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'caste' argues its most violent manifestation is in treatment of black americans.

Hope Wabuke

Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents by Isabel Wilkerson Random House hide caption

Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents by Isabel Wilkerson

To read Isabel Wilkerson is to revel in the pleasure of reading — to relax into the virtuosic performance of thought and form one is about to encounter, safe and secure that the structures will not collapse beneath you.

In the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist's first book, The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration, Wilkerson evinced a rare ability to craft deeply insightful analysis of deeply researched evidence — both historical and contemporary — in harmonious structures of language and form.

Now, in her sophomore effort, the former New York Times Chicago bureau chief does not disappoint. Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents is a masterwork of writing — a profound achievement of scholarship and research that stands also as a triumph of both visceral storytelling and cogent analysis.

What is caste? According to Wilkerson, "caste is the granting or withholding of respect, status, honor, attention, privileges, resources, benefit of the doubt, and human kindness to someone on the basis of their perceived rank or standing in the hierarchy." Racism and casteism do overlap, she writes, noting that "what some people call racism could be seen as merely one manifestation of the degree to which we have internalized the larger American caste system."

Wilkerson's central thesis is that caste, while a global occurrence, achieves its most violent manifestation in the treatment of American Blacks, set at the lowest level in society through historical and contemporary oppression, marginalization and violence — all legally maintained through systems of law and order. "The English in North America developed the most rigid and exclusionist from of race ideology," Wilkerson writes, quoting the anthropologists Audrey and Brian Smedley.

Wilkerson establishes a correlation between American Blacks, whom she names the "American untouchables" and the Indian "untouchables," or Dalits, as the lowest caste; while whites in America are the dominant, highest caste equivalent to the Indian Brahmins. Describing the treatment of Blacks in America, Wilkerson writes:

"The institution of slavery was, for a quarter millennium, the conversion of human beings into currency, into machines who existed solely for the profit of their owners, to be worked as long as the owners desired, who had no rights over their bodies or loved ones, who could be mortgaged, bred, won in a bet, given as wedding presents, bequeathed to heirs, sold away from spouses or children to convene an owner's debts or to spite a rival or to settle an estate. They were regularly whipped, raped, and branded, subjected to any whim or distemper of the people who owned them. Some were castrated or endured other tortures too grisly for these pages, tortures that the Geneva Conventions would have banned as war crimes had the conventions applied to people of African descent on this soil."

Wilkerson's argument is based on an exploration of what she names the three resonant caste systems in history: the Indian caste system, the Nazi caste system and the American caste system — which the Nazis researched when creating their own. "There were no other models for miscegenation law that the Nazis could find in the world," Wilkerson writes, citing Yale legal historian James Q. Whitman as evidence: "'Their overwhelming interest was in the 'classic example,' the United States of America."

Wilkerson supports her analysis with an immense compendium of documented research that spans centuries. Through her detailed historical research, she unearths evidence that the violence toward Blacks that the American caste system espoused was too much even for the Nazis; they balked at replicating some of the more horrific acts of American racism toward Blacks. "[Herbert] Kier was just one of several Nazi researchers who thought American law went overboard," Wilkerson writes, while others, like Hans F. K. Günter, thought the American laws so outrageous as to be untrue.

Caste, Wilkerson posits, is dependent upon the dehumanization of the other, most powerfully seen in the use of Jews and Blacks as the subject of horrific experiments by the respective dominant caste systems of Germany and America. "German scientists and SS doctors conducted more than two dozen types of experiments on Jews and others they held captive," while "in the United States, from slavery well into the twentieth century, doctors used African-Americans as a supply chain for experimentation, as subjects deprived of either consent or anesthesia," Wilkerson writes.

One of the most poignant examples Wilkerson describes is the violence done by Dr. J. Marion Sims, lauded as the founder of American gynecology, on the bodies of Black women:

"He came to his discoveries by acquiring enslaved women in Alabama and conducting savage surgeries that often ended in disfigurement or death. He refused to administer anesthesia, saying vaginal surgery on them was not painful enough to justify the trouble. ..."

Wilkerson says Sims would "invite leading men in town and apprentices in to see for themselves. He later wrote, 'I saw everything as no man had seen before.' "

Medical experiments were also carried out on Black men and Black children: Wilkerson notes Harriet Washington's research in Medical Apartheid in which a plantation doctor "made incisions into a black baby's head to test a theory for curing seizures" with "cobbler's tools" and "the point of a crooked awl." The horror is legion.

Wilkerson documents the pogroms of violence against the caste of American untouchables as waves throughout history — whether the violence of slavery or the waves of vigilante violence that that rose during Reconstruction and have continued since; incidents such the Ocoee, Fla., massacre in 1920 or the 1921 destruction of Black Wall Street in Tulsa, Okla., are set in a continuum that meets with the attacks on Black Americans in Birmingham, Ala., 40 years later in the 1960s, and then again in Charleston, S.C., by Dylann Roof on a Black church five years ago. This violent terror is a marker of the caste system, Wilkerson writes. The descriptions are vivid in their horror; the connections travel across history and time to resonate in the mind.

This structural move is a classic trademark of Wilkerson's style, and one of the attributes of her unique voice that imbues her writing with such textured depth. Wilkerson's use of a poetic focus on imagery and detailed characterization allows us an intimate and personal relationship with the lives of those she chronicles; when this empathic closeness is juxtaposed with the harsh brutality of the historical record the contrast is resonant and haunting, becoming a towering memorial to those violated by the violence of caste.

Caste is divided into six sections exploring the various aspects of caste: its origins, its sustainment and far-reaching "tentacles," and its effects — whether detrimental health for the givers and receivers of racism or the expected white supremacist backlash to the election of the first president of recognizable Black heritage: "The ability of a black person to supplant the racial caste system," Wilkerson writes, quoting the political scientist Andra Gillespie of Emory University, was "the manifestation of a nightmare which would need to be resisted."

Although a claim can be made that the opening chapter or two on the fallout of the 2016 election appear dated, this to be fair, is only because of what has happened to America in the interim since Wilkerson penned those words.

What is problematic is the glaring absence of Africa in a book that aims to position itself as a seminal text on the concept of a global caste system and the positioning of Blackness within that global caste system. Wilkerson glances at this briefly with a scant mention of South Africa in a couple of paragraphs and by quoting a woman identified only as a Nigerian playwright saying that "there are no Black people in Africa" — and then keeps it moving. Both are moments that do need to be unpacked. It is understandable why Wilkerson does not walk through this door to explore caste in Africa — Caste is 400 pages before adding the impressive list of research sources. But if Wilkerson is not opening that door, there does need to be an acknowledgement of why not, an acknowledgement of that absence.

Simply put: With colonization, European colonizers brought their caste system to Africa and implemented it over the already existing caste systems among many African ethnic groups.

Perhaps the absence of Africa is because of the caste system Wilkerson speaks of itself — to get people in the dominant caste to care about a narrative about Blackness and Brownness, about the lower castes, there must be a strong presence of whiteness in the conversation because it is the dominant caste system within the narrative.

And thus the caste system rears its head to affect a work about the caste system in real time.

This points, ultimately, to the role of personal accountability within a caste system. What does one do with this knowledge of the violence of caste? Does one perpetuate it? Eradicate it?

Interestingly, Wilkerson at times seems to argue not for an eradication of caste, but to create space for her, and others she meets, who have been miscast in their "caste" — regulated to the lowest caste when by intelligence or other attribute they should be in the higher caste, or vice versa. "We had defied our caste assignments: He was not a warrior or ruler. He was a geologist. I was not a domestic. I was an author," Wilkerson writes. Even the ending "Awakening" section, couched as a look forward, is depicted less of an articulation of the possibilities of a world without caste, and more of her desire simply to be seen as equal to those of the dominant caste.

In this, Wilkerson leans to biology. She offers the example of wolves as her support for the necessity of this hierarchal structure — the necessity not just of the alpha, but of the omega, or the underdog, beaten and abused by the others, the "untouchable." When the underdog dies, she writes, the whole pack is destabilized. No one wants to be the lowest of the low, "the scapegoat," but the pack needs one to survive.

Without the untouchable, Wilkerson argues here, society collapses. The untouchable is needed. Wilkerson just does not want to be one.

Writes Wilkerson:

"The great tragedy among humans is that people have often been assigned to or seen as qualified for alpha positions — as CEOs, quarterbacks, coaches, directors of film, presidents of colleges or countries — not necessarily on the basis of innate leadership traits but, historically on the basis of having been born to the dominant caste or the dominant gender or to the right family within the dominant caste."

I would argue that the tragedy, rather, is the need for these positions such as "omega" to still exist, which then justifies the need for this caste structure and its continued existence — even if it exists with Wilkerson's proffered edit that would allow an individual, no matter "background or caste," to hop into their desired caste and profit from the continued oppression of others the caste system welds.

If we are to look at biology as evidence, let us consider the research of Eli D. Strauss and Kay E. Holekamp on hyenas in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the official journal of the National Academy of Sciences, which offers another model for social positioning. Within the hyena community, as with wolves, there is a strict hierarchy of dominant caste and lower castes. But, if a female understands the hierarchy as unjust and challenges a more dominant member of the higher caste and her female peer group agrees with her, they will rise up across caste and challenge the dominant caste; if this female cross-caste coalition wins, the hierarchy is destabilized, and this radical feminist hyena and her cross-caste pack become the new dominant caste.

