Tanner Forum: New York Times Bestselling Author Isabel Wilkerson to speak on Social Ethics of Caste and Hierarchy

Award-winning author Isabel Wilkerson will discuss the caste systems that shaped America and still define our lives today during Salt Lake Community College’s annual Tanner Forum. Due to the continuing impact of COVID-19, Wilkerson will appear in the forum via virtual livestream Nov. 4, 7-8:30 p.m.

“Caste is insidious and therefore powerful because it is not hatred, it is not necessarily personal. It is the worn grooves of comforting routines and unthinking expectations, patterns of a social order that have been in place for so long that it looks like the natural order of things,” Wilkerson explained in her New York Times bestselling book, “Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents.” The book, published in August 2020, is currently being adapted into a Netflix film directed, written and produced by Ava DuVernay.

Wilkerson, winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Humanities Medal, has become an impassioned voice for harnessing history to help us understand ourselves, our country and our current era of upheaval. In her lectures, she explores the need to reconcile America’s karmic racial inheritance — a notion she expresses in her widely-shared op-ed essays in The New York Times.

Wilkerson won the Pulitzer in 1994 for Feature Writing, making her the first African-American woman in the history of American journalism to win the prize. She has also lectured on narrative nonfiction at the Nieman Foundation at Harvard University and has taught at Princeton, Emory and Boston universities. She has addressed more than 200 other colleges and universities across the United States, Europe and Asia, and her work has garnered seven honorary degrees, most recently from Bates College and Southern Methodist University.

SLCC’s Tanner Forum is free and open to anyone, but advance registration is required. For more information on this event and to register, visit www.slcc.edu/tanner.

Funded in part by the O.C. Tanner Company, the Tanner Forum on Social Ethics brings nationally and internationally recognized speakers to SLCC. The forum enhances the college’s mission as a community-based learning institution that provides opportunities for students, faculty, staff and the wider community to come together for the thoughtful examination of critical issues in contemporary social ethics.

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