Free Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents by Isabel Wilkerson Page A

can’t talk with you now. I’ll have to talk with you some other time.”
    â€œBut I am with The New York Times, ” I told him, pen and notebook in hand. “I talked with you on the phone. I’m the one who made the appointment with you for four-thirty.”
    â€œWhat’s the name?”
    â€œIsabel Wilkerson with The New York Times .”
    â€œHow do I know that?” he shot back, growing impatient. “Look, I said I don’t have time to talk with you right now. She’ll be here any minute.”
    He looked to the front entrance and again at his watch.
    â€œBut I am Isabel. We should be having the interview right now.”
    He let out a sigh. “What kind of identification do you have? Do you have a business card?”
    This was the last interview for the piece, and I had handed them all out by the time I got to him.
    â€œI’ve been interviewing all day,” I told him. “I happen to be out of them now.”
    â€œWhat about ID? You have a license on you?”
    â€œI shouldn’t have to show you my license, but here it is.”
    He gave it a cursory look.
    â€œYou don’t have anything that has The New York Times on it?”
    â€œWhy would I be here if I weren’t here to interview you? All of this time has passed. We’ve been standing here, and no one else has shown up.”
    â€œShe must be running late. I’m going to have to ask you to leave so I can get ready for my appointment.”
    I left and walked back to the Times bureau, dazed and incensed, trying to figure out what had just happened. This was the first time I had ever been accused of impersonating myself. His caste notions of who should be doing what in society had so blinded him that he dismissed the idea that the reporter he was anxiously awaiting, excited to talk to, was standing right in front him. It seemed not to occur to him that a New York Times national correspondent could come in a container such as mine, despite every indication that I was she.
    The story ran that Sunday. Because I had not been able to interview him, he didn’t get a mention. It would have amounted to a nice bit of publicity for him, but the other interviews made it unnecessary in the end. I sent him a clip of the piece along with the business card that he had asked for. To this day, I won’t step inside that retailer. I will not mention the name, not because of censorship or a desire to protect any company’s reputation, but because of our cultural tendency to believe that if we just identify the presumed-to-be-rare offending outlier, we will have rooted out the problem. The problem could have happened anyplace, because the problem is, in fact, at the root .

CHAPTER SIX
The Measure of Humanity
    In a parallel universe with laws of nature similar to our own, a conquering people with powerful weaponry journeyed across the oceans and discovered people who looked different from themselves. They were startled to chance upon humans who towered above them, were taller than any humans they had ever seen before. They did not know what to make of this discovery. They had thought of, and measured themselves as, the standard for human existence. But the indigenous people they saw were at the outer limits of a particular human trait: their height. Even the women averaged over six feet, some of the men approached seven. The well-armed explorers were the opposite. Their weapons were deadly, and their bodies were closer to the ground.
    At this moment in human history, as the world was being claimed by competing tribes of the well-armed, two peoples who were at the extremes of a highly visible yet arbitrary human characteristic—being tall or short—were confronting each other for the first time. A tribe of the shortest humans were now face-to-face with the tallest. Those with the most advanced weapons prevailed and found use for the tallest people. They decided to transport them to the New