Nazis, when looking to institute their dominant versus subordinate caste, look to America's racial system of segregation and caste and thought it too severe. I mean, reading that was devastating. It's gut wrenching to realize that the Nazis did not need anyone to teach them how to hate that they had down pat. But when they were looking for justification and jurisprudence and a legal framework

on which to build reasoning, presumably rationality, to do what they were ultimately going to do, they actually looked to this country, first of all, for the definition of race. It turned out that our country led the world, sadly, in finding ways to categorize people on the basis of the social construct known as race. And through those laws, I mean, they had these blood laws, the laws that said, you know, if you had one drop of black blood, you were black. For other cases, they would say one quarter of Chinese blood made you Chinese. The United States had extensive jurisprudence.

The Nazis looked all over the world, and it turned out that they had to come to this country. Also, interestingly, what we often look to South Africa as a country that has an extreme case of racial hierarchy. But they actually looked to the United States as well. apartheid followed Jim Crow. Jim Crow was set in motion in the 19th century. And so we were the leaders. Not the great like we're number one to shout, not one of those where you want to get on the hilltops. But it does make me wonder, because it seems pretty clear that the founders of this country

valued the union over the ideal. Whatever our founding documents said, they valued the creation of that union far more than they valued following the high-minded rhetoric. And do you know, was that explicit in their discussions and negotiations? And how did this legal framework come into place? Was it borrowed from an English framework? Who were the designers of this incredibly restrictive prison that we built? Interestingly enough, they actually broke from English tradition when they created this, what I would call,

caste of people who were forced to be enslaved by tying the status of an individual of a child, not to the father, which is what the English law would have said, but to the mother. And what that did was that allowed the founders, the slaveholders, people who were creating basically a slaveocracy to take possession of any child born to a black woman and to make sure that that child, any black child would automatically assume the status of the mother, which would be enslavement. So that's how you had generational, inheritable slavery and servitude that was built into the identity of anyone who was of African descent in this country. So in a way, they actually veered from it and created a new framework for the hierarchy.

But it shows, though, this wasn't happenstance. This wasn't a condition that developed out of some sort of extreme condition. And it grew. It was designed. It was purposeful, which makes it, I'm not saying it would have been any better if the intention had been different, but then the cruelty of it is that much more, our country, is that much more culpable? Well, I think that in a way, the intentionality kind of, in a way, it diverts us from the end result. I mean, in a way, it doesn't matter why the person is whipping this individual at the moment.

I mean, if they truly believe that this is their God-given right, that they were born to dominance, they've been programmed to believe that they are over these people, that these people are not even human, so they can do anything they want to them. So in a way, it becomes so encoded for so long, passed down through generations, that it becomes the perceived wisdom, it becomes the convention, it becomes what you expect to be the case. In other words, you come to accept it because it's been in place for so long, passed down through the generations. Even the idea of race itself is a social construct. We've come to believe it to be what it is, but this is a construction.

When people arrived from parts of Europe, they might have arrived thinking of themselves as Polish, or as Irish, or as Welsh, or as German, whatever they might have been. They were not thinking of themselves in terms of the current day language of race. But once they entered into the hierarchy that was created in this country, they had to shed that, and they were joining into a pre-existing hierarchy in which they were characterized as something that would have had no meaning back in Europe, but had tremendous meaning of power, influence, and entitlements in this country. Who invented this?

Somebody must have made the invention because I think you just hit on something which is, you think of yourselves as ethnicity, certainly, or tribal, certain tribes, or certain things. Where did this idea of race then enter the conversation? Is it at that time of subjugation, or is this something that was a theory that had been talked about and was deployed for the benefit of this dominant caste? Well, of course, it evolved over the decades of the 17th century, where clearly they were bringing in people who looked different from themselves. And they used what should have been the neutral physical characteristics that should have no meaning

other than just the beautiful range of human manifestation. And they converted that into a value of hierarchy in which, based upon what you look like, it would be determined whether you could own property or be property. And that was the emerging hierarchy that was built out of the fact that they perceived themselves to be needing to build a country out of wilderness. They first tried to enslave indigenous people. They killed off so many indigenous people, drove them from the land. And then, of course, the indigenous people had some ways of being able to evade because they knew the land.

