Caste by Isabel Wilkerson - Episode 407 - Voices In My Head (The Rick Lee James Podcast)

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Welcome to Voices in My Head, the official podcast of me, Rick Lee James. I'm a recording artist, a singer, a songwriter, an author, a worship leader, and an ordained minister in the Church of the Nazarene. The Voices in My Head podcast is where I discuss music, movies, books, pop culture, theology, and more with friends, colleagues, and sometimes just by myself. Now make sure to let me know what you think of today's episode by leaving me a review on iTunes or by tweeting at me @RickLeeJames on Twitter. And please join my mailing list at RickLeeJames.com where you can receive an email every time a new episode is released. By the way, in case you're interested in a daily dose of kindness and encouragement beyond this podcast, I also run the Twitter account @MrRogersSay where I post daily quotes from Fred Rogers, one of the voices in my head. Well, I guess that's it for the intro, so sit back, relax, and listen to the latest episode of Voices in My Head.

Welcome back to Voices in My Head. As always, I'm your host, Rick Lee James. This week on Voices in My Head because this podcast is about things that are speaking to me. Sometimes it's conversations, sometimes it's music that I'm listening to, sometimes it's things I'm writing, and sometimes it's things that I'm reading. This week it's a book that I just finished, and it is a book that floored me. It's the book called Cast, C-A-S-T-E, by Isabel Wilkerson, and I wanted to share a part of this book with you today. Cast is truly an exceptional book. If you haven't had a chance to read it yet, I hope that today will convince you to read it. I want to share a quick summary with you, and then I'm actually going to share a short chapter of the book with you today. I'm going to share links with you on my website voicesinmyheadpodcast.com as well as on our Substack page at rickleejames.substack.com. Substack.com, as well as voicesinmyhead.substack.com, so that you can find all of Wilkerson's links, all of the publisher's links. I want to make sure and give all credit to Isabel Wilkerson. Everything you're going to hear about this book, it all belongs to her. I don't intend any plagiarizing in any way. I simply want you to hear her writing her words completely. It floored me. It's such an incredibly well-written book, and I think that because this is a book that is living in my head right now, I wanted you, my listeners, to hear this. And I hope that you'll seek this book out. Maybe you'll do like I did and seek it out from your local library. But in the book Cast, Isabel Wilkerson argues that the current The current social and political landscapes in America derive from the infrastructure of human hierarchy developed 400 years ago when Europeans first came to this land here in America. And this hierarchy places whites at the top and black people at the bottom, and that is the American caste system. Although no one alive today is responsible for starting it, we have inherited it. And perpetuated it for generations. And Wilkerson examines the different caste systems that are around the world, how they damage the lives of everyone involved, even those at the top. And she believes that to understand how to move forward, we must examine the past and the racial structures that keep progress as nations at bay. And so I wanted to share just this short chapter with you today that I find eerily familiar. And I think I'm just gonna let it speak for itself, because when you hear it, I don't think I'm gonna need to give any commentary on it. But this has been speaking to me since I read it, and when I reread it, I thought this needs to be this week's episode of Voices in My Head. You're gonna hear it probably and think the same thing. It's from the book Cast by Isabel Wilkerson, chapter 19, "The Euphoria of Hate." The film footage, black and white, rough against the wall onto which it is projected, unfolds in a continuing loop in a cave of a viewing room at a Berlin museum. It shoves, heaves, spits you back in time to Saturday, July 6th, 1940, at precisely 3 PM. There is no commentary explaining the footage. You are forced to absorb the horror of it. In all its banal pageantry on your own. Hitler is returning to Berlin after the Germans have seized Paris in the Battle of France. The camera captures his arrival at the Anhalter station and follows the flower-strewn Strasses along the parade route to the Reich Chancellery. Hitler's motorcade winds past people who are not just hurling confetti, but are so tightly packed together that they themselves look like mounds of confetti thrown by the wind. Soldiers have to hold back the smiling, crying women as would happen at Beatles concerts a generation from this moment. The roar of the crowd is not recognizably human, but the rolling crash of ocean waves that recede and then batter the shore again. Church bells ring in the distance. The children and the men and the women flutter their own Nazi flags like bird wings. The camera closes in, and you can begin to make out the individual Heils, the male Heils from the high-pitched female Heils. A boy is hoisted on a street sign waving and hailing. A little girl is on a parent's shoulder hailing. Soldiers' heels press against the soil to keep their footing against the crowd, their jackboots braced against the woman's pumps, the woman swooning and pushing, the soldiers grinning at the futility of holding back Hitler's screaming fans in a lighthearted tussle between pant cuffs. And stockinged calves. The camera cuts to the balcony and to the object of the throng's uncontained rapture. You see him first from behind, the silhouette of Hitler set against a million dots that are his jubilant fans. He stands like a statue, arms