Continuing Education for Psychologists

CASTE
The Origins of Our Discontent

A powerful caste system influences people's lives and behavior. Linking the caste systems of America, India, and Nazi Germany, Wilkerson explores eight pillars that underlie caste systems across civilizations, including divine will, bloodlines, stigma, and others. Using riveting stories about people, she shows the ways that the insidious force of caste is experienced every day. She documents how the Nazis studied the racial systems in America to plan their treatment of the Jews; she discusses why the logic of caste requires that there be a bottom rung for those in the middle to measure themselves against; she describes the surprising health costs of caste in depression and life expectancy, and the effects of this hierarchy on our culture and politics. She points forward to ways America can move beyond the artificial and destructive separations of human divisions, toward hope in our common humanity.

Isabel Wilkerson is an American journalist and the author of The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration. She was the first woman of African-American heritage to win the Pulitzer Prize in journalism. Wilkerson was the editor-in-chief of the Howard University college newspaper, interned at the Los Angeles Times and Washington Post, and became the Chicago Bureau Chief of The New York Times. She taught at Emory, Princeton, Northwestern, and Boston University. She has won the George S. Polk Award, the Journalist of the Year award from the National Association of Black Journalists, the National Book Critics Circle Award (Nonfiction), and the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award.

"It has been ten years since Wilkerson's award-winning The Warmth of Other Suns was published. While that book pointed to the great migration of Black people to the north as an "unrecognized migration," this new book points to our entire social structure as an unrecognized caste system. Most people see America as racist, and Wilkerson agrees that it is indeed racist. She points out that we tend to refer to slavery as a "sad, dark chapter" in America when in fact it lasted for hundreds of years–but in order to maintain a social order and an "economy whose bottom gear was torture" (as Wilkerson quotes the historian Edward Baptist), it was necessary to give blacks the lowest possible status. Whites in turn got top status. In between came the middle castes of "Asians, Latinos, indigenous people, and immigrants of African descent" to fill out the originally bipolar hierarchy. Such a caste system allowed generations of whites to live under the same assumptions of inequality–these "distorted rules of engagement"–whether their ancestors were slave owners or abolitionists. And the unspoken caste system encouraged all to accept their roles. As Wilkerson develops her argument, she brings in historical figures like Martin Luther King, Jr. and Satchel Paige. She even looks at the Nazis, who turned to us when they were seeking ways to institutionalize racism in the Third Reich. As I read this book, I finally had to consciously stop myself from highlighting passages. Because I was highlighting most of the book."
--Chris Schluep (Amazon's Book of the Year, 2020)

"Magnificent ... a trailblazing work on the birth of inequality ... Caste offers a forward-facing vision. Bursting with insight and love, this book may well help save us."
--O: The Oprah Magazine

"This book has the reverberating and patriotic slap of the best American prose writing.... Wilkerson has written a closely argued book that largely avoids the word 'racism,' yet stares it down with more humanity and rigor than nearly all but a few books in our literature.... It's a book that changes the weather inside a reader."–Dwight Garner, The New York Times

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

"A transformative new framework through which to understand identity and injustice in America."
--Justin Worland, Time

"Magisterial ... Her reporting is nimble and her sentences exquisite. But the real power of Caste lies tucked within the stories she strings together like pearls.... Caste roams wide and deep, lives and deaths vividly captured, haloed with piercing cultural critique.... 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, Minneapolis Star Tribune

"Brave, clear and shatteringly honest in both approach and delivery ... Extrapolating Wilkerson's ideas to contemporary America becomes an unsettling exercise that proves how right she is and how profoundly embedded into society the caste system is.... Her quest for answers frames everything and acts as the perfect delivery method for every explanation."
--Gabino Iglesias, San Francisco Chronicle

"Wilkerson's book is a powerful, illuminating and heartfelt account of how hierarchy reproduces itself, as well as a call to action for the difficult work of undoing it."
--Kenneth W. Mack, The Washington Post

"Should be required reading for generations to come ... A significant work of social science, journalism, and history, Caste removes the tenuous language of racial animus and replaces it with a sturdier lexicon based on power relationships."
--Joshunda Sanders, The Boston Globe

"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, The Guardian

"Full of uncovered stories and persuasive writing ... Opening up a new bank of language in a time of emboldened white supremacism may provide her readers with a new way of thinking and talking about social injustice.... A useful reminder to India's many upper-caste cosmopolitans ... that dreams of resistance are just one part of the shared inheritance of the world's oldest democracy, and the world's largest."
--Supriya Nair, Mumbai Mirror