Right, they knew the landscape. And it turned out that they tried to do this with Irish indentured servants and others from Europe. But those people could also escape and blend in with the landowners and the powers that be who were the British. And so they found that here were a group of people who could not escape. They were readily visible. They turned these otherwise neutral characteristics into a value that determined who could do what in the country. And once established, as it's sunk in, and you talk about this, it takes on its own momentum, its own inertia.

And you talk a little bit in the book about these scientific experiments where the blue eyes are given dominance over the brown eyes and how those experiments play themselves out. But they set it up as sort of this bifurcated system, whiteness and blackness. And then they start to expand whiteness when they need that. And how does that play into the perpetuation of a system like this? It's actually like diabolically brilliant because what it does is it creates the uppermost group. Is then because of the power wielded by those in the uppermost group, not everyone in the uppermost group, but the group itself. The society and the structure is built around the needs of those who are in the upper group and are the dominant group.

And then that means anyone entering that society has to figure out how do I survive in this hierarchy? How do I survive in a world in which people who look like this are at the very top and they control and own virtually everything? And then those who are at the very bottom have no rights, not even over their own bodies. And how does someone coming in figure out where they fit in and how will they survive? And then that creates this desire to or the sense in order to survive, I must exceed to and be in the good graces of those who are at the very top. It creates this natural human impulse to want to be more like those who are in power in order to survive. In some ways, I don't blame people for the natural response to survive. I'm just saying that that what it does is it programs everyone into the belief system and to act in accord with what is required in order to survive in a preexisting hierarchy, such as ours.

And it's been going on for so long, it's 400 years and they're making that that it has been so set in the ways in which we move about that we don't even see it. That's the power of it. It's almost invisible. And you even talk about how it's also absorbed by the caste that has been designated as lower. That that the people in that cast start to absorb the lesson of them being lesser. Yes. And the dominant cast even relies on perverting some in that cast for their aims to police the others, you know, on plantations and in concentration camps and things like that. How do you elevate a group that's been subjugated like that? How do you begin to dismantle it?

And is it something, you know, you talk about in India, it's there for thousands and thousands of years. And it's not race based. It's just sort of they've decided the experiences you have at conferences where an upper caste Indian woman and you can spot her. You can spot that she is upper caste in the way that she talks to somebody who is giving a presentation, who has studied the deletes or studied the untouchables and walks and just thinks nothing of stepping in and correcting it. Yeah, this is the way in which we have all been programmed. I mean, this is the programming is is in every sphere of our society. It's from, you know, it's from the billboards and the commercials to who dies first in a movie.

You know, I guess everywhere. Right. And one of my favorites was the scholar that you went to. And I can't remember where the conference was where you met him. He was, I think, a Brahmin. He was somebody from a caste there. And he would say, like, I'm from the warrior class. And you're like, he's like, he's like, you know, five, seven, one hundred and thirty pounds. You're like, all right, that's fair enough.

That's if that's your cast, that's your cast. He was a geologist. Boy, does it show you, though, just the arbitrary and incredibly strange nature of all this is everywhere. So we have all been we've all been programmed as to who is valued in our society and who must be protected at all costs and whose lives do not matter as much as we have the Black Lives Matter movement as a result of the recognition of the ongoing quest for for equity and recognition of the humanity of people who have been subjugated for so long. This actually, I mean, what it means is that everyone becomes in some ways a participant,

whether we choose to or not, because this is what we've inherited. I mean, one of the things that I say, one of the the metaphors I like to use to help us to see this is, you know, in recent years, it's not been unusually here. People say, say something to this effect of, you know, this is not America or I don't recognize my country. Or this is not that this is not who we are. Well, that means that we as the majority of Americans have been deprived of the opportunity really to know our country's true and full history. And if you knew our country's true and full history, you would realize that our country is like an old house.

You know, it's like an old house. And if you inherit an old house, if you take possession of an old house, you did not build the uneven pillars and joys and beams. You did not build the frayed electrical wiring. You did not build the corroded pipes that you're now having to deal with. But when you take possession of an old house, guilt and shame are not going to help you fix it. You, you know, you have to look at that building inspector's report and see what is it that we're dealing with. And then you don't get emotional about it.

