Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents

Isabel Wilkerson

Aug 2020 · Sold by Random House

About this ebook

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • NEW YORK TIMES READERS PICK: 100 BEST BOOKS OF THE 21st CENTURY • OPRAH’S BOOK CLUB PICK • “An instant American classic and almost certainly the keynote nonfiction book of the American century thus far.”—Dwight Garner, The New York Times

The Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Warmth of Other Suns examines the unspoken caste system that has shaped America and shows how our lives today are still defined by a hierarchy of human divisions—now with a new Afterword by the author.

#1 NONFICTION BOOK OF THE YEAR: Time
ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: The Washington Post, The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Boston Globe, O: The Oprah Magazine, NPR, Bloomberg, The Christian Science Monitor, New York Post, The New York Public Library, Fortune, Smithsonian Magazine, Marie Claire, Slate, Library Journal, Kirkus Reviews

Winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize • National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist • Winner of the Carl Sandburg Literary Award • Dayton Literary Prize Finalist • PEN/John Kenneth Galbraith Award for Nonfiction Finalist • PEN/Jean Stein Book Award Finalist • Kirkus Prize Finalist

“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.”

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, Isabel 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. Finally, she points forward to ways America can move beyond the artificial and destructive separations of human divisions, toward hope in our common humanity.

Ratings and reviews

Its like people dont understand basic human nature. Of course it feels like theres a caste system in place. In every nation it would feel like that because in every nation you have your rich, youre middle class and your poor. And if youre born poor in most places youll stay poor. But luckily in america we have more freedom and the opporunities for anyone and everyone to reach "the top". Also it should be noted the caste system is more like communism then capitilism. In a caste system your social status and job are handed on birth. There are also restrictions on food and drink with how you are allocated based on your "need"/social status. Which if you know a thing or two about history sounds more like the ussr in the early days then anything the us was involved with. Leave it a leftist to compare america to nazi germany. Seems like thats the first and only comparison they do now a days.

I listened to the audio book thinking it would be insightful. It turned out to be simply an extensive series of assumptions and cherry picked information. I as an immigrant who experienced a lot of hardships living in Eastern Europe, and in US, find many of the assumptions offensive. This is propaganda at its finest.

This is one of the hardest books I have ever read, and the result is that by the final chapter my understanding has been stretched greatly. I am buying copies to share with those who are willing to consider similar growth. For me the price of change was sometimes painful, but necessary to better understand history and where we are today. Great book! Plan time to regularly step away and digest.

About the author

Isabel Wilkerson, winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Humanities Medal, is the author of the critically acclaimed New York Times bestseller The Warmth of Other Suns, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction and was named to Time’s 10 Best Nonfiction Books of the 2010s and The New York Times Magazine’s list of the best nonfiction books of all time. She has taught at Princeton, Emory, and Boston Universities and has lectured at more than two hundred other colleges and universities across the United States and in Europe and Asia.