It is not enough, but it is a start.

Let us think not just about our own individual desires to be seen as a member of the dominant caste and benefit accordingly, but about the necessity to challenge this entire system of oppression radically. Let us think not just about replicating oppressive patriarchal systems but about alternative models such as matrilineal cross-cultural communication and connection.

Let us look not to the wolves, but to the hyenas.

Hope Wabuke is a poet, writer and assistant professor at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

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Isabel Wilkerson’s ‘Caste’ Is an ‘Instant American Classic’ About Our Abiding Sin

By Dwight Garner

• Published July 31, 2020 Updated Jan. 21, 2021

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A critic shouldn’t often deal in superlatives. He or she is here to explicate, to expand context and to make fine distinctions. But sometimes a reviewer will shout as if into a mountaintop megaphone. I recently came upon William Kennedy’s review of “One Hundred Years of Solitude,” which he called “the first piece of literature since the Book of Genesis that should be required reading for the entire human race.” Kennedy wasn’t far off.

I had these thoughts while reading Isabel Wilkerson’s new book, “Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents.” It’s an extraordinary document, one that strikes me as an instant American classic and almost certainly the keynote nonfiction book of the American century thus far. It made the back of my neck prickle from its first pages, and that feeling never went away.

I told more than one person, as I moved through my days this past week, that I was reading one of the most powerful nonfiction books I’d ever encountered.

[Listen to Isabel Wilkerson on Sway: A Black and Asian Female V.P. Doesn’t Mean We’ve Escaped Caste .]

Wilkerson’s book is about how brutal misperceptions about race have disfigured the American experiment. This is a topic that major historians and novelists have examined from many angles, with care, anger, deep feeling and sometimes simmering wit.

Wilkerson’s book is a work of synthesis. She borrows from all that has come before, and her book stands on many shoulders. “Caste” lands so firmly because the historian, the sociologist and the reporter are not at war with the essayist and the critic inside her. This book has the reverberating and patriotic slap of the best American prose writing.

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By Isabel Wilkerson

Book review, full book summary and synopsis for Caste by Isabel Wilkerson, a masterful book about American's unseen caste system.

(The Full Plot Summary is also available, below)

Book Summary & Key Ideas

History of Caste in America

History of Enslavement . America begins bringing over African captives in the early 1600s to deal with their "labor" problem, after being unable to successfully enslave the Native Americans (who are exiled instead). The caste system takes form as enslavement continues for the next 250 years, but even as slavery is abolished, systems of laws are passed to keep the social organization in place. Meanwhile, as other immigrants arrive they find places within the caste hierarchy based on their proximity to the dominant caste.

The Old House Metaphor . Wilkerson compares being an American to buying an old house, where whatever issues the house has must be dealt with by the current occupant, even though you didn't directly cause them.

Assumptions of Caste. Under caste system, each person is assigned to roles, which carry with them histories of assumptions and labeling. (Wilkerson also explains this is terms of being placed into a container where there labels may not match the contents.)

Casteism vs Racism

Race vs Caste. While race is a fluid man-made definition, the contours of caste are rigid and fixed. What is considered "white" has changed over time, but what is considered the dominant caste has not. Throughout the book, Wilkerson intentionally tries to use term relating to caste such as "dominant caste" or "lower caste" instead of just referring to race in order to encourage readers to consider issues from a new, structurally-based light.

The Problem with the R-Word . "Racism" has become a loaded word that implies an "overt" hatred as opposed to the more subdued definition of indicating some "combination of racial bias and systemic power". As a society, we've also become too consumed with "smoking out individual racists" which is too individual and it shields other people who have committed lesser transgressions.

Casteism . Wilkerson proposes a new term, casteism, which she defines as "granting or withholding of respect, status, honor, attention, privileges, resources, benefit of the doubt, and human kindness to someone on the basis of their perceived rank or standing in the hierarchy." The term "casteism" places the focus on structural injustice.

Caste Systems of India, Nazi Germany and America

Three Major Caste Systems. The United State's system of social stratification shares similarities with the two other major caste systems in history, India's caste system (based on location and origins) and the caste system in Nazi Germany (between Aryans and Jews).

Indian Caste System. In India, the lowest caste members are the "Untouchables"/Dalits. Caste designations are based on location and is reflected in surnames as well, but can also be surmised from someone's manner of speaking, dress and comportment. Their system is reinforced by the Hindu belief in reincarnation, since it encourages compliance through the idea that a lower caste is deserved and one should obey the rules and be rewarded in the next life. While formal laws were abolished in the 1940s, the fossilized caste system persists.

Nazi Germany Caste System. Nazi elites drew inspiration for laws to create and enforce their caste system by looking at race legislation passed in America, such as miscegenation laws and rules for segregation. It resulted in the legal basis for the Aryan Nation, which evolved into the Nuremberg Laws.

The Eight Pillars of Caste (the parallels seen in the major caste systems)

Pillar #1: Divine Will. Caste systems attempt to justify their subordination of segments of their population through divine will (such as with describing African Americans as descendants of the cursed son of Noah, Canaan) or the laws of nature.

Pillar #2: Heritability. Caste is assigned at birth and passed down to descendants.

Pillar #3: Endogamy. Caste attempts to restrict marriage to those within the same caste.

Pillar #4: Purity Versus Pollution In the caste system, there is “a fundamental belief in the purity of the dominant caste and the fear of pollution” from lower castes.

Pillar #5: Occupational Hierarchy. Caste systems rest upon a bottom tier which performs menial tasks whose labor supports the other castes.

Pillar #6: Dehumanization and Stigma. Dehumanization distances the lower caste and allows their treatment to be “outside of the norms of humanity”.

Pillar #7: Terror and Cruelty. Terror and cruelty are used to enforce caste and control the subservient caste, and being complicit or joining in are rewarded.

Pillar #8: Inherent Superiority Versus Inherent Inferiority In each caste system, message about the inherent superiority of the dominant caste and the inferiority of the lower castes are continually reinforced.

How Caste Affects Those Within It

Bottom Caste as a Scapegoat. The bottom caste is often treated as a "scapegoat" caste where all the ills and crimes of society as a whole can be attributed to it. This is seen in blaming crime on African Americans as a whole and the treatment of African Americans as individuals within the criminal justice system.

Burden of Inherent Superiority. The dominant caste being told they are inherently superior which gives them a sense of “psychological security”. However, disruptions to the social order can therefore create an existential threat to its members ("dominant status group threat"). There is also a psychological burden to being convinced of your inherent superiority, since "downward mobility" is a fear, equality can seem like being downgraded and it can create false expectations.

Retribution for Advancement. Lower caste members who are able to rise above their station often face retribution because "lower caste success" is the greatest threat to the caste system. Instead, lower caste members who reinforce their own subjugation are the ones that can reap rewards.

Stockholm Syndrome. The caste system demands that lower caste members be mindful of the needs of the dominant caste. This includes extending “compassion even when none is forthcoming in exchange”. This can be seen in many instances of black people being asked and encouraged to forgive white people for crimes, and it fuels a lot of viral "feel-good" content. Wilkerson describes it as an example of how being subordinate means having “to be twice as good”, but still only “seen as half as worthy”.

Physiological Implications of Caste. There are real health implications caused by discrimination, as seen in all marginalized groups. Cell damage caused by stress can be measured according to the length of telomeres (biological markers of aging). A buildup of unhealthy (“visceral”) fat and increased inflammation is also seen in these same groups.

The Obama Presidency and the Politics of Caste

The Obama Presidency. Despite many declaring the Obama presidency as marking the "end of racism" in America, a majority of white voters did not vote for him. Additionally, it sparked a crisis for the caste system by threatening the centrality of white dominance.

The Trump Presidency. Contrary to many liberals saying that working class white voters are "voting against their interest", Wilkerson contends that upholding the caste system promotes their longer-term goal of dominance (a status that has historically afforded them land, advantage, self-esteem, etc.), even if it was a subconscious assessment.

Political System. Politicians treat their bases in ways that are consistent with caste. Conservatives proudly rally their white bases, while Democrats are less enthusiastic about their base (possibly taking them for granted). They expend much effort trying to appeal to white voters at the margins, which reinforces white centrality.

Symbols of Caste. Nazi Germany serves as an example of how it's possible to work to dismantle the system. In addition to forbidding symbols of caste, the country has no Nazi monuments and continues to pay reparations.

The Price We Pay. In upholding the caste system, the United States pays a steep price, increasing rivalry and distrust in the country. For example, we are reluctant to extend benefits such as healthcare to its citizens out of fear of allowing lower castes to have access to those things.

For more detail, see the full Chapter-by-Chapter Summary .

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Book Review

Caste by Isabel Wilkerson was released in the fall of last year to great acclaim. Wilkerson previously authored The Warmth of Other Suns , and she is also the first black woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for Journalism.

I should start by disclosing that I’m not an unbiased reader of this book. Isabel Wilkerson is a former professor of mine (I took her Journalism Ethics course at Emory), and she was kind enough to write one of my recommendation letters for grad school.

Of course, there’s plenty of other places to find reviews of this book, but I can tell you now that you’ll see they are overwhelmingly positive. I really hope you’ll encourage your book clubs to read and talk about this book, since I think it’s one with a lot of important ideas.