You roll up your sleeves and you get to work in fixing that. And, you know, while you didn't build those uneven pillars and joys and beams and the frayed wiring and the corroded pipes, any further deterioration is on the hands of those who are in possession of the old house now. It is on people who are here now to take responsibility. And that's where it diverges somewhat because, and that's such a great metaphor about the house. And now imagine that the people who live in that house become resentful and decide that it's actually your fault that it's like this. And they're going to let it go to more decay. You know, that's the thing that is so hard to wrap your head around that just the basic, you know,

you have a founding document that states the inalienable rights given to all humans of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness that all men are created equal. And for a subjugated group to ask for that as though it is a negotiation, the document says, granted by God, not by Senator Calhoun of South Carolina, like the idea that that has been an ongoing negotiation is the real shame of this years later that everybody thinks now like, hey, man, you got your civil rights act, so we're done here. And where does that resentment come from? Well, you know, there are a whole lot of answers to that.

I mean, one of them is that I think that we are in an existential crisis in this country, at part because of 2042 or 2045. That's the year in which the United States has been projected to have a demographic configuration different than anything any of us have ever known, which would mean that we no longer would have the historic majority that all of us have grown accustomed to would no longer be in the historic majority. That is a configuration that no one alive knows or has experienced ever. This affects everybody up and down the hierarchy in all segments of our society. And I think that there is this recognition that this is impending and this is a challenge.

There is language that political scientists use, which is dominant group status threat, which means it's another way of talking about the existential crisis of what happens when we are all accustomed to a particular configuration as to who is in power, who has this and who's to be where. And then that changes. And then what happens when those who have been subjugated and that everyone has grown accustomed to seeing at the bottom, what happens when they rise? What happens when there's opportunity for them? What happens when there's a sense that if people who've been at the bottom begin to move up,

then that diminishes and there's this view that it diminishes. It's not true, but it's a view that it diminishes the role and power and value of the people who have been programmed to see themselves as dominant all along, which is literally the American dream. Yeah, the literal interpretation of the American dream is that is it doesn't matter where you were born or how you were born or who you are, that in this country, you can rise up and go beyond that. And it turns out to be a fallacy. But I wonder, you know, when we say, oh, in 2040 or 2050, when the Democrat exchange,

we won't know what will happen. I feel like we know what will happen because it's what's happened from the very beginning. And I would say the formation of the union, the compromise that was made with the southern states, that black slaves would count as three-fifths, but they can't vote, but you can count them. There has always been a redistribution of power to the white elite. And it happened every time right after the Civil War. What happened? Black people began to rise up.

They began to get economic power. They began to get legislative power. They began to live the dream that this country is supposedly made of. And so what did they do? Chaos. There's a backlash and there's a sense of threat, again, dominant group status threat, when the historic configuration seems to be challenged and people take it personally. And I also believe that this is a response to manufactured scarcity, the sense that there's not enough for everyone,

the sense that it leads to the insecurities that are part of what happens when you have a caste system that pits people against one another in order to survive. And this is here and all over the world. And so that's what we're looking at. But what 2042 or 2045, which every year ends up being, is an opportunity for us as a country to reimagine who and what we can be. It's a chance to incorporate all of the pieces of our identities and incorporate it and make it into a stronger union. I mean, that's the opportunity that we have. What will the country do?

Will people get transfixed on fear and insecurity and the threat? Or will they see this as an opportunity to truly lead the world in finding a way to have a true multiracial democracy, a true multiracial society that offers justice and liberty for all of us? I mean, that's the goal and that's what we're facing. If we can rise past it, if we can recognize, first of all, we need to stop talking about African-Americans as if they have not been in this country since before the country was founded. We need to recognize that this is not when we talk about slavery and Jim Crow, we're not talking about African-American history. We're talking about American history.

This happened as a result of the laws, the protocols, the actions of the state and of individuals in power to keep an entire group of people in a fixed place at the very bottom of society, excluded from the body politic, excluded from the fruits of the economy, excluded in every sphere of life. And that also need to remind ourselves that this idea of African-Americans being mainstreamed into our society is a very new proposition. We're in the adolescence of this effort to reach equity and equality in this country. It only goes back to the 1960s. Anyone born before 1965 was not even born into a democracy because the majority of African-Americans with the Voting Rights Act were not permitted to vote after the majority of African-Americans were prohibited from being able to vote. So that means that this is very new. This is very, very new.