rigidly forward. He leans over the balcony and lets escape a smile of satisfaction. You recall that you have never seen an image of evil smiling. A quarter second of human emotion. He surveys the waving, cheering base of his power and nods. This is good, the look on his face is saying. People laugh in reverie. Jubilation all around, from the balcony and along the parade route and on the packed plots where it appears that every German alive has managed to squeeze themselves in. So many that they are fairly holding one another up and jumping and waving their Nazi flags, a million Nazi flags. The motorcade had only minutes ago wound beneath Nazi banners, a story high, blowing from above on both sides of the street. Every few feet a Nazi banner rose and rose for miles. This is the worship service of the true believers, looking now like mounds of pebbles on a beach, a million indistinguishable bees in a hive. The film played in a loop on the wall without comment. None was necessary. I sat mesmerized and repulsed, sickened but unable to get up. Perhaps if I stayed long enough, I might begin to comprehend it. In that moment, you are face to face with the force of willing susceptibility to evil. The Nazis could not have risen to power and done what they did without the support of the masses of people. People who were open to his spell. I could not stop watching it. The smiling, shining faces in this carpet of exuberant humanity. This massive number of people could not all be what we would consider evil. They are husbands, wives, mothers, fathers, Children, uncles, nephews, all gathered at a ticker tape parade on a brilliant sunny day celebrating what we know to be a horror. I thought to myself, did the German people know the carnage they were celebrating? Yes, It turns out clips of bombing raids were shown during the newsreels before the feature film at the cinema. They knew that the French had been violently defeated. It was 2 years past Kristallnacht. They knew that Jewish friends and neighbors had been rounded up, publicly humiliated, taken away, never seen again. And the people in the crowd were smiling and happy. Everything that happened to the Jews of Europe, to African Americans during the lynching terrors of Jim Crow, to Native Americans as their land was plundered and their numbers decimated, to Dalits considered so low that their very shadow polluted those deemed above them, happened because a big enough majority had been persuaded, and had been open to being persuaded, centuries ago or in the recent past, that these groups were ordained by God as beneath them, subhuman, deserving of their fate. Those gathered on that day in Berlin were neither good nor bad. They were human, insecure, and susceptible to the propaganda that gave them an identity to believe in, to feel chosen and important. What would any of us have done had we been in their places? How many people actually go up against so great a tide of seeming inevitability? How many can see the evil for what it is, as it is occurring? Who has the courage to stand up to the multitudes in the face of a charismatic demagogue who makes you feel better about yourself, part of something bigger than yourself, that you have been primed to believe? Every last one of us would now say to ourselves, "I would never have attended such an event. I would never have attended a lynching. I would never have stood by." much less cheered as a fellow human was dismembered and then set on fire here in America? And yet tens of thousands of everyday humans did just that in the lifetime of the oldest among us in Germany, in India, in the American South. This level of cold-hearted disconnection did not happen overnight. It built up over generations of insecurities and resentments. Some of the witnesses and participants who heiled Hitler and laughed at humans being tortured in the Jim Crow South are still alive, cradling grandchildren to their bosom. The camera in Berlin panned the crowd and fixed its lens on the children. A little girl with a blond pageboy and a barrette in her hair, heiling Hitler, hoisted on her parents' shoulders. She would be about 80 now, and this could be one of the earliest memories she carries inside her as a human being. Germany bears witness to an uncomfortable truth: that evil is not one person, but can easily be activated in more people than we would like to believe when the right conditions congeal. It is easy to say, "If we could just root out the despots before they take power or intercept their rise, if we could just wait until the bigots die away." It is much harder to look into the darkness in the hearts of ordinary people with unquiet minds needing someone to feel better than, whose cheers and votes allow despots anywhere in the world to rise to power in the first place. It is harder to focus on the danger of common will, the weaknesses of the human immune system, the ease with which the toxins can infect succeeding generations, because it means the enemy, the threat, is not one man. It is us, all of us, lurking in humanity, itself.

Thank you for joining me here this week on Voices in My Head. I hope you'll visit me on my website at rickleejames.com, where you can find out more about me, get my music on vinyl and CD, follow my blog, and even schedule me for a concert or speaking engagement. Better yet, even a book signing in your neighborhood. You can find all that and more at rickleejames.com. Also, it would mean a great deal to me if you could write a review of this podcast on iTunes. The more positive reviews that we receive, the more visible this podcast will be online. And now for the benediction. May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing, so that by the power of the Holy Spirit you may abound in hope. God bless you. God bless you and thank you for listening to Voices in My Head.