Article By Tara Jenkins // EEW Magazine Online // Book Buzz

Oprah Winfrey is using her 86th Oprah’s Book Club selection to address systemic racism against Black people in America. She has chosen the book "Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents" by Pulitzer Prize-winning author Isabel Wilkerson.

Wilkerson refers to America as having a "caste" system, a made-up hierarchy used to determine ranking, respect, depictions of beauty and intelligence, and who gets access to resources.

In an interview with the esteemed author on “CBS This Morning,” Winfrey called the book “the most important book, the most essential book, the most necessary-for-all-humanity book that I have ever chosen.”

The 66-year-old OWN CEO said she is purchasing 500 copies of “Caste” to send to every U.S. governor, the top 100 mayors, the top 100 CEO’s of companies, and college professors at the top 100 colleges.

“It is necessary for people who are leaders in our country to understand the origin of our discontents and what caste really means,” said Winfrey, who featured Breonna Taylor on the latest cover of OWN Magazine. Winfrey wrote a piece calling for justice for the 26-year-old emergency medical technician and aspiring nurse killed by police in a botched raid in Louisville, KY.

As America is forced to grapple with its history of racism and oppression of Black people in the wake of the murder of 46-year-old George Floyd, an unarmed Black man killed by Minneapolis police officer, Derek Chauvin, who kneeled on his neck for more than eight minutes, conversations about race in America have taken center stage.

Gayle King, co-host of “CBS This Morning,” who facilitated the interview between Winfrey and Wilkerson, said, “I never thought of the U.S. as having a caste system, but after reading your book, I see it so clearly. And I’m not sure I like what I see, Isabel.”

Wilkerson, 59, who is the first woman of African-American heritage to win the Pulitzer Prize in journalism, said, “This is not a book that I wanted to write. This is a book that compelled me, that called to me, that I felt I had no choice but to write it.”

Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Isabel Wilkerson receives the National Humanities Medal from President Barack Obama (Susan Walsh | AP)

Wilkerson continued, “I ended up working on this because it seemed that there were things going on that only caste could really explain.”

Even with all of America’s failings, the writer noted, “We have actually made so much progress when it comes to things we consider to be traditional, old school racism of the Klansmen of the late 19th century and early 20th century.”

Yet, she said, “There is something else that is percolating underneath all of what we can see.”

Winfrey chimed in, “What’s so extraordinary is the comparison of the American caste system, the system in Nazi Germany, and also in India. How did you come to that?”

Wilkerson replied, “Caste is something that we applied to India – the original caste system – so that was the first place I was going to look. And then, after Charlottesville, Charlottesville pulled me into another direction because in that moment, we saw the symbolism of both the Confederacy and Nazi symbols coming together, converging, and the ralliers who had, themselves, made this connection. And that propelled me, inspired me to go and look at the history of Germany. And how do they remember their past? What have they done in the intervening decades to reconcile that past and atone for it, and what can we learn from it?”

In Charlottesville, VA, deadly violence broke out Aug. 12, 2019 when hundreds of white nationalists and their supporters staged a protest to preserve a Confederate statue and clashed with counter-protesters. During the “Unite the Right” rally, a vehicle driven by James Alex Fields Jr. was deliberately plowed into a crowd of counter-protesters, killing 32-year-old Heather Heyer and injuring more than a dozen others.

Examples like Charlottesville make it clear that however far we have come as a nation, we have a long way yet to go.

To make the need for urgent changes in America clear, Wilkerson uses the analogy of an old house to depict the U.S.—something Winfrey and King said they found fascinating.

“I present our country as an old house, and when you have an old house you know that there’s always work to be done on it,” explained Wilkerson. “And when, after a rain, you do not want to go into that basement sometimes, because you don’t want to know what you might face there. But whatever is there, you’re going to have to deal with, whether you wish to or not. It’s never going away until you address it.”

Watch the full interview where the trio addresses racism and prepare America to reckon with it through “Caste.”