We are living in “an uncertain and unsettled time” that “calls upon us to search ourselves and our history,” Isabel Wilkerson told an audience at McGill Oct. 23. The Pulitzer-prize-winning American journalist and acclaimed author was delivering the 2025 Beatty Lecture to a packed Tanna Schulich Hall.
“Why are we so divided? It’s my belief that we cannot fix what we cannot see, and we cannot cure disease unless we have diagnosed it,” she said.
Wilkerson said she believes that some of the surprise that people have expressed in the face of rising unrest and prejudice is due to a failure to be aware of, or acknowledge, a pre-existing social condition: a U.S. caste system.
“You would not be surprised if a heart patient, without intervention or treatment, had a heart attack. And so it is too with societies: if something is not recognized and addressed, it isn’t possible to treat issues in a way that allows us to overcome them,” she said.
Black Americans denied equality
Wilkerson spoke about family history and the role her ancestors play in motivating her and her work, even though she cannot know most by name. Their individual histories and names were largely erased by systems of social and political power that denied Black Americans equality and basic rights. She provided a host of examples, including laws that had prohibited teaching African Americans to read and write:
“And here I am today, standing before you as a Pulitzer Prize winner, who makes her living doing precisely what [my ancestors] were prohibited from doing.”
Wilkerson won her Pulitzer in 1994 when she was Chicago Bureau Chief for the New York Times, making her the first African American woman to win for journalism. She also received widespread acclaim for her 2010 book The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration.
Wilkerson recounted how her father was denied the right to continue piloting airplanes after the Second World War, despite his success as a member of the Tuskegee Airmen. As a result, he went back to university to study civil engineering.
“I am literally the daughter of a builder of bridges, and I take that legacy very seriously. In the work that I do, I aim to bridge spans, to build links, to join otherwise disconnected spaces.”
“You cannot build a bridge without digging into the two sides that you’re seeking to connect,” she added.
Diagnosing our species through our history
Wilkerson, whose latest best-selling book is Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents, told the audience how deliberate she tries to be with terminology and documentation, seeking to provide information and stories in as neutral a way as possible so that readers arrive at their own position based on evidence. She describes a caste system – a social hierarchy based on criteria that can be listed – rather than using terminology like “racist” to describe slavery, Jim Crow laws or measures and attitudes that persist today.
Another term she finds useful, notably when approaching both history and the present, is “species.”
“Speaking of ourselves as a species connects us to other species and to our responsibility to take care of the one planet that we have,” she said.
Species also allows her to approach social ills much like scientists or physicians work to diagnose a disease.
The building inspector
Wilkerson’s diagnostic work has led people to ask her for a cure. But that’s not her job, she said, likening her role to that of a building inspector:
“It is not the job of the building inspector to fix the house, she said, adding, “I would also say that, as someone who is descended from people who were held in a fixed place at the bottom, that it is not our responsibility to fix a problem that we did not create,” a statement that earned much applause from the audience.
“No one was held to account for 246 years of slavery or the ruptures caused by the Civil War. Instead, there are monuments built to [Confederate leaders]. Because we have not addressed – much less reconciled ourselves with this history – we actually saw a Confederate flag inside the United States Capitol in January of 2021.”
A need for ‘radical empathy’
While rejecting calls for her to prescribe a fix to ailing societies, Wilkerson did offer some healing perspectives, including “radical empathy”:
“That means putting in the work to educate oneself, to learn history and to listen with a humble heart. It is to understand another’s experience from their perspective, and not as we imagine that we would feel.”
She also suggested taking a lesson from the COVID virus, which emerged affecting all members of the human species:
“It did not care about colour. It did not care about nationality, immigrant status, gender, borders or passports. COVID saw all humans for what we actually are: one interconnected and interdependent species.”
Wilkerson’s full address, as well as her subsequent exchange with CBC journalist and Ideas host Nahlah Ayed will be broadcast on the radio show Nov. 3. It will also be available through the show’s website and podcast platforms.