Lowell Lecture
Isabel Wilkerson: Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents
Date & Time
Sept. 8, 2021 at 7 p.m.
Location
Virtual
, MA
Driving Directions
Speaker(s)
Isabel Wilkerson
Presenting Organization
Topics
Contact
Chandler Shaw (shawcp@bc.edu, (617) 552-2203)
Isabel Wilkerson, winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Humanities Medal, has become a leading figure in narrative nonfiction, an interpreter of the human condition, and an impassioned voice for demonstrating how history can help us understand ourselves, our country, and our current era of upheaval. Through her writing, Wilkerson brings the invisible and the marginalized into the light and into our hearts. She is a native of Washington, D.C., and a daughter of the Great Migration, the mass movement that she would go on to write about in her debut work, The Warmth of Other Suns which has won, among other awards and honors, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Heartland Prize for Nonfiction, the Lynton History Prize from Harvard and Columbia universities, and the Stephen Ambrose Oral History Prize. She won the Pulitzer Prize for Feature Writing in 1994, as Chicago Bureau Chief of The New York Times, making her the first African-American woman to win a Pulitzer Prize in journalism. She then devoted fifteen years and interviewed more than 1,200 people to tell the story of the six million people, among them her parents, who defected from the Jim Crow South. Her newest book Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents was published in 2020.
Isabel Wilkerson will give a lecture on the topic of her latest book Caste, followed by a moderated discussion and audience Q&A. Of Caste, Penguin Random House writes: “Beyond race, class, or other factors, there is a powerful caste system that influences people’s lives and behavior and the nation’s fate. Linking the caste systems of America, India, and Nazi Germany, Wilkerson explores eight pillars that underlie caste systems across civilizations, including divine will, bloodlines, stigma, and more. Using stories about people—including Martin Luther King, Jr., baseball’s Satchel Paige, a single father and his toddler son, Wilkerson herself, and many others—she shows the ways that the insidious undertow of caste is experienced on a daily basis.”
Cosponsored by the Office of the Provost, the Winston Center for Ethics and Leadership, the Jesuit Institute, the Law School, and the Boston College Forum on Racial Justice in America.
Please note this is a virtual event. Registration will open on August 25th, 2021.
Recording of this event is not permitted. For more information on this Speaker please visit prhspeakers.com.