The basic idea behind Caste is that America’s system of racial stratification is actually a caste system based on race. While this distinction may seem merely academic at first glance, by understanding the features of a caste system and the unseen structural power hierarchies behind them, it helps to clarify the power dynamics of race in America.

Wilkerson dissects the three major caste systems — in India, Nazi Germany and the U.S. — in human history. She discusses the formation of these systems and the legal foundations used to support those systems, with a particular focus of course on the American caste system.

This book is essential reading for everyone, but especially anyone interested in social justice. It reframes the discussion of racism in such a critical and clear-eyed way. It actually frustrates me now to talk about racial inequality with people who haven’t read it since it provides such an crucial framework for how to look at a lot of issues we face today.

For years, I had a white co-worker named Emily who insisted on following up every description of someone with blond hair and blue eyes with the phrase, “you know, the American idea of beauty” whenever she was speaking to myself (an Asian American) or my officemate (an African American).

After reading Caste , I realize that describing her actions as “racist” has never felt like it really explained dynamic at play. Instead, “casteism” explains Emily’s behavior more accurately. Emily was a generally mediocre person with worse professional and educational credentials than either of us, but she wanted to be able to use her race to attempt to put us in our places. It’s the idea that even though objective measures might consider her inferior, there is a separate hierarchy which she wants to bolster because that’s the way she believes she can be dominant. While her statement was related to race, her insistence on repeating that phrase was always truly about power.

Similarly, my black officemate — a Harvard graduate who had previously worked at Goldman Sachs — was treated particularly poorly by John, a white man who had the most modest background compared to everyone else in the office. Again, while clearly his behavior was rooted in racism, there was more to it than that.

In Caste , Wilkerson describes “dominant group status threat” as being a common trait of a caste system. It’s about lower status members of the dominant (white) caste feeling threatened by members of the subordinate (black) caste. In essence, John’s insecurity about himself led him to feel particularly threatened by a high-achieving young black woman. After being told his whole life that he was innately superior to people like her, her successes in the same professional areas he cared about (finance and law) he created an “existential crisis” (as Wilkerson calls it), since it threatened his world-view.

At the time, I thought it was crazy that John would treat my officemate so poorly, since she was so clearly (over) qualified for the job we were doing and did it well. However, as I was reading Caste, Wilkerson makes the point that the anger over lower caste members rising above their station is very typically directed at the most successful members of the lower caste, since that presents the greatest existential threat.

Anyway, I could honestly continue on with examples I’ve seen ad infinitum, but the point is that this book really reframed a lot of the random thoughts I had, but had difficultly explaining. It put them into a framework that helped me to understand better my own sense of unease about things I’ve seen in the past.

As a side note, at one point in the book, Wilkerson talks about her dogs, which made me very happy. Back in college, she invited our class over to her (impeccably decorated) house for one session, and I recall it being the cutest thing when her two white fluffy pups came trotting up to us as we entered. I think that memory is part of the reason why I now have a cute fluffy white dog of my own. (Still working on getting the second one, need a bigger place with a lawn first!)

Read it or Skip It?

Read it. Everyone should read it, get your book club to read it and buy copies for your friends. I mentioned a few things I learned from the book above, but it barely scratches the surface of the insights you can glean from this book, so just read it!

See Caste on Amazon .

Discussion Questions

• In what ways do you think the term “Casteism” can be helpful to the discussion about racism? Do you think it’s important that “casteism” acknowledges the inherent power inequality in a way that the term “racism” does not?
• Wilkerson sets out the Eight Pillars of Caste, as seen in the major caste systems (America, India and Nazi Germany). Can you think of additional examples of those pillars that weren’t mentioned in the book?
• In what ways did this book challenge your ideas about race and caste in the United States?
• Are there arguments in the book of parts of it that you disagreed with?
• Wilkerson mentions a number of incidents of interactions between black and white people in America that have gone viral as “feel good” moment that she is skeptical or critical of. What did you think about the events described?
• There’s a lot of discussion in this book about the horrors of slavery and the history of lynchings in America. Were you aware of this history or was some of this new to you?
• How did the things mentioned in this book regarding the history of enslavement and race in America compare with what you were taught growing up?
• Do you think a “world without caste” is possible?

Book Excerpt

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In this brilliant book, Isabel Wilkerson gives us a masterful portrait of an unseen phenomenon in America as she explores, through an immersive, deeply researched narrative and stories about real people, how America today and throughout its history has been shaped by a hidden caste system, a rigid hierarchy of human rankings.

Beyond race, class, or other factors, there is a powerful caste system that influences people’s lives and behavior and the nation’s fate. Linking the caste systems of America, India, and Nazi Germany, Wilkerson explores eight pillars that underlie caste systems across civilizations, including divine will, bloodlines, stigma, and more. Using riveting stories about people—including Martin Luther King, Jr., baseball’s Satchel Paige, a single father and his toddler son, Wilkerson herself, and many others—she shows the ways that the insidious undertow of caste is experienced every day. She documents how the Nazis studied the racial systems in America to plan their out-cast of the Jews; she discusses why the cruel logic of caste requires that there be a bottom rung for those in the middle to measure themselves against; she writes about the surprising health costs of caste, in depression and life expectancy, and the effects of this hierarchy on our culture and politics. Finally, she points forward to ways America can move beyond the artificial and destructive separations of human divisions, toward hope in our common humanity.

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Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents — Book Review

Review of Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents , by Isabel Wilkerson (Random House, 2020)

“Anything that causes the negro to aspire above the plow handle, the cook pot, in a word the functions of a servant, will be the worst thing on earth for the negro. God Almighty designed him for a menial. He is fit for nothing else .” —Governor James K. Vardaman of Mississippi

I begin with this quote by Governor Vardaman in order to address a primary question I asked myself as I began reading Caste : why talk about “caste” or “caste-ism” instead of “race” or “racism”? How does using the word “caste” illuminate the problem? Isabel Wilkerson’s answer is that “caste” speaks more specifically and powerfully to the institutional, societal nature of racism. Looking back at Governor Vardaman’s quote — he served as governor from 1904 to 1908 and as senator from 1913 to 1919 — under the paradigm of “racism,” we might focus on Vardaman as an individually egregious racist. Under the paradigm of “caste-ism,” we will see Vardaman’s statement as a societal problem. In what kind of society can a governor make such statements and be applauded and upheld by the electorate? Only in a society where voters give systemic support to the opinions expressed by Vardaman; only in a society with a caste system firmly in place.

Wilkerson says that “Caste and race are neither synonymous nor mutually exclusive. They can and do coexist in the same culture and serve to reinforce each other. Race, in the United States, is the visible agent of the unseen force of caste. Caste is the bones, race the skin. Race is what we can see, the physical traits that have been given arbitrary meaning and become shorthand for who a person is. Caste is the powerful infrastructure that holds each group in its place” (19). She also notes that “Caste is fixed and rigid,” whereas “Race is fluid and superficial” (19) as, for instance, with periodic redefinitions of who qualifies as “white” in the United States.

Isabel Wilkerson is a distinguished writer, having won a Pulitzer Prize in journalism in 1994, and a National Book Critics Circle Award for The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration (2010). Caste is not remarkable for new facts. As Wilkerson acknowledges, scholars have been comparing racism and caste-ism at least as far back as Gunnar Myrdal’s An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy (1944). What Wilkerson so valuably contributes is an extensive knowledge of what previous scholars have said on the subject, a fine writer’s ability to use interesting comparisons and metaphors to get the reader to reframe thinking about race, the power of story to reach the reader logically and emotionally, and an ability to bring these findings to bear in a powerful way that speaks to our time. The book just came off the press in August and includes material about Covid-19 — in other words, everything up to the West Coast fires and the death of Justice Ginsburg and whatever crisis rocks the country next week.

According to Wilkerson, “Caste does not explain everything in American life, but no aspect of American life can be fully understood without considering caste and embedded hierarchy” (324). The core idea of this book is to view American caste-ism side by side with India’s caste system and the caste system in Nazi Germany, 1933-1945. From the comparisons, Wilkerson extracts a set of Eight Pillars of Caste, ideologies that pertain to all three systems:

1. Divine Will and the Laws of Nature

2. Heritability

3. Endogamy and the Control of Marriage and Mating

4. Purity versus Pollution

5. Occupational Hierarchy

6. Dehumanization and Stigma

7. Terror as Enforcement, Cruelty as a Means of Control

8. Inherent Superiority versus Inherent Inferiority

Each of these points has its own chapter — there are thirty-one shortish chapters in the book — with illustrative stories, examples, and illuminating analyses. There is also considerable discussion of how the pillars fit together and reinforce each other. I found it very helpful to think through racism as caste-ism, to break the problem down in this way.

As just one example, in the “Purity versus Pollution” chapter there is a section on the use of public swimming pools and beaches in America. “Well into the twentieth century,” writes Wilkerson, “African-Americans were banned from white beaches and lakes and pools, both north and south, lest they pollute them, just as Dalits were forbidden from the waters of the Brahmins, and Jews from Aryan waters in the Third Reich” (117). She tells about how, in the early 1950s, when Cincinnati agreed to let black swimmers into some of its public pools, “whites threw nails and broken glass into the water to keep them out” (117); how in 1919 a seventeen-year-old black swimmer in Lake Michigan was stoned and drowned for wading past the imaginary white line at a public beach (118); how a public pool in Pittsburgh solved the “problem” by keeping black people out until September, giving the maintenance crew the off season for “sufficient time to properly cleanse and disinfect [the pool] after the Negroes have used it” (119).

