Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents

I didn't want to read this book. I did very much enjoy Isabel Wilkerson's Warmth of Other Suns, and I've enjoyed so many other historic books on race I guess I assumed this would be a "preaching to the choir" kind of book that I didn't need. I've also read "White Trash" by Nancy Isenberg and "Hillbilly Elegy" by the now Vice Presidential candidate J.D. Vance to help me better understand white sentiment and seemingly endless anger. But my sister said I had to read it so I did. It's easy reading, candid, engaging and non preachy. There's no angry tone. There's reasoning and methodical stories of caste and comparisons between USA, India and ouch . . Natzi Germany. And still there's no villainizing. Just comparisons and stories. So why was it also uncomfortable reading? Well I like history. It's safe and it's back there, and helps me understand the world today. This is a history book, but it makes the connection and reaches into current times in a compelling, truthful and ultimately disturbing way. Racism isn't over. And it doesn't automatically go away. If a caste system exists, it exists whether it's acknowledged or not. This book presents caste as a neverending story. I'm not sorry that it was upsetting for me or that I had to read in short segments. Do whites really need to have a designated lower black class in our country - or else discontentment (which is a nice way of putting it) sets in and basically takes over? Is this our security? Ouch. Big ouch as in - ouch of a lifetime. What a landmark book. You can't read this and be the same person, whatever race you call yourself. Ok maybe you can. But I'm not. So many good wishes at the end of the book too. "A world without caste would set everyone free." Ms. Wilkerson then exonerates us to "make a connection" across caste. She doesn't use the word love, but that's what this book is all about. Hope and love.

Isabel Wilkerson has hit the refresh button on injustice, prejudice and bigotry in America. Rather than filter a "conversation about race" through a black or white prism the author reframes the discussion entirely to one of caste. Black and White is rarely referenced--Dominant and Subordinate (subhuman) castes are all. Not even the almighty $ trumps caste--the poorest white member of the dominant caste may think himself superior to a successful, affluent African American "subordinate." For 4 centuries Americans have installed and sustained a caste system as fixed and as rigid as that of India; as pernicious and as brutal as Nazi Germany's. This is a breathtaking claim but one painstakingly and systematically proved. Since the second decade of the 17th century White European colonists, later White Americans have ruled, by installing themselves as the American Brahmins and paradigms and African American slaves as the Dalits--untouchable and subhuman. Sandwiched in-between are Asians and Latinos, mixes and browns. The castes existed in North and South during colonial times and continue to this day. Immigrant waves quickly learned they would be assigned a caste in America and scrambled (i.e., bought into the racist premises of White elites) to avoid a life of degradation and servitude lumped in with African American subordinates. The book's first half or more lays out the author's 8 pillars of casts and the second third-to-half proves her point with sociological, psychological and scientific research and testing. There is a smattering of personal and anecdotal information that puts a human face on this sociological tragedy. The negative reviewers hollering "bias" are projecting onto Wilkerson their own shortcomings. The author determinedly and relentlessly proves her point: America is not only a closed, racist Caste System, its claims of exceptionalism are fraudulent by any fair, quantified standard. Among advanced Western nations we have the worst health care, the worst educational system and appalling life expectancies, not to mention the lowest happiness indices. We are exceptional for our complete lack of exceptionalness in every meaningful category. This is an important book. One that unflinchingly details victimization without wallowing in victimhood. Wilkerson not only demands change--she gives us a road map: destroy the American Caste System that makes a mockery of our highest ideals. She calls upon American Whites to invent a new class of heroes. Tear down the statues of the Confederacy and erect statues to Abolitionists, Sojourner Truths, Frederick Douglasses , James Baldwins, Albert Einsteins and every unknown slave who resisted the American Caste System. Wilkerson calls upon us all to find worthier heroes. She asks us to dream an American Dream that is more expansive, humane and decent. For all the tragedy therein, Caste is extraordinarily hopeful. I hope millions will read and absorb its lessons.

Excellent read. Complex events and experiences well told in easy to understand language. Good balance of specific events and their connection to the message. Thoughtful ideas for the future.

A must-read and so pertinent now. Lots of history told is an easily readable and understandable way. I highly recommend this.

