Santilla Chingaipe : Are ‘race’ and ‘caste’ synonymous, or are they mutually exclusive?
Isabel Wilkerson : In the ways that I am hoping and urging us to see past what we are accustomed to seeing and to recognise that we can learn so much when we look from the perspective of the infrastructure of the society, to recognise that a society, or a hierarchy, a caste system, can use any number of metrics in determining the arbitrary nature of division. These things are arbitrary; this is not real. I mean, this is like, you choose a particular characteristic and you need to get the work done and you use this characteristic as a thing that will assign an entire group to the bottom and lift up another group to the very top. And so, the idea of race, one way of looking at it, is that caste is the bones of the infrastructure of a society, it is more of a universal impulse to rank and divide and to keep people in a fixed place to have a hierarchy to have a ladder of value assigned to people in a particular society, and you can use any number of metrics in doing that. It just so happened that this was the metric that was convenient for European colonists, and I’m speaking about the United States and the English colonists in particular. Of course, this also created, between colonisation and enslavement, created essentially a global caste system that was based upon the standards that were set by those who had the power to colonise and to enslave. And that’s what we all have inherited as a species.
Isabel Wilkerson : In the ways that I am hoping and urging us to see past what we are accustomed to seeing and to recognise that we can learn so much when we look from the perspective of the infrastructure of the society, to recognise that a society, or a hierarchy, a caste system, can use any number of metrics in determining the arbitrary nature of division. These things are arbitrary; this is not real. I mean, this is like, you choose a particular characteristic and you need to get the work done and you use this characteristic as a thing that will assign an entire group to the bottom and lift up another group to the very top. And so, the idea of race, one way of looking at it, is that caste is the bones of the infrastructure of a society, it is more of a universal impulse to rank and divide and to keep people in a fixed place to have a hierarchy to have a ladder of value assigned to people in a particular society, and you can use any number of metrics in doing that. It just so happened that this was the metric that was convenient for European colonists, and I’m speaking about the United States and the English colonists in particular. Of course, this also created, between colonisation and enslavement, created essentially a global caste system that was based upon the standards that were set by those who had the power to colonise and to enslave. And that’s what we all have inherited as a species.
'Caste' (extract)
Recorded 1 May 2021 Sydney Writers Festival
Skylight guillotine at Sinclair Gallery, Castlemaine Art Museum
detail
A Person Looks At A Work Of Art/
someone looks at something...
LOGOS/HA HA
A Person Looks At A Work Of Art/
someone looks at something...
LOGOS/HA HA