And we have barely begun to make progress in the ways that we need to. And as soon as there is any progress then, of course, as you mentioned, there is this backlash. There is this retrenchment. There is this sense of fear and threat that holds us back. And then so much of it is denial. Denial. Right. And I also wanted to say that when it comes to that house, so if you stop looking at what's wrong with the house and you start trying to blame people, then the house is not going to get fixed.

We're all in this house. That means that all of us suffer if we don't fix this house. I mean, we all suffer. That's a beautiful point. And that's the thing that the resentment, I think, never begins to address. And it's so interesting that the idea that history stops in 1964 or 1965 and that that scaffolding isn't in place is really embedded in people's minds. And we just had it on the show. Name one systemic issue of racism.

A lot of people can be bigoted, but name one systemic thing. And you name 10, Homestead Act, GI Bill, New Deal, subject change. They don't. The idea that if you build something that intentionally over 400 years, you have to dismantle it with the same intentionality. And that doesn't mean like three extra points on your college admission test. Like, that's not it. The issue is that we as a country, most people have not had a chance to know how we got to where we are. I mean, I can say that as a result of whenever people respond to the the books that I've written, Both Warmth of the Suns and Cast.

One of the things I hear time and time again is I had no idea. I had no idea this happened in our country. They're trying to make it illegal. Yeah, they're trying to make it illegal. And they are. They have an idea. That's what's crazy. And not having an idea has consequences.

It affects how people view their fellow citizens. It affects how they view policies. It affects how they vote. I mean, it affects everything. It affects where they send their children to school, where they choose to live. It affects everybody. So it's time that people have an idea. It's time that we all have an idea.

But, you know, these are challenges that that as a country, if we don't deal with them, they're not going to go away. I mean, one of the things that I make reference to a lot is the idea that our country is kind of like a human being, a body that has a preexisting condition, you know, like heart disease or diabetes or alcoholism, whatever it might be. When you have inherited a chronic condition, you don't expect that you take one pill. I'll do this one thing and I'll be good. I don't have to think about it again.

You don't you don't expect that there will be one thing you will do or that you did something back in 2012 and you don't have to think about anymore. I mean, if you have diabetes or alcoholism, you don't say, OK, I watch my diet and I didn't drink, you know, last year, so I'm good. I can do whatever I want now. No, it's constant work. It's vigilance. It requires constant awareness that this is a chronic inheritance,

a chronic condition that we've inherited and that it requires constant work, just like that old house. You don't change out the the replumb or get a new furnace and then just think, I'll never have to do anything on the house again. I'm done. I'm good. We're we're fine. You wouldn't do that. First of all, now I just feel like I've got to go look in my house and see what's going wrong, because I'm sure there's all kinds of things

that are falling apart. But but the other side of it, I wonder if how much the immune system of the country like our information mechanisms like the news, because you you wrote something in the book that was really interesting about the skewed vision we have of African Americans through the news media that there was a, you know, 11 percent of crime committed by African Americans on white citizens. But if you watch the news, it's 42 percent. So those who would consider themselves the guardians of our context

and of our perspective and would probably consider themselves good liberals, good, nice, moderate, liberal white folk that want to do right are actually exacerbating and exaggerating this conflict and making it harder to move past these entrenched feelings. Well, this is where the unconscious biases come in, where people who are of presumably good intentions and see themselves as fair and just people have been still programmed by with unconscious biases. And it's interesting how we want to act as if we don't have these biases.

When we are human, to be human means you have your experiences, you have a ways in which you've been exposed to everything from the time that you were born until the current moment. And that gives you a particular window on to the world. However, when we're driving our cars, we recognize that we have blind spots. We have rear view mirrors, side mirrors. We've got mirrors in the back. We've got cameras in the back. I mean, we have all these protections, right?

But we don't do that for the more significant aspects of what it means to be human in our society to recognize that we have these unconscious biases and that we need to have ways in which we can can fill in for those biases and recognize that we have them as opposed to denying them and then making us endangering ourselves further as a result of it. But is there a more formal process that we can go by that we haven't done through scholarship and and through communication that can start this?

