An excerpt from Isabel Wilkerson's 'Caste'

A few years ago, a Nigerian-born playwright came to a talk that I gave at the British Library in London. She was intrigued by the lecture, the idea that 6 million African Americans had had to seek political asylum within the borders of their own country during the Great Migration, a history that she had not known of. She talked with me afterward and said something that I have never forgotten, that startled me in its simplicity.

"You know that there are no black people in Africa," she said.

Most Americans, weaned on the myth of drawable lines between human beings, have to sit with that statement. It sounds nonsensical to our ears. Of course there are black people in Africa. There is a whole continent of black people in Africa. How could anyone not see that?

"Africans are not black," she said. "They are Igbo and Yoruba, Ewe, Akan, Ndebele. They are not black. They are just themselves. They are humans on the land. That is how they see themselves, and that is who they are."

What we take as gospel in American culture is alien to them, she said.

"They don't become black until they go to America or come to the U.K.," she said. "It is then that they become black."

It was in the making of the New World that Europeans became white, Africans black, and everyone else yellow, red, or brown. It was in the making of the New World that humans were set apart on the basis of what they looked like, identified solely in contrast to one another, and ranked to form a caste system based on a new concept called race. It was in the process of ranking that we were all cast into assigned roles to meet the needs of larger production.

None of us are ourselves.

From "Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents" by Isabel Wilkerson. Copyright ©2020. Reprinted with permission of Random House.