Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents

by Isabel Wilkerson

Isabel Wilkerson, the Pulitzer Prize best-selling author of Warmth of other Suns, has written Caste as a further historical examination of the social and power paradigms of our country.  For ten years she labored over this book which is close to 400 pages followed by a raft of incredible bibliographical material.  Most of the critical reviews sang its praises but pondered the use of caste as the lens she asks us to apply to her theories.

She is a brilliant storyteller and she shares the stories of Black Americans as they live out their realities in our structural framework.  She writes,

“As we go about our daily lives, caste is the wordless usher in a darkened theatre, flashlight cast down in the aisles guiding us to assigned seats for a performance. The hierarchy of caste is not about feelings or morality.  It is about power, which groups have it and which groups do not.”

In her words I hope you can get a sense of this sweeping conversation from all corners of America, India, and Germany where she studies its reckoning with its Nazi past.  

As readers, we bring our personal narrative to her framework, and sense for ourselves where we fit in this power structure. We can begin to reckon with the complicated history which was not so readily taught to us as we came into our own adulthood.

Our book group grappled with the stories, and started to talk about how we might better face our history and what solutions might be available to us in forming a more just society.  A sense of hope illuminates the end of her book which gives us the perseverance we need to confront the injustices that we still encounter all too often in the first two decades of the 21st century.

— Fran Putnoi