You know, to do this book, I spent I spent a lot of time in Germany. I made many, many trips to Germany to understand what they had done in the decades after the war and how they have built into everything in that society and education and the ways in which they remember history. Is they acknowledge what has happened and acknowledgement is the first step toward reconciliation. In other words, they they have converted the places of horror into places of learning.

You know, you go into Berlin, there's this massive, massive structure that takes up the center of Berlin, a major world city. And that is the that is the monument to those who perish in the Holocaust. And that all of the monuments you see are to those who either perished or suffered as a result of the Holocaust or those who resisted the Holocaust. No big Hitler statue on a horse with a plaque. They are addressing their history and they are continuing to reconcile with their history.

They're, for example, because of their history, there is no there's no death penalty. I remember speaking to a German woman that said we we don't have the death penalty. After what happened during the war, we cannot be trusted with that as stunning. And it's a crime, a very serious crime to display any of the any of the Nazi symbolism. So they have they have taken proactive steps to protect against this recognizable condition that they've inherited. We, on the other hand, have not reconciled that. We can't even necessarily agree on what was the cause of the Civil War.

We cannot agree on what should happen. How should we remember the Civil War, remember our history? We're still we're in the middle of conversations and discussions and and contentions about what to do, how we should even tell the story of our country. So we have not done that. I believe that we should have a Truth and Reconciliation Commission. I think that all of us need to be given the opportunity to know our country's true history. How will we know what is possible if we have not had a chance to know

what actually happened? Do you think, Isabel, it's possible that this is because we lack humility? Germany was humbled. Yes, they there was an arrogance, obviously, to Hitler's and the Aryan philosophy and a eugenics philosophy. And ultimately, they were humbled in an incredibly destructive and and devastating way. And only maybe through that humility. And I'll guarantee you and you probably know this from from being in Germany.

There's also an underlying resentment. Oh, yeah, there's a lot of it's enough already. We're OK. We screwed up. Leave us alone. But I think without that humbling, it's hard to put this country on that path because we tell ourselves this tale of exceptionalism. We are a shining city on a hill bathed in the glories of the Greek and Roman philosophers that and democratic republics and freedom and liberty. And without that humility, boy, it's hard to imagine us

tackling it in the honest way that that you speak of so well. Well, I think that humility is an important part of this, I agree. Humility could be fostered if we came to a realization of of how we actually compare even to our peer nations. I mean, one of the things that I think is important in terms of looking towards solutions as to what we need to do is to recognize that we are all as a country suffering as a result of this. We do not rank well.

We believe ourselves to. And there's obviously there's a tremendous portion of our country that is outrageously wealthy and having the best that any human being who's ever lived could ever have. At the same time, we as a country do not fare well against our peer nations. I mean, we have the highest maternal mortality rate among our peer nations. We have the highest infant mortality rate. We have one of the lowest life expectancies we have among the highest gun

deaths, the graphs that show our peer nations and ourselves. If you want to have the gun deaths, you can't even get all of them on this on the same page, the same graphic, because it's so extreme. And we have to have the lowest life expectancy means it's literally a matter of life and death that these divisions and this history is costing us. And I would I would say, you know, one of the things that I did was I included in this in the book, this this these interviews that were conducted of people in London who were asked to try to guess what is that how much

to America's pay for basic things. So they were like one woman says, how much do you think it costs for an American to have a baby? And when she was told it was like $6,000, whatever the number was, she said, what to have a baby? And then someone else was asked, how much do you think? First of all, they never got them right. Right off the bat.

They never got right. The one person was asked, how much does it cost if if if an American has an accident and needs to have or gets very, very ill and needs an ambulance to take them to the hospital? Yes. And the man's response was they charge for that. I mean, they could not believe it. Now, this is this is a peer nation. We are alone in in the in the the lack of generosity and

magnanimity toward our fellow citizens, because a caste system, a hierarchy such as ours actually pits people against one another and makes people believe that they have no stake in the well-being of their of their fellow citizens. So we are at odds. We don't see how this hurts actually hurts every single one of us to live in a society that is actually harsher than it needs to be because of the inherited divisions that we have yet to overcome. It's like going to a doctor and any and he checks you out and he says,

high blood pressure, arthralosclerosis, pleurisy, you know, bad skin. You're good, 100 percent. Like you've diagnosed all these things and it's so evident and true. And yet we walked out of it thinking clean bill of health were number one. These are ways in which we are, if we're wise, will look deeper and to find out how is it that we got to this place? We need to see ourselves clearly for what we've inherited and who we actually are. We need to see ourselves clearly should be the the headline of all of this,

because, man, truer words were never spoken. I cannot thank you enough, Isabel Wilkerson, for spending the time with us. The book is cast, the origins of our discontents. It is a difficult and necessary read. Really a remarkable work. You have to come back and talk to us again. It's just you're really incredible and we really appreciate it. Thank you for having me.

