A startling and transformative account of how we are all tied up in a caste system, from NYT-bestselling, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Isabel Wilkerson
'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.
About the Author
Isabel Wilkerson, winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Humanities Medal, is the author of the critically acclaimed New York Times bestseller The Warmth of Other Suns. Her debut work won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction and was included in Time's 10 Best Nonfiction Books of the decade and in The New York Times's list of the Best Nonfiction of All Time. She has taught at Princeton, Emory, and Boston Universities and has lectured at more than two hundred other colleges and universities across the United States and in Europe and Asia.
Industry Reviews
Required reading for all of humanity
Oprah Winfrey
Extraordinary ... an instant American classic and almost certainly the keynote nonfiction book of the American century thus far ... It made the back of my neck prickle from its first pages, and that feeling never went away. 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 seeks to shatter a paralysis of will. It's a book that changes the weather inside a reader.
Dwight Garner * The New York Times *
Important and timely ... America does not merely have a problem with "race", but it is also haunted by the ugly issue of caste, a set of embedded practices that presume it is natural - and correct - to divide humans into different groups and keep them in a hierarchy. ... 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 * Financial Times *
An expansive interrogation of racism, institutionalised inequality and injustice ... This is an American reckoning and so it should be. Wilkerson activates history in her pages, bringing all its horror and possibility to light. It is a painfully resonant book and could not have come at a more urgent time.
Fatima Bhutto * Guardian *
Searching, gorgeously crafted... Wilkerson builds her arguments with nuance and meticulous research. Her reporting is nimble and her sentences exquisite... 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.
Hamilton Cain * Star Tribune *
Propulsive...Should be required reading for generations to come. Caste removes the tenuous language of racial animus and replaces it with a sturdier lexicon based on power relationships. Using examples from around the world, Wilkerson demonstrates how the codification of caste has hardened economic and political inequality into seemingly permanent markers of difference.
Joshunda Sanders * Boston Globe *
