Caste: Pillars 6 & 7

Oprah’s Book Club

Part six of Oprah’s discussion with Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Isabel Wilkerson and readers of the book, Caste: The Origins of our Discontents. The sixth episode in the eight-part series focuses on the sixth pillar of Caste, “Dehumanization and Stigma” and the seventh pillar, “Terror as Enforcement, Cruelty as a Means of Control.” Isabel explains how dehumanization is the fundamental leveler that allows everything else in the caste system to occur. Plus, how terror through lynching and brutality has been and continues to be used to keep the subordinate caste in its place. Melba Patillo Beals, one of the original Little Rock Nine school children who integrated the very first high school in Arkansas in 1957, recounts the horrific details of a lynching she witnessed when she was five years old.