#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • OPRAH’S BOOK CLUB PICK • NATIONAL BOOK AWARD LONGLIST • “An instant American classic and almost certainly the keynote nonfiction book of the American century thus far.”—Dwight Garner, The New York TimesThe Pulitzer Prize–winning, bestselling author of The Warmth of Other Suns examines the unspoken caste system that has shaped America and shows how our lives today … that has shaped America and shows how our lives today are still defined by a hierarchy of human divisions.
NAMED THE #1 NONFICTION BOOK OF THE YEAR BY TIME, ONE OF THE TEN BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY People • The Washington Post • Publishers Weekly AND ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY The New York Times Book Review • O: The Oprah Magazine • NPR • Bloomberg • Christian Science Monitor • New York Post • The New York Public Library • Fortune • Smithsonian Magazine • Marie Claire • Town & Country • Slate • Library Journal • Kirkus Reviews • LibraryReads • PopMatters
Winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize • National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist • Dayton Literary Peace Prize Finalist • PEN/John Kenneth Galbraith Award for Nonfiction Finalist • PEN/Jean Stein Book Award Longlist
“As we go about our daily lives, caste is the wordless usher in a darkened theater, flashlight cast down in the aisles, guiding us to our assigned seats for a performance. The hierarchy of caste is not about feelings or morality. It is about power—which groups have it and which do not.”
In this brilliant book, Isabel Wilkerson gives us a masterful portrait of an unseen phenomenon in America as she explores, through an immersive, deeply researched narrative and stories about real people, how America today and throughout its history has been shaped by a hidden caste system, a rigid hierarchy of human rankings.
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. She documents how the Nazis studied the racial systems in America to plan their out-cast of the Jews; she discusses why the cruel logic of caste requires that there be a bottom rung for those in the middle to measure themselves against; she writes about the surprising health costs of caste, in depression and life expectancy, and the effects of this hierarchy on our culture and politics. Finally, she points forward to ways America can move beyond the artificial and destructive separations of human divisions, toward hope in our common humanity.
Beautifully written, original, and revealing, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents is an eye-opening story of people and history, and a reexamination of what lies under the surface of ordinary lives and of American life today.
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In Caste, Isabel Wilkerson takes a fresh approach to an important issue. When one hears the word ‘caste,’ they are likely to think of India, and it is true that country defined it thousands of years ago and it is alive today. But Wilkerson shows how it has applied to America for hundreds of years, and to Nazi Germany for two decades.
It might surprise the reader to see Nazi Germany added to the comparison until, as the author points out, the Nazis looked to the United States and studied its Jim Crow laws of the 1930s in establishing their own laws separating Jews from society.
The book goes through several phases. It begins with a gentle, literary touch with well-crafted prose speaking in metaphors about a house’s foundation, one that may have unrealized cracks. Then it delves into the horrors of slavery and how the subjugation of a caste continued after the civil war. Finally, it leads to reader to consider how much caste distinction is built into each member of our society. Most of this section is from the point of view of today, least we think we’ve outgrown caste thinking, and much of that is from the author’s own personal experience.
The central section of the book depicts individual horrors we’ve read before. It is worth reading again, but the book doesn’t depend on those events to make a point, and the sections beyond that are worth wading through the center.
Although the author leads the reader into the book gently, it is not a light read. But it is important.
excellent exploration of the underbelly of race and racism born out of caste
“Caste” is the right book at the right time. You’ll find yourself thinking about it during your everyday interactions.
An important book and perspective.
This book gave me a deeper understanding about this moment in history, how we got here. Very important, thought-provoking reading.
I was always taught to treat all people the way I wanted to be treated and saw first hand from close friend about racism. This author explores throughout history how different caste system were in all places all over the world. This made is cry at times and I pray people will not fear others for being different and work together for the good of everyone and our planet.
It’s hard to read Isabel Wilkerson’s new book without comparing it to her previous book, THE WARMTH OF OTHER SUNS, which I think is one of the most important and transformative books I’ve EVER read. This one is just as well-researched and comprehensive — but it lacks the cohesive story lines that made WARMTH so compelling. This one has more of episodic feel.
Regardless of story, this remains a VERY hard book to read. As a White American, I felt ashamed.
The book draws parallels between three global systems of caste: in India, in Nazi Germany, and in the United States. Most of us only think of India as having a caste system since it’s the only one of the three where the word is freely used by both government and citizens. But you will see that the profound similarities among the three systems simply cannot be ignored, regardless of how we in the US tend to use the word “caste.”