"A caste system is an artificial construction, a fixed and embedded ranking of human value that sets the presumed supremacy of one group against the presumed inferiority of other groups on the basis of ancestry and often immutable traits, traits that would be neutral in the abstract but are ascribed life-and-death meaning in a hierarchy favoring the dominant caste whose forebears designed it. A caste system uses rigid, often arbitrary boundaries to keep the ranked groupings apart, distinct from one another and in their assigned places." This book is heartbreaking to read and reading such horrible, inexcusable history while the same atrocities are still happening today in 2024 all over the world is really freaking infuriating! ... It is important to read - a moral obligation, really!! ... This book is fuel to ignite change - to demand it. I love the way this book is broken up into parts, chapters within each part and even further separated by lines for sections within the chapters. That type of organization is really helpful and appreciated. The only reason this is a 4 star book instead of a 5 star for me is because of the two sections that were so pro-Democrat ... I understand that talking about Obama & Trump is an important part of the book's purpose and I do appreciate that part of the conversation... What I don't like is all of the other pro-Hilary Clinton / pro-Democrat talk. And no I'm not a Republican... Without those pro-democrat sections, I could lend this book to some of my Republican acquaintances and they would hopefully/probably read this book. With those sections however, they would almost certainly not go on (reading). In short, this book could reach a lot more people if the Democratic bias was cut out. And it would obviously be really awesome for this book to reach more people ... It is just a couple of sections in an otherwise great book. A very well-written, worth-while book! "To dehumanize another human being is not merely to declare that someone is not human, and it does not happen by accident. It is a process, a programming. It takes energy and reinforcement to deny what is self-evident in another member of one's own species." "A world without caste would set everyone free"

This is an Oprah’s Book Club book. This book will challenge your understanding about race in the world. Like my book: The Real Wakandas of Africa it looks at racism across borders and throughout history. The author takes the reader through various regions in the world that embraced caste systems and racism. More specifically, the book focuses upon Nazi Germany and upon India. The book is nonfiction, but offers an engaging narrative of history. These caste systems serve as a reference point for the author to compare to racism against African Americans. The book offers a considerable amount of detail and support for its thesis. It points to racist incidents throughout history to support some of its claims. Some readers have been insulted by this book. However, if one were to step back and truly analyze the data in this book, he/she would come to the conclusion that this society is clearly biased and that it is underpinned by a considerable amount of inequality. This is the beauty in this book. Like this book, I also discuss racism in my book The Real Wakandas of Africa. However, I also discuss the rich history of African people before racism and before colonialism. Prior to slavery and European colonialism Africans constructed the tallest building in the world which stood as the tallest building for more than 4000 years. Africans conducted surgery on the eye to remove cataracts 700 years ago. They performed cesarean sections in Central Africa with antiseptics hundreds of years before they were performed in Europe or America. They smelted carbon steel 2000 years before Americans or Europeans learned this process. In the field of astronomy, they charted star systems for hundreds of years before they were discovered by scientists in America. Africans also built the longest wall in the world for which I also wrote a book called: The Great Wall of Africa: The Empire of Benin’s 10,000 Mile Long Wall. Too often, this history has been ignored by books that discuss racism, and the exclusion of this information contributes to humanity’s misunderstanding of black history. Caste takes a more global historical approach to discussing racism than most books, and this is refreshing. It will keep you on the edge of your chair and is filled with facts. Indeed, Caste is a worthy read. Purchase your copy today!

This book is engaging, well-written and well-researched, and extremely thought-provoking, as it gives an overview of the history of race in our country (and others). People in my church, a primarily White church, read Caste together with people from a primarily Black church. Through reading and dialogue, it helped us to begin to see the history of our country in a new and transformative way. It made us want to commit ourselves to finding a better way forward, even if just in a small and local way.

