Caste

Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents
by Isabel Wilkerson
Random House, 2020. 476 pages. Nonfiction

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 riveting 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 every day.

Part memoir and part thesis, Caste breaks down barriers between historic and current events, bringing the weight and societal toll of segregation and class systems to the forefront of each page. The intense imagery and frank storytelling is a force of its own to make crystal-clear connections between horrors across countries, people, and time, illustrating how these structures manifest most clearly with violence and terror toward American Blacks. Isabel Wilkerson builds a masterful accounting, creating a critical shift of understanding in all the ways American society and justice work in a prescriptive fashion to create and protect the American Caste.

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