Jeez, I mean, yo, yo, whoo, right when so hard. To be on mute and not be like, yes, keep going. Don't stop. Another one. I just wanted to be DJ Khaled the whole time. Another one. There was so many inward, arcenial hall hoots. It was hard to contain. When you're in the presence of someone who has that kind of facility to

communicate and that knowledge base. Also, imagine she is the first black woman to win a Pulitzer Prize for journalism, not because she's the first black woman to be qualified. It's just because it took that long. That's the amount of black firsts that we still see or is like mind blown. And you think like that was in Ida Wells? No, that one. Yeah, right.

Have we got to wait? OK, fair enough. It's also wild. The stories that she didn't tell. Yes. Like their personal stories in that book where I'm like, you, I would tell that story every chance I get. OK, that's such a good.

I fucking wish I'd gotten to that. It's that idea of place that if you are not in your place, there is always this friction because she tells a lot of stories about like a plumber would come to her house and be like, is the are the owners of the house here? Like that kind of stuff. When she talked about how like anyone born before 1964 doesn't understand just how fundamentally different America is. And this is a point that I bring up sometimes.

I was the first person in my immediate family to go to an integrated kindergarten, my mom, my grandma, my great grandma, all of them were live when I was in kindergarten. And I never knew why it was so crazy. But in the nineties, we'll say the nineties, the case casting wants to 18 to 34. But in Jackson, Mississippi, I was the first person in my immediate family to go to an integrated, fully integrated elementary school,

elementary, middle and high school. That was me in the nineties. That's crazy. That's how close it was. That's how even when she talked about, you know, they were trying to do research even into this. I mean, it was like having to sneak people into North Korea. She said there was the two researchers, one African American couple

and the white couple, and the white couple, they had to drive out to the woods to exchange research because nobody in the town would understand why they were discussing things together. And this was post war America. Yeah, she told a story in the book about her going to Chicago to do this interview. And she walks into the room and the guy says, I'm sorry, you're going to have to leave. I'm waiting for the New York Times. Yes, that was bonkers and never got to do the interview because he just

something it just didn't click or connect. And there's an interview with her and Brian Stevenson, where they're just kind of like sharing stories together. And that's right. You think of Brian Stevenson. You're like, oh, Michael Jordan played him in a movie. He fought all of these things. But then you also hear him tell stories about how like he goes into a courtroom

and the judge tells him, I don't want defendants in my courtroom yet. And in order to protect his client, he has to laugh it off as the judge and the prosecutor are both left. It's like this isn't something that is like. What does that do, though, to the to the psyche and how much emotional damage, how much trauma is wrapped up in that element? Because for defendant to casually just being black person means that we're definitely going to get a fair trial now.

You're where you're supposed to be, sir. Jesus, you know, the most devastating part of that story is that if the judge that day with Brian Stevenson told that story, he'd be like, we all laugh to have a good time like in that was so funny. Remember that time that I thought you were a drug dealer and not a lawyer? For their POV, it was a good laugh. And the other thing is like there's the psychic trauma there. But then also there is a threat of it being a fatal encounter.

Ahmed Arbery, like he was killed because he was out of place. That guy that was in Times Center Park, he was birdwatching. You can't do something whiter than birdwatching. Fucking Central Park. And and that woman tried to call the cops on on him. And that could have been a fatal encounter. Like not only is it that psychic trauma, but then it's that physical trauma, that fear of you're almost living in a kind of a war zone at that level.