It seems we live in a caste society. This is the message of "Caste: The Origins of our Discontent" by Isabel Wilkerson, a Pulitzer Prize winning author. She cites a number of sources to support her thesis, the most compelling by historian Nell Irvin Painter, who says simply and succinctly: "Americans cling to race as the unschooled cling to superstition." The author also makes the point that racial prejudice is not healthy. Indeed, she cites clinical evidence that harboring racial hatred can shorten your life, and ultimately kill you. At 388 pages the book is not overly long, and reads quite well. However, as well as the author makes her points, she often overstates the case, with repeated stories that after awhile become tiresome. Having said that there is much here to be learned, and I recommend the book heartily. Certainly, our nation has been long divided over race, dating back to 1619, when the first slave ship made port in Point Comfort, Virginia, and unloaded about twenty chained Africans, destined for slavery. Up to this point the concept of "white" and "black" people was unknown. The colonies were comprised of Europeans (mostly Englishmen) who did not think of themselves as white. And the arriving African slaves did not think of themselves as black, but as Igbo. Yoruba, Ewe Akan, and Ndebele. White people and black people were concepts that developed over time. Writes the author: "There developed a caste system, based on what people looked like, an internalized ranking, unspoken, unnamed, unacknowledged by everyday citizens even as they go about living their lives adhering to it and acting upon it subconsciously to this day." She adds, "Caste is not a term often applied to the United States. It is considered the language of India or feudal Europe. But some anthropologists and scholars of race in America have made use of the term for decades." Indeed, the idea of "race", is a recent phenomenon in human history. It dates back to the start of the transatlantic slave trade and thus to the subsequent caste system that arose from slavery. The word "race" likely derived from the Spanish word "raza" and was originally used to refer to the "caste or quality of authentic horses, which are branded with an iron so as to be recognized," wrote the anthropologists Audrey and Brian Smedley. As Europeans explored the world, they began using the word to refer to the new people they encountered. "Ultimately, the English in North America developed the most rigid and exclusionist form of race ideology," say the Smedleys. "In the American mind (race) was and is a statement about profound and unbridgeable differences (that) conveys the meaning of social distance that cannot be transcended." Geneticists and anthropologists have long considered race as a manmade invention, with no basis in science or biology. In fact, the term "Caucasian", a label often ascribed to people of European descent, is a word invented by a German professor of medicine named Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, who was so taken with the shape of a human skull he found in the Caucasus Mountains of Russia, that he applied it to the people he believed descended from there and settled in Europe. About two decades ago, an analysis of the human genome established that all human beings are 99.9 percent the same. Concludes the geneticist J. Craig Venter: "We all evolved in the last 100,000 years from the small number of tribes that migrated out of Africa and colonized the world." Which means the entire racial caste system--the catalyst of hatreds and civil war--was built on what anthropologists now call "an arbitrary and superficial selection of traits," derived from "a few of the thousands of genes that make up a human being." In other words, it is based on a lie. As slavery took hold in the Southern colonies, slaveholders began looking to the Bible for justification of their "peculiar institution" and, while conveniently ignoring Jesus's Sermon on the Mount, turned their attention to the Old Testament and learned that back in the Middle Ages some interpreters had described Noah's son, Ham, as bearing dark skin, and thus translated Noah's curse against him as a curse against the descendants of Ham--against all humans bearing dark skin. They took further comfort from Leviticus, which exhorted them, "Both thy bondmen, and thy bondmaids, which thou shalt have, shall be of the heathen that are around you; of them shall ye buy bondmen and bondmaids." They took as further license to enslave those they considered religious heathens, to build a new country out of the wilderness. Thus, a hierarchy evolved in the New World they created, one that set those with the lightest skin above those with the darkest. "The curse of Ham is now being executed upon his descendants," wrote Thomas Cobb, a leading Confederate and defender of slavery. "The great Architect had framed them both physically and mentally to fill the sphere in which they were thrown. His wisdom and mercy combined in constituting them thus suited to the degraded position they were destined to occupy." Writes the author: "The United States and India would become, respectively, the oldest and the largest democracies in human history, both built on caste systems undergirded by their reading of the sacred texts of their respective cultures. In both countries, the subordinate castes were consigned to the bottom, seen as deserving of their debasement, owing to the sins of the past." It would take a civil war, the deaths of three-quarters of a million soldiers and citizens, the assassination of a president, Abraham Lincoln, and the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment to bring an end to slavery in the United States. Still slavery would live on in a new form of discrimination--white supremacy. The white supremacists devised a labyrinth of laws to hold the newly freed people on the bottom rung ever more tightly, while a popular new pseudoscience called eugenics emerged to justify the renewed debasement. People on the bottom rung could be beaten or killed with impunity for any breach of the caste system, like not stepping off the sidewalk fast enough--or in trying to vote. When Hitler and his band of thugs took power in Germany and focused their hatred toward European Jews, who should they turn their attention to for guidance? To the discriminatory race laws of the Jim Crow south. According to Yale legal historian James Whitman, in debating "how to institutionalize racism in the Third Reich, the Nazis began by asking how the Americans did it." PUTTING AN END TO CASTE Writes the author: "The caste system in America is four hundred years old and will not be dismantled by a single law or any one person, no matter how powerful. We have seen in the years since the civil rights era that laws, like the Voting Rights Act of 1965, can be weakened if there is not the collective will to maintain them . . . "Caste is a disease, and none of us is immune. It is as if alcoholism is encoded into the county's DNA, and can never be declared fully cured. It is like a cancer that goes into remission only to return when the immune system of the body politic is weakened . . . "To imagine an end to caste in America, we need only look at the history of Germany. It is living proof that if a caste system--the twelve-year reign of the Nazis--can be created, it can be dismantled. We make a serious error when we fail to see the overlap between our country and others, the common vulnerability in human programming, what the theorist Hannah Arendt called "the banality of evil." "What's most disturbing about the Nazi phenomenon," writes philosopher David Livingston Smith, "is not that the Nazis were madmen or monsters. It is that they were ordinary human beings." Note: While preparing this review, I came across this quote by Nelson Mandela: "No one is born hating another person because of the color of his skin or background or his religion. People must learn to hate, and if they can learn to hate, they can learn to be taught to love, for love comes more naturally to the human heart than its opposite." Mandela, it will be remembered, was elected as South Africa's first black head of state. Under his watch, the government focused on dismantling the legacy of caste (a.k.a. apartheid) by tackling institutionalized racism and fostering racial reconciliation.