Review of Caste by Isabel Wilkerson

Review of Caste: the Origins of Our Discontents by Isabel Wilkerson. I had read Isabel Wilkerson’s first book The Great Migration last year and loved it (see my review on this blog). Without hesitating, I placed her second book Caste on my reading list. Wilkerson’s skills at storytelling, her meticulous research, and her wonderful prose makes one literally feel her stories. In this brilliant book, she carefully lays out the characteristics of a caste-based society and argues that the United States has had a caste system in place since 1619 through today. She persuasively compares the caste systems of India, Nazi Germany, and the United States. She reminds us that the Nazi’s carefully studied how the US caste system with blacks as the lower caste served as a model for the creation of a caste system with Jews on the bottom. She discusses how the caste systems in the US and India, despite being illegal today, are still maintained. The historical evidence and countless examples serve to emphasize this thesis. In the end she does offer ways in which the US can move ahead and end the destructive consequences of our caste-based system. This book, like The Great Migration, is difficult to read but hopeful in the end.