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Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents is the second book by Pulitzer Prize-winner Isabel Wilkerson, best-selling author of The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration (2010). As with her first book, Caste is an historically illuminating literary work that contributes to our understanding of how Black Americans have come to regard ourselves in society. In Caste, Wilkerson organizes her thoughts into seven parts, proceeding from “The Eight Pillars of Caste” to “Awakening.” Here we will address four of those parts. Wilkerson follows in the great tradition of African American writers and her fellow alumni of Howard University, including Paul Lawrence Dunbar, Zora Neale Hurston, Toni Morrison, Amiri Baraka, and Ta-Nehisi Coates, who write of the American experience through lenses unclouded by the dominant culture's impingements and delusions.
Addressing the realities of racism is a heavy lift. Wilkerson accomplishes it by enlisting relatable metaphors throughout the book to speak in displacement. With this approach, she creates space in which one can think and possibly gain deeper knowledge of the emotionally charged topics of racism and casteism. This potential space is important because exploration of these topics understandably raises defenses that can hinder thinking. Within this space, Wilkerson links the caste systems of India, the U.S., and Nazi Germany. She introduces material, largely unfamiliar to the general reader, about Hitler's envy and admiration of America's ability to legally establish a system of racial oppression. Wilkerson notes that Hitler “attributed” this feat to America's “Aryan stock.” Nazi Germans were further inspired by America's near-genocide of indigenous peoples, including the “exiling” of the survivors to reservations, as well as by the institution of slavery. American ideology, turned law, inspired