Comparing the United States to an “ old house” with cracks, leaks, and rot that most Americans are too terrified to examine, Wilkerson examines the “pillars of caste” that tenuously hold the country up.
Wilkerson examines how caste handicaps societies-because when a country is built around the subordination and humiliation of a certain group, no group can achieve its fullest potential. In doing so, she shines a light on how the dominant castes in each caste system internalize their inherent superiority and seek to retain that sense of supremacy, no matter the cost. Wilkerson compares the intricate, multi-layered caste system in India to the polarized caste systems of Nazi Germany and the U.S.-which placed white people in the dominant caste while subordinating Jewish people and Black people, respectively. The book draws connections between the world’s three major caste systems: the Indian caste system, the caste system created by the Nazis during the Third Reich, and the American caste system. By examining the origins of the country with the arrival of English settlers in the 1600s, Wilkerson explains how white Europeans created a hierarchy based on race that would allow them to render entire groups of people subhuman, or subordinate, and thus endlessly exploitable in terms of the labor needed to build a new nation. Throughout the book, she weaves personal anecdotes about moving through the world as a Black woman in with historical evidence of how caste has shaped and divided the U.S.
Wilkerson who is African American and therefore a member of what she deems the U.S.’s subordinate caste. Isabel Wilkerson is the author and narrator of Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents.
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