Caste

The Origins of Our Discontents

By: Isabel Wilkerson

Narrated by: Robin Miles

Brought to you by Penguin.

'The hierarchy of caste is not about feelings or morality. It is about power - which groups have it and which do not'

Beyond race or class, our lives are defined by a powerful, unspoken system of divisions. In Caste, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Isabel Wilkerson gives an astounding portrait of this hidden phenomenon. Linking America, India and Nazi Germany, Wilkerson reveals how our world has been shaped by caste - and how its rigid, arbitrary hierarchies still divide us today.

With clear-sighted rigour, Wilkerson unearths the eight pillars that connect caste systems across civilizations, and demonstrates how our own era of intensifying conflict and upheaval has arisen as a consequence of caste. Weaving in stories of real people, she shows how its insidious undertow emerges every day; she documents its surprising health costs; and she explores its effects on culture and politics. Finally, Wilkerson points forward to the ways we can - and must - move beyond its artificial divisions, towards our common humanity.

Beautifully written and deeply original, Caste is an eye-opening examination of what lies beneath the surface of ordinary lives. No one can afford to ignore the moral clarity of its insights, or its urgent call for a freer, fairer world.

© Isabel Wilkerson 2020 (P) Penguin Audio 2020

Critic reviews

If you haven't read Caste yet, you absolutely must (Edward Enninful)

Powerful and timely... I cannot recommend it strongly enough (Barack Obama)

Such is Wilkerson's gift as a writer that she leaves you looking at the world differently (Afua Hirsch)

Elegant and persuasive... Caste will spur readers to think and to feel in equal measure (Kwame Anthony Appiah)

Probably the most important piece of non-fiction published this year (Sarah Hughes)

A surprising and arresting wide-angle reframing... Her epilogue feels like a prayer for a country in pain, offering new directions through prophetic new language (Bilal Qureshi)

An expansive interrogation of racism, institutionalised inequality and injustice... This is an American reckoning and so it should be... It is a painfully resonant book and could not have come at a more urgent time (Fatima Bhutto)

Persuasive and unsettling... The case Wilkerson puts forward is inspiring and hopeful... caste can be dismantled, setting everyone free (Ashish Ghadiali)

Important and timely... If repudiation of past assumptions is the first step towards healing, Wilkerson's book offers a powerful frame for this. It is essential reading for anybody who feels angry, guilty or threatened by the tangled issue of "race" in America today (Gillian Tett)

Magisterial... [Wilkerson's] reporting is nimble and her sentences exquisite. But the real power of Caste lies tucked within the stories she strings together like pearls... Caste is a luminous read, bearing its own torch of righteous wrath in a diamond-hard prose that will be admired and studied by future generations of journalists (Hamilton Cain)

honest truth

an uncomfortable journey of learning so needed in our times. The web of Cast is disturbing

wow wow wow!

This book has helped me make sense of lingering stubborn racist sentiments in Post Apartheid South Africa , and constant sense of exclusion the native black people in this country still wrestle with. This book is highly recommended to the racist and excluded- all the same! Therein, lies the cause and cure. Selah...

It was worth the pain of cognitive dissonance.

The book is thorough. It was a personally rewarding listen. This story was told through the lens of a black African American female who straddles many worlds of marginalization, privilege and power, bringing alive the concepts in a way that makes the book layered and worth reading multiple times. The book empowers, humiliates, angers and consoles as it takes us on a global journey that provides parallels and analogies that creates discomfort and a-ha moments.

It provides a reference guide and framework for constructive debate and discussion. The book provides a call to action in order to empower people from different ‘castes’ to increase self awareness of the cultural codes of conduct that we are often unconsciously choosing to reinforce which is having a cataclysmic impact on the the way we all engage with the ‘mythology of power’ based on the illusion of our own superiority or inferiority which creates real consequences for the development of humanity.

Many academics, cultural commentators and race experts have articulated the points in Isabel Wilkerson’s book before but her book provides a millennial language, full of references that make it relevant for a new generation whose behaviour is informed by history but now due to globalization and technology have the ability to access information to challenge a 400 year old system that is no longer sustainable and has become counterintuitive to human and economic development.

The book provides food for thought and an invitation to radically redefine empathy. It is a book for all lives but especially those who have power and are ready to decide whether the history they create today by ignoring the past is the future they want their children to experience by reinforcing it.

The book is not a panacea but its a perfect pandemic read, that may help us to calm the coming storm by taking the time we are inside our homes to take a look at what’s really going on inside our heads and challenge it. Thank you Isabel Wilkerson for going on this journey. You are appreciated.

Outstanding review on the causes of racism/caste

Wilkerson reveals, with honesty and integrity, the historical and present day links between race and caste, comparing America, Germany and India and the frightening similarities of all three.
The most shocking revelation for me was the fact that Hitler used legislation from the US to formulate his separatist new Germany!
At times I found the book repetitive, but that resulted in the thoughts remaining with me, and as a South African, understanding the racist culture in which I live , to be understood against the historical prejudice of caste.

An important and necessary education

Every human being should read this book. The education it afforded me was heartbreaking and entirely necessary. As an Irish woman who had spent a few years in America, I could see and feel the inequality but I did not understand the complexity and depths of it. A change is well over due, maybe this book will be a catalyst.