by Matthew Smith
Pulitzer Prize winner, National Humanities Medal recipient, and New York Times best seller Isabel Wilkerson called for togetherness during the 29th Society for Social Work and Research annual conference presidential plenary, all while holding a mirror to America’s history and past.
Wilkerson discussed her latest book, “Caste: The Origins of Our Discontent” and described how America’s own caste systems — slavery and Jim Crow — have shaped the country today.

“Caste is not a word that is often applied to the United States, but there are many people who have used this language before,” Wilkerson said. “Caste is essentially an artificial, arbitrary, graded ranking of human value in society. In our country, the metric that the early colonists chose to use to divide and rank people, to determine who would be slave or free, who would have rights or no rights … (was what) we have come to accept as race.
“Slavery became the foundation of a hierarchy built on greed and exploitation, was succeeded by Jim Crow, and manifests in the current day.”
Wilkerson said that understanding this past and how people in the United States have been treated inconsistently based on the way they look explains the differences in how people are treated today. One example she provided was the stark contrast of the treatment of Jan. 6, 2021, rioters in the nation’s capital and the murder of George Floyd just a year prior.
“We have not addressed, much less reconciled, what we are facing as a nation or what we have inherited as Americans,” she said.
“Karmic moment of truth”
While Wilkerson doesn’t ask for others to forget the past, she does stress the importance of learning from it and working together for a better future.
“We are all in this together and it is time that we started to act like it,” she said. “This is the country’s karmic moment of truth. Will it follow the path of darkness and division, of hate and of hierarchy that have driven us for centuries, or will it find a way to rise to what Dr. King called ‘the heights of the majestic’ and to live up to its creed and defend true democracy, freedom, liberty and justice for every single one of us?”
Wilkerson took questions from University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Social Work Dean Ramona Denby-Brinson — some even posed by Carolina students. When asked about current social movements, Wilkerson told Denby-Brinson she sees current movements as a backswing of a pendulum.
“It’s a pendulum that swings and as it swings, there’s a response to … the advancements that occur,” Wilkerson said. “It’s not a straight arrow toward one specific goal. I believe we’re in a time where people are having to come to grips with the fact that things we thought were written in granite are in fact just a draft of what was possible. We are having to reconcile and figure out what it means when the closely held gains that we (believed) to be the law of the land are so easily erased as have occurred in the last 10 years or so.”
Despite these challenges, Wilkerson left the crowd with hope for the future.
“There is in fact good and decency in the world when we fret that there is none,” she said. “That even out of power, and especially more so out of power, people can do great good in the world if we can find our purpose and calling. Patience, kindness, compassion and tenacity are superpowers that take time to bear fruit, but last beyond the whims of any moment.”
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