What the Nazis Learned from Jim Crow: Author Isabel Wilkerson on the U.S. Racial Caste System

In her extensively researched new book, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents," Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Isabel Wilkerson argues the United States' racial hierarchy should be thought of as a caste system, similar to that in India. In a wide-ranging interview, she describes how she also looks at the ways Nazi Germany borrowed from U.S. Jim Crow laws. The Nazis needed no one to teach them how to hate," Wilkerson says. But what they did was they sent researchers to the United States to study Jim Crow laws here in the United States, to study and to research how the United States had managed to subordinate and subjugate its African American population."