America’s Untouchables

In honor of Black History Month, Chrysalis Lab will highlight African American individuals and organizations who have made tremendous contributions to society. We continue our tribute with esteemed author Isabel Wilkerson.

Isabel Wilkerson is an impassioned voice who helps us understand how history can be used to uplift ourselves and improve our country. She won the Pulitzer Prize for Feature Writing in 1994, making her the first African American female journalist to win. She then devoted fifteen years and interviewed more than 1,200 people to document the story of the Black people who defected from the Jim Crow South. This resulted in her debut work, The Warmth of Other Suns, which won a litany of literary awards. The book examined the Great Migration — the movement north and westward by six million Black Southerners between 1910 and 1970. 

Wilkerson noted that the Great Migration marks “the only time in our country’s history that American citizens had to flee the place of their birth just to be recognized as the citizens they had always been. It was the seeking of political asylum from within the borders of one’s own country.”

Her latest book, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents is an expansive account of the system of divisions that govern our world. Wilkerson says racism is an insufficient term for the systemic oppression of Black people in America. Instead, she invokes the tenets of the centuries old systems of caste to explain the racial tensions and structures that undergird all aspects of American society and culture Wilkerson describes caste as an artificial hierarchy that helps determine social standing, respect, competence, and access to resources. In 2023, filmmaker Ava DuVernay wrote and directed, Origin, a biographical drama based on Wilkerson’s book. 

Through her writing, Wilkerson explores the need to reconcile America’s karmic inheritance and our shared commonality. “If we truly want to end caste, each of us, every single one of us, needs to search our souls for the ways in which we may be complicit in upholding caste and stereotype and hierarchy, as our society has so cleverly trained us to do, and to consciously work against this programming in our everyday lives if we are ever to overcome it.” 

Recently, there has been a staunch resistance to teaching the history of racism, caste, and slavery in our public-school systems. Many Americans find it uncomfortable to talk about the sordid parts of our past. However, all of us need to know our history in its totality. We cannot avoid our history because we are living it and we must learn from it.

A vital component of the work of Chrysalis Lab is to aid in dismantling America’s caste system by shining a floodlight on it and helping individuals and organizations confront it. We are inspired by Wilkerson’s works as it provides creative and compelling  context for resolving the underlying issues that plague American society. As noted by Ava DuVernay, “this is a time when we need to be alert. We need to be aware of the stripping of freedoms and rights. The intention of certain people to distort history, to say it doesn’t matter, to say it never happened. …This is the time when we have to push through our fatigue and open our eyes and engage. “