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The year 2020 ushered in a period of upheaval and reckoning. Into this time of pandemic anxiety, political extremism, and the blatancy of racism comes a book by Isabel Wilkerson destined to be an American classic. Her title, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents, will doubtless remind psychoanalysts of Civilization and Its Discontents, in which Freud (1930) describes the development and resolution of the great battles between culture and the individual, and ending with the grim reminder of the ever present do-or-die tensions between self-love and the societal demand of love for fellow humans. Wilkerson's book has taken neighborhood reading groups, Oprah's book club, and its many reviewers by storm, all of whom are shaken by a strange, yet convincing account of a new theory of racism. Wilkerson weaves well-thought-out observations of three geographically and culturally disparate epochs of sanctioned subjugation, exploitation, and dehumanization—American racism, Nazi Germany, and the Indian caste system—and concludes that racism, anti-Semitism, and virtually every other form of discrimination is a psychological subset of casteism.
Wilkerson, a distinguished African American Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and the best-selling author of The Warmth of Other Suns: The