In a final story on the public waters issue, Wilkerson tells about how, in 1951, a Little League baseball team in Youngstown, Ohio, won the city championship, and decided to celebrate with a picnic at the municipal pool. The pool officials prohibited the team’s one Black player from getting in the water — or even inside the fence around the pool. Under protest of the team, the pool supervisor finally allowed the Black player to come inside the pool fence and be towed around the pool on a small raft, once, while being continually warned not to touch the water (120). This kid was better off than the one who got stoned and drowned, but how heartbreaking for a child to be shamed and ostracized in front of his teammates like this — a burden to bear for the rest of his life.

Ok, that happened in the 1950s, you may be saying. We don’t have segregated pools now. Well, that’s sort of true, but we still have incidents involving pools and race, such as the McKinney, Texas, pool party of 2015, in which a white officer slammed a fifteen-year-old Black girl in a swimsuit to the ground and waved his gun at teen Black boys in the group (236). You can read about it online and watch the video. And of course we have the more recent McKloskey couple in St. Louis, who brandished firearms at Black Lives Matter protestors this past June, and were then featured in a video during the Republican Convention, warning viewers that electing Joe Biden “would bring crime, lawlessness and low quality apartments into now thriving suburban neighborhoods,” an indirect way of saying “white people, protect yourself against a Black and brown invasion.” As Wilkerson says, “Caste, along with its faithful servant race, is an x-factor in most any American equation, and any answer one might ever come up with to address our current challenges is flawed without it” (72).

Wilkerson does an excellent job showing us how it’s not sufficient to say “I’m not racist, let’s just go forward in a colorblind fashion.” We are, she says, like the buyers of an old home. We are not responsible for the way the foundation was laid, but now, as the current occupants of the house, we are responsible for repairing it and making it safe to live in. Safe for all of us who are occupants.

So, what do we do to make it safe? And not just safe, but a place where the occupants can flourish? Here are two places to begin. Start with the premise that we are all equal and brothers and sisters in God’s sight. Access to safe neighborhoods, good schools, nutritious food, and reasonable health care should be available to all. It is not possible to instantly, or perhaps ever, create these basic conditions for everyone, but when we think about public policy, when we vote, when we act as a community, we should think about everyone as part of a collective, not “us” and “them,” and we should seek to provide everyone with these baseline ingredients for opportunity.

Second, we all need to learn more about the United States’ history of… I was going to say “race relations,” but a more accurate term for what I mean would be “white supremacy.” The more I learn, the more committed I am to actively promoting equal opportunity and equal access, and the more I recognize that without citizens actively pursuing these goals they will not be volunteered by most of those living with privilege.

Caste is a rich, well-researched and engagingly written meditation on one of the most important subjects of our time. I encourage you to read it.

Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents   is available on Amazon in  hardcover ,  Kindle , and  audiobook .

Scott Moncrieff is a Professor of English at Andrews University.

Book cover image courtesy of Random House.

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Caste Offers a New Word for Injustice in America, Not a New Way of Thinking

What is caste?

“Caste is the infrastructure of our divisions,” Isabel Wilkerson writes in Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents . Caste is like the bones of an old house, “the studs and joists that we cannot see in the physical buildings we call home.” It is also like “our bones,” literal bones, the structural integrity of our innards kept mostly invisible without X-ray. Caste is like a detailed medical history. “Caste is a disease.” It is a sluggish poison, “an intravenous drip to the mind,” shoring up an “immune system” that is also vulnerable to its “toxins.” It is cellular, “molecular,” “neurological,” “cardiovascular.” Like subduction-zone activity below the Earth’s surface, caste is “the unseen stirrings of the human heart.” Caste is not, however, about “feelings or morality” (though it does “live on in hearts and habits”). Caste is drama, “a stage of epic proportions” with unremovable costumes and an uncorpseable script. Caste is onstage, “a performance,” and caste is, also, somehow, “the wordless usher in a darkened theater.” It is a magic “spell.” A corporation. A Sith Lord. A high-rise building with a flooded basement. Like in The Matrix , “an unseen force of artificial intelligence has overtaken the human species.” It is a ladder; we exist on its rungs. “Caste is structure,” whatever that means precisely.

What caste is not is “the R-word” — that is, race or racism. It is not reducible to race — nor gender, nor class. This Wilkerson realized during research for her first book, The Warmth of Other Suns , an intensely investigated, intimate narrative of manifold migration in 20th-century America. The Warmth of Other Suns , widely praised and an instant New York Times best seller, went on to win the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Heartland Prize for Nonfiction, among other accolades. Working on that book and learning about the Jim Crow underpinnings of what’s often flatly called “the Great Migration,” Wilkerson “discovered … that I was not writing about geography and relocation, but about the American caste system.” Her subjects sought asylum from something much more “insidious” than the age-old Negro question (“How does it feel to be a problem?” W.E.B. Du Bois writes in the well-trodden first chapter of The Souls of Black Folk ). Black Southerners — sharecroppers, domestics, and above all ex-slaves and their children — were escaping a “legal caste system” borne of enslavement, mutated into Jim Crow during the calamitous transition from slavery to freedom deferred. “For this book,” the Pulitzer Prize winner writes, “I wanted to understand the origins and evolution of classifying and elevating one group of people over another.” For that purpose, “racism,” she concluded, “was insufficient.” And as she’s adapted her language, taking on the terms of caste — “the most accurate term to describe the workings of American society” — she beckons readers to do so, too. In that sense Caste is a ride-along, like all persuading histories. “Some of this may sound like a foreign language,” she warns. Foreign isn’t quite the word for it, or not the one I would use. Perhaps messy is, though.

Public conversations about race in America could use some messiness. We could stand to be more awkward amid too much PR. As Wilkerson succinctly identifies, “racism” — and “race” with it — has been so worked over in nomenclature it no longer, if ever it did, pricks the minds of the people who need to be schooled. Though defined sociologically as a compounding entity of bias and power, “racism has often been reduced to a feeling, a character flaw, conflated with prejudice, connected to whether one is a good person or not.” Wilkerson asks, “What does racist mean in an era when even extremists won’t admit to it?” Where are the teeth when a term like “white supremacy” is denounced by gods of mass culture, the likes of Taylor Swift or Donald Trump? In the wake of such rapid, online-propelled appropriation of the literal terms of radical political and cultural judgment, the language is no longer compelling. Just look at recent debates over the usefulness of the acronym BIPOC — “Black peoples and Indigenous peoples and peoples of color” or, as I prefer it, “Black and Indigenous peoples of color” — which exhibit anxiety over the seamless integration of a new racial term without accompanying enlightenment. While it used to emphasize the people Wilkerson might call “lower castes,” whose experiences in America may be unique from that of other people of color in the nation (“middle castes,” in Wilkerson’s terms), BIPOC has quickly become another means for white people, or the “dominant caste,” to run their racial sentiments on autopilot — extending blanket solidarity to “BIPOC co-workers” in workplaces with no apparent Native employees or, as often happened with the predecessor “POC,” applying the term in lieu of “Black.”

Caste takes precedence because of precedent — Wilkerson prefers the word caste because it is, in a word, ancient. She describes race as a strictly visible phenomenon, “a hologram,” “decoy,” or “front man” with respect to caste. Though the book includes evidence of race acting otherwise — like the 1922 case Takao Ozawa v. United States in which, Wilkerson writes, “the Court held unanimously that white meant not skin color but ‘Caucasian’” — these moments, per the book, only underscore how unqualified racial analysis leaves itself bound to the ambivalent whims of the American racial imagination. By contrast, caste is firm, “fixed and rigid,” so rigid it “shape-shifted to keep the upper caste pure by its own terms.” In the United States, 19th- and early-20th-century European immigrants such as the Irish entered the nation and were called “Negroes turned inside out” (Black people, in turn, were called “smoked Irish”) — not a century later whiteness evolved and enveloped them, folding their descendants and contemporary equivalents into the body politic. The ethnic, religious, and cultural makeup of the upper caste has changed since Plymouth Rock, but the necessity of a bottom caste has not. Despite race’s mutability, the American bottom caste, Wilkerson argues, is and has always been Black — or her preferred designation, “African-American.”

Caste does not abandon racial terms. Wilkerson does not leave us to flounder with the labels she wants incorporated, though at times I wished she would. In a chapter called “The Intrusion of Caste in Everyday Life,” Wilkerson describes an interlude between “a white contractor,” “a white engineer,” and “a Black engineer,” “who happened to be African-American and a woman.” The characters retain these titles just until the very end of the story, which transforms the white engineer into “a dominant-caste man.” Maybe, in keeping with the book’s soft spot for metaphors of pathology (and metaphor in general), this is a spoonful of the old ways to help the new vocab go down. But as I progressed through this big book, saddled with terms I’m to understand are inadequate, I wondered why, a couple hundred pages in, I still wasn’t trusted with the training wheels off. Perhaps the many scenes selected from the primary pages of history, the chilling tales of caste at work, would have read less poignantly without the not-so-classical window dressing of whiteness and Blackness and, more rarely, other forms of racialized otherness. Or maybe Wilkerson acquiesces that the modality of race, perceived by senses in addition to sight, accounts for something caste cannot.

