Television mogul Oprah Winfrey described the United States as having a “caste system” that was the “template for Nazi Germany.”
“How did you decide to focus the book on three caste systems: India, Nazi Germany, and the United States?” Winfrey asked during a discussion on her Apple TV series with Isabel Wilkerson, the author of Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents. “I think a lot of people get riled up and offended that you’re comparing the caste system here to Nazi Germany, yet we discover that we were the template for Nazi Germany.”
Winfrey and Wilkerson made the case that Adolf Hitler was inspired by the eugenics movement in the U.S. and alleged that America’s racial “caste system” includes “systemic racism” and “microaggressions.”
“It’s one of the most profound and important books I’ve ever read,” Winfrey said of Wilkerson’s book. “You will never see our country, our culture, even our individual selves the same way again.”
Wilkerson told Winfrey that she was inspired to write the book in part by the death of Trayvon Martin in 2012, which was a “reminder of one of the characteristics of a caste system” that “people are to remain in their place.”
“[Trayvon] was seen as not appropriate to the location where he happened to be,” Wilkerson said, explaining that Martin was killed because of his skin color as Winfrey nodded in agreement.
At one point in the interview, Oprah spoke specifically to people who say they don’t have anything to do with slavery because their ancestors never owned slaves. She cited a passage from Wilkerson’s book where she describes white people in America today as “homeowners who inherited a house on a piece of land that is beautiful on the outside, but whose soil is unstable loam and rock, heaving and contracting over generations, cracks patched but the deeper ruptures waved away for decades, centuries even.”
“Our immediate ancestors may have had nothing to do with it, but here we are, the current occupants of a property with stress cracks and bowed walls and fissures built into the foundation,” the passage continues.
Winfrey also repeated the widely debunked claim that President Trump referred to neo-Nazis in Charlottesville in 2017 as “very fine people.”
Earlier this year, Oprah derided “whiteness” in America, making the case that all white people in the country “have a leg up.”
“There are white people who are not as powerful as the system of white people — the caste system that’s been put in place — but they still, no matter where they are on the rung or the ladder of success, they still have their whiteness,” Winfrey said. “Whites have a leg up. You still have your whiteness. That’s what the term ‘white privilege’ is. It means that whiteness still gives you an advantage, no matter.”
