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 civilisations 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.

©2020 Isabel Wilkerson (P)2020 Penguin Audio

Phenomenal: A must read for Everyone!!!

Absolutely captures the origins of our discontent as a human species. I was able to journey through the lived experiences of each of the characters. My heart has been broken open to the injustices caste has accorded lower caste members. It’s my hope the upper caste members embrace radical empathy to change this inappropriate & unjust human discontent; as ‘A world without caste - would set Everyone free ’ - Isabelle WilKerson - You have done a phenomenal job to make this knowledge accessible- Thank you!

Kind words from a Powerful Book

Isabel masterfully took me through an American History class. It is costly when a majority of Americans do not embrace their country's true past for the last 400 years that has seen the black minority degraded in all spheres of their lives. It's sad to see that the country is still struggling to agree to work on this vice. If America successfully ends Caste. I think you will become unstoppable because all people from all creeds, shape and color will truly be free to become all they were created to be.

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.

Truly “the lies that divide us”

I would recommend this book for everyone. The oppressed and the not oppressed. We can not change anything about the past but we can change the present and the future. As a black South African reading this book I found it helped shine the light on some reprogramming I may need to do in how I see myself and my abilities. But it also gave me insight on why the constitution says I’m free and yet do not feel free most times. It’s given me the courage to work out my freedom, reprogram my mind with intentionality. It is also helping me understand why some people still behave a particular way. Not to excuse the behavior but to understand it will be a process to unlearn.

My best non-fiction ever…read/listened to it twice

My best non-fiction ever…read/listened to it twice already and can't stop for the third time

Caution: This review is going to be a tad longer


This was my first book on audible. I only used audible for my child to put him to sleep. Then I realized that I had got some credits to buy some books. I had heard about Caste by Isabel Wilkerson and some rave reviews. So I didn't think twice before buying it in exchange for a credit. That was the best decision of my life! In less than three days, I completed the book. Such a powerful book, with a very strong and fitting narrative on audible by the brilliant Robin Miles (the same reader of Isabel's other book: The Warmth of Other Sun).


So, to start with, I am an Indian. So as explained in the book, Caste is built into the very system of we Indians…no Indian can ever escape Caste or the term. So, it obviously caught my attention. I was all the more curious as I always thought Caste and race are though intertwined, they are very different from each other. Any Indian would vouch that Caste is not only about race, but it is much more than that. Besides, Casteism in India is based on the “Varna System” based on occupation and descent, whereas racism is about skin colour at least from the binary of black and white people. Isabel lifted the veil from my eyes and enabled me to see that it is the same repulsive hierarchy that divides people into dominant and subordinate categories, which in India we would call it Casteism and in USA it is called racism. But it is an inherent problem of dehumanizing other fellow human beings on the basis of superficial physiological traits such as skin colour, with a motive to exploit and rule over them.

When Isabel was narrating one after the other well-researched incidences of atrocities of the African Americans at the hands of the dominant caste/ the whites in America, I could recall exact experiences of the lowest caste/outcasts of India – the "untouchables" or the "Dalits". When she narrates how the slaves in the Jim Crow era in southern America were not allowed to go to schools, to read or write or to read to their own children, not allowed to go to church, not allowed to read the Bible, not allowed to eat/sit/travel together with the “dominant caste”/whites/slave owners/Masters, it sounded as if she is talking about the Dalits /”lower caste” vs the “upper caste” in India. How the restaurants would break the glasses after a black person drinks from it, how the whites demand to empty the swimming pools after a black has entered it, how the innocent love of a black boy for a white girl can be a reason for his lynching, how the crowd cherished the lynching of blacks, how the slaves could be punished with whiplashes at will, how the black slaves were made “guinea pigs” for the medical inventions by white doctors, and many more instances narrated in this book, has uncanny similarities of atrocities meted out to the Dalits for over three millennia in India’s Caste system.

The story of a teacher's experiment about the blue-eyed vs the brown-eyed children goes on to demonstrate how we as human beings can so quickly start abusing the other when the differences in the others are pointed out to us, even at that young age.

Like in the USA, the whites were / are predominantly better off financially, intellectually and otherwise for historical reasons; in India, the so-called "upper caste" constitute a large majority in economics, politics, executive, judiciary, media, education and religious affairs.

The parallels are drawn between the Jim Crow south of USA, the Nazis in Germany and the Caste system of India are brilliantly done. What connects all three different forms of discrimination is dehumanizing a particular community of people to exploit them at will for their own benefit. In all three cases, there is strong internalization of being discriminated against, which makes the victims immune to this inhuman treatment /torture wherein the latter start to think they are destined to this fate of theirs.

The book begins and also ends with the 2016 elections…how the seeds of hatred that were sown years ago and that was suppressed through the civil rights movements erupted when a “conducive” environment was created in Trump’s victory in the 2016 elections. In that connection, the analogy of anthrax released from the Siberian permafrost due to the extreme summer heat impacting the native population is simply brilliant.

The book ends with a strong pitch for a world without Caste.

Get your copy, printed or audio versions, and I bet you will not be disappointed. Do not be carried away by some negative reviews. I strongly feel, most of them would invariably fall into the "dominant caste" category. I would invite them to read another brilliant book on racism, "White Fragility: Why It's So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism” by Robin DiAngelo.

Superb

I just finished listening this beautiful manifesto for a better world. Superbly written and excellently documented, this book must be read by anyone wishing to become a better human.

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.

Excellent

Loved the book. I thought I already knew and understood, the issues and yet, I feel, for the first time that I better understand the race problem in America, and it's central role in American economic and social life.