Blackness, for one. The book’s insistence on “African-American” for Black people within the nation’s borders reads old-school at best and, at worse, intensely awkward in contemporary contexts. Consider one endnote that refers to today’s regular police killings of “unarmed African-Americans,” citing the research group, Mapping Police Violence. However, Mapping Police Violence tracks victims who are, among other races, best described as “black.” The 2015 data cited by Wilkerson, for example, includes NYPD’s murder of David Felix, a Haitian man with schizophrenia. For anyone not accustomed to thinking diversely about Blackness, this might sound like the smallest of grievances, and yet it can hardly be unimportant to the book’s urge for more precise terminology. Caste proposes a remedy, yet its national articulation of present-day Black people raises more questions than answers. If Black immigrants reside in the upper reaches of the lowest caste — due to their actual and perceived difference from descendants of the American South — as outlined in chapter 16, how ought we to account for their representation as frequent victims of state violence? Where do we place their children, Black Americans whose descendants’ migrations do not fit the regional patterns explicated in The Warmth of Other Suns ?

But this is not actually a problem for the interior life of the book, which doesn’t care much for post-’70s history, in which Blackness in America became more ethnically hybrid. It also mostly concerns itself with the South; the primary, and a good portion of secondary, research (including an oft-cited 1956 study of slavery by late historian Kenneth M. Stampp) emerges from the expanse of Jim Crow. And contemporary scenes tend toward autobiography. In scenes such as these, another awkwardly unavoidable term emerges, the C-word: class. In Caste , class is, like race, variable, its privileges “acquired through hard work and ingenuity or lost through poor decisions or calamity.” Caste is fascinated by scenarios in which white people misread Black affluence, bringing them low in the face of pedigree, education, and the fineness of their dress. In chapter 23, “Shock Troops on the Borders of Hierarchy,” Wilkerson shares three personal encounters at the scene of a plane’s front cabin. Though “I frequently have cause to be seated in first or business class,” she writes, the occasion “can turn me into a living, breathing social experiment without wanting to be.” She is judged, gossiped about, ignored by staff, accosted by a passenger who retrieves his luggage as if her body isn’t there, while the rest of the cabin watches silently. The chapter concludes with an incident that happened to someone else, David Dao, who was dragged by his legs down the aisle of a United Airlines plane at O’Hare. Dao, a Vietnamese-American physician, belongs to the racially and ethnically jumbled category of “middle caste,” according to Wilkerson, and therefore on a higher rung of the ladder, or higher floor of the apartment complex, than she. It is thus not clear what the proximity of these narratives is meant to illuminate. Deprived the terms of race, class, and gender, not much is revealed besides the cross-caste indignities of air travel.

I am being only a bit facetious, conforming to the language of caste in Caste , which I now suspect is more unyielding than caste itself, unprepared for anomalies that, if one spends enough time observing Earth, tend to amass into banalities. (In the case of the white officer, Eric Casebolt, who body-slammed a teenage Black girl at a McKinney, Texas, pool party in 2015, Wilkerson remarks that it “would be hard to imagine” an officer doing the same “with a young girl from the same caste”; the following chapter, however, includes the circumstances of Freddie Gray, who was killed by officers who shared his caste, as an example of “the otherwise illogical phenomenon” of intra-caste violence.) Caste could benefit from more, or maybe deeper, research on the histories of resistance movements, particularly the work of late Caribbean scholar Michel-Rolph Trouillot, whose Silencing the Past appears as a bibliographic entry but is not cited in the body of Caste . As Trouillot writes in that book, historians, or readers of history, cannot assume that our inheritance of the past is identical to the past as it unfolded in its time. There is danger in drawing too fine a parallel.

Wilkerson knows this well enough when she ventures across the Atlantic for firsthand research into Indian caste and German Nazism, the other two castes she considers as formidable as America’s own. This is another benefit of caste language — historical comparison, getting America and Germany and the Indian subcontinent on the same page, which she stresses is a unique feat of her book. Though historical and cultural asides about how caste exists or existed in these places are numerous, anecdotes are selected by glint of their similarity to U.S. formulations of caste. If you thought the Nazis were awful, well, they learned it from Jim Crow, and even softened some aspects of U.S. caste deemed too severe for a German populace.

If caste is us, the book asks, how does one “dig up the taproots of hierarchy” without killing the tree, or torching the house, or whatever image one prefers. It would seem that it can’t be done, an answer fine by me. If caste is “who we are” — inside of us, deep, to the bone, in the nerves, at the heart of our matter — it leads to reason that the only answer to a problem of caste is self-immolation. But the book does not end on such a note, or anything like it. Instead, it finds comfort in sentimentality, faith that the answer lies in the heart — “the Last Frontier,” according to the final full chapter. I can’t blame Wilkerson, it’s a nice place to be, a place where we can believe people in power are one sincere interaction away from radical empathy. A place where the phrase “newly minted anti-racist, anti-casteist, upper-caste woman,” given to a family friend after she tells off a waiter who neglects their interracial table in favor of white patrons, rolls off the tongue without irony. The language is slightly different, but we’ve been here before, have we not?

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Reviews of Caste by Isabel Wilkerson

Summary | Excerpt | Reading Guide | Reviews | Beyond the book | Read-Alikes | Genres & Themes | Author Bio

The Origins of Our Discontents

by Isabel Wilkerson

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The Pulitzer Prize–winning, bestselling author of The Warmth of Other Suns examines the unspoken caste system that has shaped America and shows how our lives today are still defined by a hierarchy of human divisions.

"As we go about our daily lives, caste is the wordless usher in a darkened theater, flashlight cast down in the aisles, guiding us to our 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 do not." In this brilliant book, Isabel Wilkerson gives us a masterful portrait of an unseen phenomenon in America as she explores, through an immersive, deeply researched narrative and stories about real people, how America today and throughout its history has been shaped by a hidden caste system, a rigid hierarchy of human rankings. Beyond race, class, or other factors, there is a powerful caste system that influences people's lives and behavior and the nation's fate. Linking the caste systems of America, India, and Nazi Germany, Wilkerson explores eight pillars that underlie caste systems across civilizations, including divine will, bloodlines, stigma, and more. Using riveting stories about people—including Martin Luther King, Jr., baseball's Satchel Paige, a single father and his toddler son, Wilkerson herself, and many others—she shows the ways that the insidious undertow of caste is experienced every day. She documents how the Nazis studied the racial systems in America to plan their out-cast of the Jews; she discusses why the cruel logic of caste requires that there be a bottom rung for those in the middle to measure themselves against; she writes about the surprising health costs of caste, in depression and life expectancy, and the effects of this hierarchy on our culture and politics. Finally, she points forward to ways America can move beyond the artificial and destructive separations of human divisions, toward hope in our common humanity. Beautifully written, original, and revealing, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents is an eye-opening story of people and history, and a reexamination of what lies under the surface of ordinary lives and of American life today.

Chapter 2 An Old House and an Infrared Light

The inspector trained his infrared lens onto a misshapen bow in the ceiling, an invisible beam of light searching the layers of lath to test what the eye could not see. This house had been built generations ago, and I had noticed the slightest welt in a corner of plaster in a spare bedroom and had chalked it up to idiosyncrasy. Over time, the welt in the ceiling became a wave that widened and bulged despite the new roof. It had been building beyond perception for years. An old house is its own kind of devotional, a dowager aunt with a story to be coaxed out of her, a mystery, a series of interlocking puzzles awaiting solution. Why is this soffit tucked into the southeast corner of an eave? What is behind this discolored patch of brick? With an old house, the work is never done, and you don't expect it to be. America is an old house. We can never declare the work over. Wind, flood, drought, and human upheavals batter a structure that is ...

Please be aware that this discussion guide will contain spoilers!

• At the beginning of Caste , author Isabel Wilkerson compares American racial hierarchy to a dormant Siberian virus. What are the strengths of this metaphor? How does this comparison help combat the pervasive myth that racism has been eradicated in America?
• Wilkerson begins the book with an image of one lone dissenter amidst a crowd of Germans giving the Nazi salute. What would it mean—and what would it take—to be this man today?
• What are some of the elements required for a caste system to succeed?
• Wilkerson uses many different metaphors to explain and help us visualize the concept of the American caste system: the bones inside a body, the beams inside a house, even the computer program in the 1999 film The Matrix. Which of ...
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Wilkerson writes clearly and with a gravity that matches her subject matter. Her masterful and at times poetic use of allegory adds color and emotional resonance to her academic analysis, such as when she relates the story of a strange sickness that swept through Siberia in 2016, which eventually was discovered to have been caused by anthrax buried under permafrost. It had been there since World War II, but now, because a radical heatwave had hit the area, it had been released from the snow. The anthrax, she says, is "like the reactivation of the human pathogens of hatred and tribalism in this evolving century...It lay in wait, sleeping, until extreme circumstances brought it to the surface and back to life." The book is painstakingly researched, with thousands of testimonials and case studies, both historical and contemporary. Each anecdote conveys an element of the barbarity and perversity of the caste system. Wilkerson relays these incidents with calm authority, equal parts blunt and tender, laying bare the exceptional cruelty that the delusion of caste can engender... continued

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Isabel Wilkerson

Ask litcharts ai: the answer to your questions.