In India, castes are based on ancient and no-longer-relevant “job classifications” — that, nevertheless, STILL influence one’s treatment, opportunities, and, in many cases, well-being — for life. In Germany, the Nazi’s used the Aryan race as a model for the dominant caste and targeted primarily Jews (along with disabled, Roma, and gay) as the villains — with the much more evil outcome of the Holocaust. In these United States, caste is based on race — with African-Americans relegated to the lowest caste — despite the fact that race is purely a human-made distinction that has no basis in science. Wilkerson argues, successfully I think, that Black Americans in our society are equivalent to “the untouchables” in India. Historically, through the exploitation, abuse, and despicable brutality of slavery. And now, through ongoing marginalization where prejudice (both explicit and implicit) limits where Black Americans can live, what jobs they do, how much wealth they accumulate, and how they are treated in every facet of everyday life.
Wilkerson paints a justifiably bleak portrait. Her narrative begins with the earliest arrival and subjugation of Blacks in this country. She continues through 250 years of slavery where rape, punishment, starvation, and murder were commonly practiced on a very labor force that was, at the same time, building the wealth of individual slaveowners and turning our country into a global, economic powerhouse.
Wilkerson’s narrative then looks at the discriminatory laws of the Jim Crow era where post Civil War, still-angry Confederates continued controlling and terrorizing their former slaves with random lynchings, false imprisonment, forced labor, and a sharecropping system that cheated Black farmers. She reviews the discrimination suffered by Black Americans performing military service and the voter suppression efforts we still see today — evidence of the dominant white caste continuing its efforts to hold onto power.
In reading this book you will learn much that isn’t taught in schools. It should be a required text in ALL our schools. Because the American history we have all been taught is a decidedly WHITE-washed version. (Did you know, for example, that Nazis in the early 1930s used United States laws as the model for the Nuremberg laws — the German laws that began LEGALLY targeting Jews?) You’ll understand more about white privilege, poverty, and contemporary urban issues. But I’m afraid, like me, you will have to recognize that racism is not just one strand in the American story. It is THE American story.
This book made me realize certain things and reminded me of other things; how and why hierarchy is thoroughly embedded in every society
Excellent informative analysis of the current US caste system -an almost impenetrable System -structure that creates and sustains racist ideas that leads to the oppression and marginalization African-American people.
I think this book is a very important book and should be required high school reading. I never heard these things when I was in high school, or at the university, either.
The language and metaphors makes Caste a very enjoyable book. My life has been profoundly effected.
Phenomenal book!! A must Read!
Not only did this book re-educate me about a country I thought I knew, I was haunted by what I hoped were dystopian elements that are happening today. A must read. I have come to expect excellence from Wilkerson after the Warmth of Other Suns, and this took me even further.
Insightful and original review of the treatment of African Americans in the US from the time the first slaves were transported from Africa to the Americas up to the current treatment and social status of African Americans in the twenty-first century. Compares legal and social status of African Americans to the caste system in India with brilliant analysis and a very readable presentation.
This was an eye-opener in its haunting, tragic, never-ending listing of all of the horrors placed on our blacks even up to today. Although I was aware of many of the facts and practices, it struck me that I was aware only on a surface level. The depth of evil and horror of man (and often woman making accusations) toward a fellow human forced me to step away from the book often and get my feelings back under control. To realize that Hitler studied our southern laws against blacks as his guideline for mistreatment and torture of the Jews had me shuddering. With all that is going on now, I don’t believe much has changed–only gone more underground. To those who rated this book a 1, I would say they want to stay living in their protective rose-colored glass bubble and refuse to see the reality of our history and the present. No-one reading this book can truly deny the horror described.
As a foreign observer of racial tensions in USA, this book immersed me tremendously, and that for me is usually enough. Yet, not only is it the clearest account I’ve ever read about this issue, but it’s nuanced, well researched, there is a beauty to the way she writes as a journalist, and as an insightful commentator. There are too many things that makes sense to me after reading this book, and it comes at a time when it can educate many people who are just now getting interested into this issue after protests against police brutality (which is one of the many ways in which the ‘upper caste’ exerts its power) have broken out earlier this year in the US. Will absolutely read ‘The warmth of other suns’, and will keep an eye on Isabel Wilkerson’s work. I was not familiar before, but I became overwhelmed with admiration halfway through this amazing book. Cannot praise it enough.