Knowingo
The cover of Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents

Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents

Isabel Wilkerson, 2020

America has a hidden caste system, a ranking of human value it shares with India and Nazi Germany, built on eight pillars and still shaping health, politics and daily life.

Get the app Read on the web

9 parts, about 28 minutes to read.

Why read it

  • Argues that American racism works as a caste system, closer to India and Nazi Germany than we assume
  • Gives you a framework of eight pillars for spotting hierarchy in daily life, politics and workplaces
  • Joins history, reporting and the author's own encounters, and ends with a call for radical empathy

Who it is for

  • Readers who want a deeper frame for race in America
  • Teachers and students of history and sociology
  • People who sense unspoken rank at work and want words for it

What the summary covers

  1. The Man in the Crowd1 min
  2. Toxins in the Permafrost3 min
  3. The Arbitrary Construction of Human Divisions4 min
  4. The Eight Pillars of Caste5 min
  5. The Tentacles of Caste6 min
  6. The Consequences of Caste4 min
  7. Backlash3 min
  8. Awakening1 min
  9. A World Without Caste1 min

Recommended by

  • Tracy KidderPulitzer Prize winning author of Mountains Beyond Mountains
    Her book leaves me both grateful and hopeful. I gulped it down.

About the author

  • Isabel WilkersonJournalist who won the 1994 Pulitzer Prize for Feature Writing
    • Born in Washington, D.C., in 1961, to parents who left Virginia during the Great Migration
    • Her father, Alexander Wilkerson, was one of the Tuskegee Airmen
    • Studied journalism at Howard University and became editor in chief of its student newspaper, The Hilltop
    • Became Chicago bureau chief of The New York Times before she was 30
    • The first Black woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for journalism; also received the National Humanities Medal from President Barack Obama
    • Left the Times in the mid 1990s to write The Warmth of Other Suns
    • For The Warmth of Other Suns she interviewed more than 1,200 people to find its three protagonists
    • The Warmth of Other Suns won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction

More books like this