Thanks for the response and the sources. I’ve heard of Wilkerson’s work. I read both parts of the interview. I’m not sure what’s original or insightful about this work…People have long referred to a “racist caste system” in the US. bell hooks refers to a racial apartheid. You may have seen in my other responses that the historian Lerone Bennett Jr said the the colonists tried, tested, and proved everything in the plantation system on whites first before the same systems were used against Black people. Cedric Robinson also wrote about racial capitalism and how European proletarians were racial subjects despite having similar skin colors. All of that is caste. I appreciate Wilkerson’s reference to caste as the bones, the building, the infrastructure and being fixed, and race is fluid to meet the needs of the dominant in the caste. It’s important to note that every society in human history hasn’t had castes, hierarchies, and divisions. The colonists looked for those divisions in groups to exploit them. And where they found none, they had difficulty and they had to create them. That’s how and why we have whiteness. The colonists deliberately created white identity as a social-control formation. Whiteness is the buffer status to protect elite interests. As scholars say, whiteness is a cross-class collaboration that thwarts working class solidarity. That’s the role whites play as part of “the cast” in the caste system. This history is outlined in the book, “The Invention of the White Race” by Theodore Allen. The issue we have now is this modern and relatively new thing called whiteness. Everything else was pre-whiteness; proto-whiteness. The racist caste system now revolves around whiteness – which is a negation of Blackness. Now that we have whiteness, it’s not helpful to generically speak about caste systems as if what we have doesn’t have a name and a color. Instead, we need a full-throated indictment and repudiation of whiteness. Going back to Wilkerson’s comparison to bones and skin, skin protects and hides internal organs; skin blocks our view of internal systems; you have to pierce the skin to get to the bones. Skin color is a status, and the skin-status that protects and hides the organs in the US is white. Whiteness stands in the way. Whiteness keeps the caste in place. Again, that’s the role of whiteness, and that skin-status has to go. Then we can deal with the basics and the bones.