Standing before a packed house at The OShaughnessy on October 3, Isabel Wilkerson asked audience members to imagine how water connected Nazi Germany, the slavery and Jim Crow eras of the United States, and the historic caste system of India.
Each culture had different markers and customs, and each system of oppression divided its people according to different metrics, said Wilkerson, the fall 2024 Bonnie Jean Kelly and Joan Kelly Distinguished Visiting Scholar. All three, however, segregated access to drinking water and swimming areas.
They decided that water was sacred, and that water could only be controlled by and used by those assigned at the top, Wilkerson continued. The reason I give those three [examples] is that it drives home the point that you can have any number of metrics, and still have similar behaviors, similar impulses, similar protocols.
In her lecture, Our Racial Moment of Truth, the Pulitzer Prize winner and National Humanities Medal recipient discussed the United States history of racial injustice through the lens of caste. Caste refers to a hierarchical social structure that divides a cultures people by a quality of some kind, whether hereditary, religious, or professional.
The term caste is rarely used when discussing the United States, Wilkerson said, but the hallmarks of the system are present in the U.S. history of enslavement of Black people and the subsequent Jim Crow period, and they manifest to this present day. As an example, Wilkerson compared the treatment of George Floyd with the treatment of the January 6 Capitol attackers. Floyd, a Black man, was murdered by a police officer in 2020 for suspected use of a counterfeit $20 bill, an infraction for which the legal response is generally a ticket and court date. Just seven months later, a mob of white people attacked the U.S. Capitol, made assaults that resulted in police deaths, and walked out alive.
This is not to say that what happened to [Floyd] should happen to anyone, Wilkerson said. Its to say that this gives us a window into the ways in which people in our country on the basis of the group that they're assigned to, based on the identity that is presumed of them that these are the distinctions in the ways that people are treated. Slavery lasted for 246 years. We have not addressed, much less reconciled, what we are facing as a nation and what weve inherited as Americans.
Wilkerson received a standing ovation from a full house at The O'Shaughnessy.
President Marcheta P. Evans, PhD, (left) facilitated a Q&A session with Wilkerson following the lecture.
Wilkerson signed copies of her books for St. Kate's community members after the event.
"A beautiful burden"
Wilkerson also spoke about the Great Migration as a declaration of agency, which was the focus of her book The Warmth of Other Suns. Between 1910 and 1970, six million African American people moved from the rural South to the Northeast, Midwest, and West in order to leave severe racial segregation and discrimination. Moving across the country in the hope of a better life meant many sacrifices, including the loss of contact with family. For many, distance and lack of technology meant that they would never see their loved ones again.
Migration in search of freedom, stability, and fulfillment is a universal human experience, Wilkerson said. All of us have a family member who has, like those in the Great Migration, embarked on the unknown and said goodbye indefinitely to family.
That is the nature of the sacrifice that had to have happened in almost all of our families just for us to be here today, said Wilkerson. And I am convinced that they did not make that sacrifice, they did not make that journey across wherever whatever ocean or rivers or mountains that they had to cross I am convinced that they did not make that journey to find their descendants at war with one another. I think that they have left us a beautiful burden, and that burden is to make that sacrifice mean something.
After a lengthy standing ovation for Wilkerson from the audience, President Marcheta P. Evans, PhD, facilitated a short Q&A that included questions from the community, and ended the evening with sincere gratitude for an extraordinary evening.
Thank you so much for such a powerful and thought provoking-presentation this evening, said President Evans. Your insights into the complexities of caste, race, and hierarchy have given us so much to reflect upon as a community committed to justice and equity, and that's what we do here at St. Kates. I encourage each of us to carry these lessons learned into our daily lives, continuing to challenge those systems of inequality and fostering inclusive, transformative spaces here at St. 做厙輦⑹ and beyond.
About the Bonnie Jean Kelly and Joan Kelly Distinguished Visiting Scholars Lecture
Photos by Rebecca Zenefski Slater 10.