Did you ever see the clip? You guys ever seen the clip of the little white guy who's getting arrested in the airport and on his way down? He's like, you're treating me like a black guy. Come on, the biggest takeaway for me when you were talking about the breakdown of the caste system is also a divine reason. Like the introduction of like a mythology and an otherworldly power, a great chain of being that says, oh, black people like this,

which the curse of hand, which is just hypertension. The actual curse of hand, the actual curse of ham is high sodium. That's what the curse of ham is. Understood. But you think black people are slaves because Noah's son saw his dad drunk and naked? That is. And that held for how many hundreds of years?

But you know, it's funny, though, it just shifts. It just shifts. That's the thing. The caste system can move the goalposts. That's what you the caste system is incredibly rigid when it comes to place and incredibly flexible when it comes to justification. Boy, it's evasive. That's why I think Isabel's metaphor of the preexisting condition is

perfect, because I think responsibility of like, I don't own slaves. You're not in slaves. We're supposed to be good, which makes the conversation so evasive. But now when you think, when you bring diabetes into a situation, now we all seem to understand. We go like, oh, we got to take care of that. I don't want to lose your foot. God, I take care of this.

But people get very, very scared. People get very upset. They're I don't want to talk about the hat while wearing the hat while attempting to put on another hat. But people are going to say that John's talking to a lot of black people. Do we have any white voices on this thing? And that's that threat of dominant like loss that she was talking about. The loss of dominant group status is very scary, just visually to people.

But it's been also made scary. And I think that the mythologizing of it has been made scary, because now you do have this thing of like, it's almost like a doomsday clock for white people. That this idea that in 2050, when that clock ticks over, like run for the hills because it's over, it's it's been turned and mythologized into this negative where it's just like, no, it's just a composition of the same ideal. If there is a silver lining is that in the NAACP, you only have to change color to Caucasian and you can keep.

You can keep all the swag, the same, the national advance, the bumper stickers, all the sweatshirts, the National Association for the Advancement of the Caucasian people. It still sticks. No, OK, we can't give them the the life hacks. Why are we helping? Let me ask you guys, what do you guys have planned for us? I just want to know what you have planned for us.

And I think our Jews flexible enough that I can jump to the other. When you guys become dominant cast, can I jump on that? Look at this skin tint. Come on, I'll if John, I just want to say, I think it is beautiful that you think you will still be here, but also. Oh, that's so funny and correct. We can. I wasn't even thinking of that, but damn, Jay. Damn. We can costumously

fucking redraft you. Thank you. That's all I'm at. We can also do. We can pull what we did with Babe Group, where we just look at the photos and we go, no, if you look at his nose, I'm actually thinking. We just have black and white photos. That's fine. You know what? Just go ahead and I'm down with that. Oh, my God, we even did it with Hoover. We did it with J Edgar Hoover.

We were like, nah, that's a curl pattern. That's a fact. There is a. Don doesn't know this. There is. I know this. That Hoover is really J Edgar Hoover. Yeah, there's the it's the same way that a lot of people who are like very Italian, you're like, oh, you're Italian. What part of North Africa are you from? Yeah, that's right. And when did the Moors visit your town by the chance?

Yeah, yeah, don't get mad. And that shows the whole ridiculous. So the whole fucking thing is we probably all are like every, you know, and and if you believe in the Bible, we're all we come from one person anyway. Like what the fuck? Thank you, John. To our original point, we were trying to get to at the end of this episode. Yes. Black on black crime is American crime.

Thank you. And with that case, I know I rode off into the distance. Good shit, guys. Thanks to Isabel Wilkerson, Kay Son and Jay. Great fucking job. I hope you guys enjoyed it for more, more content. Check out the newsletter, subscribe to problem.com. Check out the Apple TV plus version, a link in the episode description.

Also, guys, Apple News has a little in conversation podcast. They were nice enough to interview me, covered a lot of topics from the show. And I really enjoyed talking on it. So if you get a chance to check out that as well, this is the last podcast for a little bit. We got a little break coming up and going to take a little break, drop some bonus episodes in the coming weeks. You guys want to do some, we'll do a couple of bonus episodes. We'll miss each other.

We got to do it. In the meantime, tell us what you think of the show, Twitter and where else do people tell you what they think? Twitter, I don't know, a hotline. I think we have a hotline. If you haven't been to YouTube. You have a hotline. There are YouTube comments, John.

They are. Tell us there, too. Tell us on YouTube there. All right, we'll be back very, very soon. Thanks a lot. And we'll see you guys. Bye-bye.