Author Isabel Wilkerson argues that life in the United States is defined by a dual-poled caste system in which white people comprise the dominant caste while Black people comprise the subordinate caste. Throughout U.S. history, she suggests, a collective scrambling to get as close to the dominant caste as possible has defined relations among people of different races and ethnicities who have come to the U.S. in search of better futures.

Race is the visible agent of caste, while caste is the unseen “infrastructure” that holds each of American society’s racial and ethnic groups firmly in their places. The hierarchy of caste defines every aspect of contemporary American life—and it’s why the U.S., in spite of its vast wealth and political power, continues to lag in terms of overall happiness, literacy, and social programs like universal healthcare. In seeking to uphold the dominant caste’s superiority at every turn, Wilkerson argues that the U.S. has handicapped itself greatly. The U.S. is like an old house , Wilkerson suggests. And unless Americans begin to really examine what it is that keeps that house standing—and what problems threaten its structural integrity—they will never be able to repair their country’s ills.

Wilkerson sharpens her arguments about the existence of an American caste system by drawing comparisons to the world’s most recognizable caste system—the Hindu caste system which has existed in India for millennia—and the caste system manufactured by the Nazi Party during the Third Reich . While these systems were (and are) very different from the one in the U.S., every caste system is defined by how it forces people to play a role assigned to them at birth. This makes people unable to recognize others’ humanity—and once someone has been dehumanized by the caste system, it’s easy to continue perpetuating violence and humiliation against them.

There are many “pillars” that keep the caste system standing: the Indian caste system, for instance, posits that the god Brahma created the castes from different parts of his body). In the American caste system, white, European Christians used the biblical story of Noah’s curse on the dark-skinned sons of his child Ham to justify enslaving African people. Other pillars that uphold caste include caste-based violence and terror, caste’s perceived heritability, and the idea upper castes are inherently pure while the lower castes are inherently polluted.

Caste intrudes into every aspect of daily life in the U.S. and India—in large part because of the “urgent necessity of a bottom rung” to keep the dominant castes feeling secure in their social positions and their power to influence the world around them. This means that members of the subordinate castes will often physically or emotionally harm one another in an effort to get as close to the dominant caste and its attendant privileges as possible. It also means that when the dominant caste’s power and longevity is threatened, chaos can break loose.

Toward the end of the book, Wilkerson seeks to tie upper-caste anxieties about losing power and authority to the election of Donald Trump in 2016, and to the rise in anti-Black and anti-Semitic violence, police brutality, and flagrant racism. These phenomena led to violent conflicts like the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. Any “change in the script,” Wilkerson argues, leads to a sharp resurgence of caste. The presidency of Barack Obama , a Black politician, was a major deviation in a centuries-long script where the dominant caste was able to punish, humiliate, brutalize, and murder the subordinate caste with impunity.

The only solution to the problem of caste, Wilkerson argues, is a collective societal effort across the spectrum of the caste system. Upper-caste individuals must shed the false belief that they are inherently superior or entitled to special privileges and power. Instead, they must work to elevate the voices of those in the subordinate castes. Societies around the world are being held back from progress due to their allegiances to their caste systems—social programs are suffering, violence rates are increasing, and people are more divided than ever. But with open-hearted attempts to connect to people of other castes and focus on what all humans have in common, society may be able to achieve a world without caste. Only them, Wilkerson suggests, will everyone truly be free.

Caste Summary

1-Sentence-Summary: Caste unveils the hidden cultural and societal rules of our class system, including where it comes from, why it’s so deeply entrenched in society, and how we can dismantle it forever and finally allow all people to have the equality they deserve. 

Favorite quote from the author:

Table of Contents

Video Summary

Caste review, audio summary, who would i recommend our caste summary to.

Imagine you inherited an old home. You freshen it up with paint and a new roof, but soon you notice plaster cracking in the ceiling. At first, you brush it off as unimportant, but soon it grows larger, so you bring in a specialist to tell you what’s wrong.

They tell you that stress cracks in the foundation are bending the ceilings. It’s not your fault since you inherited the house. But because it’s your home, it’s now your problem. Until you address this problem, it’s a hazard to everyone. 

Racism in America is a lot like this. After three hundred years, we can see the stress fractures all around us. These come in the form of income gaps, police brutality, a lack of healthcare access. The reason it’s so hard to get rid of systemic racism because America has a hierarchical system underlying it.

In Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents , Isabel Wilkerson explores the phenomenon that is the hidden caste system in American society. She shows parallels between the US caste system others and teaches the principles that underlie all caste systems. Through her story, you will better understand how we got here and what we still need to do. 

Let’s see how much we can discover in just 3 lessons:

• There are 8 foundational pillars of a caste system, and the first 4 are Divine Will and Laws of Nature, Heritability, Endogamy, and Purity vs Pollution.
• The last 4 pillars of the caste system deal with hierarchy, dehumanization, terror, and superiority.
• We can dismantle the caste with monuments and memorials and support all who try to break it down.

Ready to learn all about social classes and how to dismantle them? Let’s get to it!

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Lesson 1: The first 4 pillars of the caste system are Divine Will and Laws of Nature, Heritability, Endogamy, and Purity vs Pollution.

Wilkerson believes eight pillars that make up every caste system are: 

1. Divine Will and the Laws of Nature . This is when religious beliefs make it hard to change the way things are. In India, Hindu texts describe a caste system that places a series of groups in order. Those at the bottom are stuck for life paying off a karmic debt. Canaan – one of Noah’s three sons, is a curse to be a slave-based on the old testament. Some people interpret Canaan to have dark skin. 

2. Heritability . This means you are born into whatever caste your parents belong to.

3. Endogamy and the Control of Marriage and Mating . Endogamy, which means marrying within your caste, was strictly enforced, especially in India. There were times in America when the mere accusation that a Black man touched a white woman ended in lynching. 

4. Purity vs Pollution . This is when people insist on maintaining a “pure” bloodline. In Nazi Germany, Jewish people were forbidden to go near any water that might touch an Aryan German. Also, African-Americans were banned from swimming pools.

As you can see, caste systems form around arbitrary but culturally strengthened rules. The remaining four pillars were built on fake reasons for why those rules were “necessary.”

Lesson 2: Hierarchy, dehumanization, terror, and superiority are the last 4 pillars of the caste system.

The remaining 4 pillars are made up reasons to keep the other four in place:

5. Occupational Hierarchy . People claim someone has to do the hard and menial jobs in society. As an example, Americans argued that low-status jobs were for Blacks.

6. Dehumanization and Stigma . Some groups dehumanize other groups to elevate themselves. Nazis did this to the Jewish community, and America has done the same to African-Americans. In both cases, the lower-class people are subject to torture and medical experiments, sometimes solely for the higher caste’s enjoyment.

Blacks and Jewish people were also greatly stigmatized. They blamed Nazis for Germany’s loss in World War I and the economic downturn that came after. In the US, a high crime rate and economic challenges were blamed on African-Americans.

7. Terror as Enforcement and Cruelty as Means of Control. Tragically, whippings, burnings, and hangings were things both Nazis and American slave owners did as a means of control or to serve warnings. This often happened on plantations. Hangings and burnings continued even after slavery was abolished.

8. Inherent Superiority vs Inherent Inferiority. Interactions between castes are dominated by a long, unspoken list of rituals, rules, and traditions to remind inferior castes of their lower status, which causes lasting damage in any society.

Lesson 3: If we want to take down the caste system, we have to support those trying to destroy it.

A few years ago, the US had around 230 memorials commemorating Robert E Lee, the commander of the Confederate Army during the Civil War. Despite being tolerated and even honored for a long time, people finally feel brave enough to say they should be taken down.

When hearings in one city were held whether to take down a statue of the general, there was some pushback. While Nazi general Erwin Rommel was a gifted military leader, Germans didn’t erect statues. This is what Richard Westmoreland, a retired Marine lieutenant colonel, pointed out. He poignantly said, “They’re ashamed. Why aren’t we?” 

In contrast, Germany has many memorials to victims of the Nazis. This includes markers with names on the sidewalk outside of homes from where they took them. In short, they humanized people.

But in America , merely removing a statue of a Confederate leader leads to death threats, showing how far we still have to go. It won’t be simple to tackle the caste problem. The first thing we can do is make people aware of its existence. 

The next thing that we can do is support people who find ways to break free of a lower caste. We can also highlight the things we have in common to view each other as unique individuals. The more we see each other as individuals, the easier it will be to break free of castes.

Social classes and the people that try to uphold them make me sick. We’re all human beings, we are all equal, and we all deserve equal rights, opportunities, and treatment. Caste made me angry not because it was wrong or a bad book, but rather because it identified a huge problem with society that I can’t wait to tear down.

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Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents

86 pages • 2 hours read

A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Preface-Part 1, Chapter 3

Part 2, Chapters 4-6

Part 2, Chapters 7-9

Part 3, Preface-Pillar 2

Part 3, Pillars 3-5

Part 3, Pillars 6-8

Part 4, Preface-Chapter 12

Part 4, Chapters 13-15

Part 4, Chapters 16-18

Part 5, Chapters 19-21

Part 5, Chapters 22-24

Part 6, Chapters 25-27

Part 6, Chapters 28-29

Part 7, Chapter 30-Epilogue

Key Figures

Index of Terms

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Summary and Study Guide

Isabel Wilkerson’s Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents is a 2020 historical and narrative nonfiction work about the nature of inequality in the United States, India, and Nazi Germany. Wilkerson is a writer and former journalist, best known for her work in the New York Times, for which she received a Pulitzer Prize . She achieved further acclaim with her 2010 work, The Warmth of Other Suns. Wilkerson has also taught journalism at many colleges and universities, including Princeton and Emory.

Caste describes the United States from the arrival of the first enslaved people in 1619 to the current Covid-19 pandemic to explain the nature and consequences of inequality. In the book’s first part, Wilkerson notes that many people were shaken and surprised by the results of the 2016 presidential election, but the outcome was really the result of long-buried issues, and she therefore calls for a deep dive into the structures of American life. She argues that the key to understanding America is its caste system, a commitment to structures that assign some lives more value than others; in the United States it is based on skin color. 

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In Part 2, Wilkerson describes how race was constructed as a system of inequality in response to economic need. Enslaved Africans became a labor force for the American colonies, and an ideological system sprang up to justify their subjugation. Race is a constructed category, and Wilkerson in some respects finds caste more useful as it rests more on hierarchies rather than emotions, and every individual at upper levels of the hierarchy maintains the system. Wilkerson also notes that what we think of as the most extreme example of prejudice, Nazi Germany, actually rejected some of the racial thinking of the Jim Crow South as too extremist.

In the work’s third part, Wilkerson explains the pillars of every caste system and describes her personal encounters with some of these principles, such as the divine origins of inequality, the inheritability of inferior status, control over sexual partnerships and children, fears of pollution by inferiors, and assumption of status based on employment. Violations of these tenets often have horrific consequences. Wilkerson herself has lost work opportunities because White men assumed a Black woman could not be a journalist.

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In the work’s fourth part, Wilkerson notes that since the 1970s, White men have believed themselves to occupy a more precarious position, and they have fallen back on racism to explain their new circumstances and increasingly turned away from the Democratic Party. Black people are threatened with police violence when they appear in settings or spaces where White people do not believe they belong. Wilkerson also discusses individuals whose professional lives were harmed by the caste system.

In Part 5, Wilkerson elaborates on dominant caste behavior, noting how white Americans describe themselves in terms of their European ancestry. The caste system also depends on the subordinate caste extending empathy and forgiveness when its members suffer, such as after the Charleston shootings at Mother Emmanuel AME in 2015. She describes her own experiences being nearly assaulted by White men on airplanes as they defended their caste status at the expense of her own autonomy. These indignities have physical consequences: The stress of racism has been found to alter the cells of African Americans and accelerate their aging.

Wilkerson then turns to the 2008 election. Obama’s election is also a story of caste: His biography did not touch on slavery or segregation, and his achievements marked him as a remarkable individual. However, his presidency produced White backlash, most notably the formation of the Tea Party. The caste system also explains 2016: Many white voters were eager to reassert the primacy of the caste system by supporting Trump. They continued this defensiveness by defending Confederate monuments. In contrast, German commemorative practices do not in memorialize former leaders of the Third Reich. Wilkerson also notes that the caste system has high economic costs, which the Covid-19 pandemic has brought into sharp relief, as racial disparities in mortality rates are stark.

In the work’s final part, Wilkerson contemplates Indians who have left their dominant caste identity behind, and a White friend who became outraged after receiving poor service at a restaurant due to Wilkerson’s race. She uses these stories to posit that a reclamation of humanity beyond caste may be possible. Modern Germany offers hope of a state that has left caste behind, which is crucial in a moment when American democracy seems precarious precisely because too many elites cling to the caste system. 

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Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents

Isabel wilkerson.

544 pages, Hardcover

First published August 4, 2020

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Those in the dominant caste who found themselves lagging behind those seen as inherently inferior potentially faced an epic existential crisis. To stand on the same rung as those perceived to be of a lower caste is seen as lowering one's status. In the zero-sum stakes of a caste system upheld by perceived scarcity, if a lower-caste person goes up a rung, an upper-caste person comes down. The elevation of others amounts to a demotion of oneself, thus equality feels like a demotion.

Under the spell of caste, the [baseball] majors, like society itself, were willing to forgo their own advancement and glory, and resulting profits, if these came at the hands of someone seen as subordinate.

A caste system is an artificial construction, a fixed and embedded ranking of human value that sets the presumed supremacy of one group against the presumed inferiority of other groups... In the American caste system, the signal of rank is what we call race, the division of humans. "As a social or human division," wrote the political scientist Andrew Hacker of the use of physical traits to form human categories, "it surpasses all others - even gender - in intensity and subordination."

The hierarchy of caste is not about feelings or morality. It is about power—which groups have it and which do not. It is about resources—which caste is seen as worthy of them and which are not, who gets to acquire and control them and who does not. It is about respect, authority, and assumptions of competence—who is accorded these and who is not.

The anthropologist Ashley Montagu was among the first to argue that race is a human invention, a social construct, not a biological one, and that in seeking to understand the divisions and disparities in the United States, we have typically fallen into the quicksand and mythology of race. “When we speak of the race problem in America,” he wrote in 1942, “what we really mean is the caste system and the problems which that caste system creates in America.

Empathy is no substitute for the experience itself. ... Radical empathy is not about you and what you think you would do in a situation you have never been in and perhaps never will. It is the kindred connection from a place of deep knowing that opens your spirit to the pain of another as they perceive it. ... The price of privilege is the moral duty to act when one sees another person treated unfairly.

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THE ORIGINS OF OUR DISCONTENTS

by Isabel Wilkerson ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 11, 2020

A memorable, provocative book that exposes an American history in which few can take pride.

The Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist chronicles the formation and fortunes of social hierarchy.

Caste is principally associated with India, which figures in the book—an impressive follow-up to her magisterial The Warmth of Other Suns —but Wilkerson focuses on the U.S. We tend to think of divisions as being racial rather than caste-based. However, as the author writes, “caste is the infrastructure of our divisions. It is the architecture of human hierarchy, the subconscious code of instructions for maintaining, in our case, a four-hundred-year-old social order.” That social order was imposed on Africans unwillingly brought to this country—but, notes Wilkerson, “caste and race are neither synonymous nor mutually exclusive.” If Africans ranked at the bottom of the scale, members of other ethnic orders, such as Irish indentured servants, also suffered discrimination even if they were categorized as white and thus hierarchically superior. Wilkerson writes that American caste structures were broadly influential for Nazi theorists when they formulated their racial and social classifications; they “knew that the United States was centuries ahead of them with its anti-miscegenation statutes and race-based immigration bans.” Indeed, the Nazi term “ untermensch ,” or “under-man,” owes to an American eugenicist whose writings became required reading in German schools under the Third Reich, and the distinction between Jew and Aryan owes to the one-drop rules of the American South. If race links closely to caste in much of Wilkerson’s account, it departs from it toward the end. As she notes, the U.S. is rapidly becoming a “majority minority” country whose demographics will more closely resemble South Africa’s than the norms of a half-century ago. What matters is what we do with the hierarchical divisions we inherit, which are not hewn in stone: “We are responsible for ourselves and our own deeds or misdeeds in our time and in our own space and will be judged accordingly by succeeding generations.”

Pub Date: Aug. 11, 2020

ISBN: 978-0-593-23025-1

Page Count: 496

Publisher: Random House

Review Posted Online: May 29, 2020

Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2020

CURRENT EVENTS & SOCIAL ISSUES | HISTORY | AFRICAN AMERICAN | UNITED STATES | PUBLIC POLICY | ETHNICITY & RACE | ISSUES & CONTROVERSIES

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KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON

The osage murders and the birth of the fbi.

by David Grann ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 18, 2017

Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.

Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.

During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorker staff writer Grann ( The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession , 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.

Pub Date: April 18, 2017

ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6

Page Count: 352

Publisher: Doubleday

Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017

GENERAL HISTORY | TRUE CRIME | UNITED STATES | FIRST/NATIVE NATIONS | HISTORY

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WHAT THIS COMEDIAN SAID WILL SHOCK YOU

by Bill Maher ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 21, 2024

Maher calls out idiocy wherever he sees it, with a comedic delivery that veers between a stiletto and a sledgehammer.

The comedian argues that the arts of moderation and common sense must be reinvigorated.

Some people are born snarky, some become snarky, and some have snarkiness thrust upon them. Judging from this book, Maher—host of HBO’s Real Time program and author of The New New Rules and When You Ride Alone, You Ride With bin Laden —is all three. As a comedian, he has a great deal of leeway to make fun of people in politics, and he often delivers hilarious swipes with a deadpan face. The author describes himself as a traditional liberal, with a disdain for Republicans (especially the MAGA variety) and a belief in free speech and personal freedom. He claims that he has stayed much the same for more than 20 years, while the left, he argues, has marched toward intolerance. He sees an addiction to extremism on both sides of the aisle, which fosters the belief that anyone who disagrees with you must be an enemy to be destroyed. However, Maher has always displayed his own streaks of extremism, and his scorched-earth takedowns eventually become problematic. The author has something nasty to say about everyone, it seems, and the sarcastic tone starts after more than 300 pages. As has been the case throughout his career, Maher is best taken in small doses. The book is worth reading for the author’s often spot-on skewering of inept politicians and celebrities, but it might be advisable to occasionally dip into it rather than read the whole thing in one sitting. Some parts of the text are hilarious, but others are merely insulting. Maher is undeniably talented, but some restraint would have produced a better book.

Pub Date: May 21, 2024

ISBN: 9781668051351

Page Count: 384

Publisher: Simon & Schuster

Review Posted Online: March 5, 2024

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2024

POLITICS | CURRENT EVENTS & SOCIAL ISSUES | ISSUES & CONTROVERSIES | ENTERTAINMENT, SPORTS & CELEBRITY

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Caste (Wilkerson)

Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents Isabel Wilkerson, 2020 Random House 496 pp. ISBN-13: 9780593230251 Summary As we go about our daily lives, caste is the wordless usher in a darkened theater, flashlight cast down in the aisles, guiding us to our 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 do not . In this brilliant book, Isabel Wilkerson gives us a masterful portrait of an unseen phenomenon in America as she explores, through an immersive, deeply researched narrative. She tells us stories about real people, how America today and throughout its history has been shaped by a hidden caste system—a rigid hierarchy of human rankings.   Beyond race, class, or other factors, there is a powerful caste system that influences people’s lives and behavior and the nation’s fate. Linking the caste systems of America, India, and Nazi Germany, Wilkerson explores eight pillars that underlie caste systems across civilizations, including divine will, bloodlines, stigma, and more. Using riveting stories about people—including Martin Luther King, Jr., baseball’s Satchel Paige, a single father and his toddler son, Wilkerson herself, and many others—she shows the ways that the insidious undertow of caste is experienced every day:

—she documents how the Nazis studied the racial systems in America to plan their out-cast of the Jews; —she discusses why the cruel logic of caste requires that there be a bottom rung for those in the middle to measure themselves against; —she writes about the surprising health costs of caste, in depression and life expectancy, and the effects of this hierarchy on our culture and politics.

Finally, Wilkerson points forward to ways America can move beyond the artificial and destructive separations of human divisions, toward hope in our common humanity. Beautifully written, original, and revealing, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents is an eye-opening story of people and history, and a reexamination of what lies under the surface of ordinary lives and of American life today. ( From the publisher .)

Author Bio • Birth—N/A • Where—Washington, D.C., USA • Education—B.A., Howard University • Awards—Pulitizer Prize (twice); National Book Critics Circle Award; George S. Polk Award; Journalist of the Year Award from The National Association of Black Journalists. • Currently—lives in in Boston, Massachusetts

Isabel Wilkerson is a journalist and the author, in 2010, of The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration , which won the Pulitizer Prize, as well as the Book Critics Circle Award. In 2020, she published Caste: The Origins of our Discontents , a book that also received wide critical acclaim. Born in Washington D.C., Wilkerson studied journalism at Howard University, becoming editor-in-chief of the college newspaper The Hilltop . During college, Wilkerson interned at many publications, including the The Los Angeles Times and Washington Post . In 1994, while Chicago bureau chief of The New York Times , she became the first African-American woman to win the Pulitzer Prize in journalism, winning the feature writing award for her coverage of the 1993 midwestern floods and her profile of a 10-year-old boy who was responsible for his four siblings. Several of Wilkerson's articles are included in the book Pulitzer Prize Feature Stories: America's Best Writing, 1979 - 2003 , edited by David Garlock. Wilkerson has also won a George S. Polk Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a Journalist of the Year award from the National Association of Black Journalists. She has also held the positions of James M. Cox Professor of Journalism at Emory University, Ferris Professor of Journalism at Princeton University and the Kreeger-Wolf endowed lecturer at Northwestern University. She also served as a board member of the National Arts in Journalism Program at Columbia University. Wilkerson is now a Professor of Journalism and Director of Narrative Nonfiction in the College of Communications at Boston University. After fourteen years of research, she has just released a book called The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration , which examines the three geographic routes that were commonly used by African Americans leaving the southern states between 1915 and the 1970s, illustrated through the personal stories of people who took those routes. During her research for the book, Wilkerson interviewed more than 1,000 people who made the migration from the South to Northern and Western cities. The book almost instantly hit number 11 on the NYT Bestseller list for nonfiction and has since been included in lists of best books of 2010 by many reviewers, including Salon.com, Atlanta Magazine, New Yorker, Washington Post, Economist , and The Daily Beast. ( From Wikipedia .)

Book Reviews [A]n extraordinary document…an instant American classic and almost certainly the keynote nonfiction book of the American century thus far. It made the back of my neck prickle from its first pages, and that feeling never went away…. It's a book that seeks to shatter a paralysis of will. It's a book that changes the weather inside a reader. Dwight Garner - New York Times [E]legant and persuasive…. [Wilkerson] combines larger historical descriptions with vignettes from particular lives, recounted with the skill of a veteran reporter…. Its vivid stories about the mistreatment of Black Americans… prompt flashes of indignation and moments of sorrow. The result is a book that is at once beautifully written and painful to read. Kwame Anthony Appiah - New York Times Book Review Wilkerson’s book is a powerful, illuminating and heartfelt account of how hierarchy reproduces itself, as well as a call to action for the difficult work of undoing it. Washington Post Magnificent… a trailblazing work on the birth of inequality…. Caste offers a forward-facing vision. Bursting with insight and love, this book may well help save us. Oprah Magazine [ Caste ] should be at the top of every American’s reading list. Chicago Tribune ( Starred Review ) [A] powerful and extraordinarily timely social history…. Incisive autobiographical anecdotes and captivating portraits…reveal the steep price U.S. society pays for limiting the potential of black Americans. This enthralling expose deserves a wide and impassioned readership. Publishers Weekly ( Starred Review ) [Wilkerson] explains how a rigid social order, or caste, is about power.… Incidents of historical and contemporary violence against African Americans resonate throughout this incisive work. [ Caste ] is destined to become a classic, and is urgent, essential reading for all. Library Journal ( Starred Review ) This is a brilliant book, well timed in the face of a pandemic and police brutality that cleave along the lines of a caste system. Booklist ( Starred Review ) Wilkerson writes that American caste structures were broadly influential for Nazi theorists when they formulated their racial and social classifications…. A memorable, provocative book that exposes an American history in which few can take pride. Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions 1. At the beginning of Caste , author Isabel Wilkerson compares American racial hierarchy to a dormant Siberian virus. What are the strengths of this metaphor? How does this comparison help combat the pervasive myth that racism has been eradicated in America? 2. Wilkerson begins the book with an image of one lone dissenter amidst a crowd of Germans giving the Nazi salute. What would it mean—and what would it take—to be this man today? 3. What are some of the elements required for a caste system to succeed? 4. Wilkerson uses many different metaphors to explain and help us visualize the concept of the American caste system: the bones inside a body, the beams inside a house, even the computer program in the 1999 film The Matrix . Which of these metaphors helped the concept click for you? Why was it successful? 5. Caste and race are not the same thing. What is the difference between the two? How do casteism and racism support each other? 6. Discuss how class is also different from caste. 7. Who does a caste system benefit? Who does it harm? 8. "Before there was a United States of America," Wilkerson writes, "there was a caste system, born in colonial Virginia." How can Americans reckon with this fact? What does it mean to you to live in a country whose system of discrimination was cemented before the country itself? 9. Did learning about the lens and language of caste change how you look at U.S. history and society? How? 10. Wilkerson discusses three major caste systems throughout the book: India, Nazi Germany, and America. What are some of the differences that stood out to you among these three systems? What are the similarities? How did learning about one help you understand the other? For instance, did the fact that the Nazis actually studied America’s segregation practices and Jim Crow laws help underscore the depth of our own system? 11. Harold Hale, an African-American man, helped his daughter defy the "rules" of their caste in 1970s Texas by naming her Miss. As Wilkerson illustrates throughout the book, the dangers of being seen as defying one’s caste can range from humiliation to death. What do you think of the lengths he felt he needed to go to assure dignity for his daughter? What are the risks he put her in by doing so? Should Miss have had a say in her father’s quietly revolutionary act? Explain. 12. Discuss the differences and similarities between how Miss was treated in the South, where racism and casteism have historically been more overt, and in the North, where they still exist, but can be more subtle. Do you think these various forms of racism and casteism must be fought in different ways? 13. Wilkerson quotes the orator Frederick Douglass, who described the gestures that could incite white rage and violence: "in the tone of an answer; in answering at all; in not answering …" These contradict each other: One could incite rage by answering … or by not answering. Discuss the bind that this contradiction put (and still puts) African-American people in. 14. Wilkerson frequently uses her own experience as an African-American woman to illustrate her points regarding caste—and the confusion when someone "rises above" his or her presumed station. What do readers gain from hearing about Wilkerson’s personal experiences in addition to her deep historical research? 15. "Indians will ask one’s surname, the occupation of one’s father, the village one is from, the section of the village that one is from, to suss out the caste of whoever is standing in front of them," Wilkerson writes. "They will not rest until they have uncovered the person’s rank in the social order." How is this similar to and different from the process of determining caste in America? Have you ever, for instance, asked someone what they did for work or where they lived or went to school, and been surprised? Did you treat them differently upon hearing their answer? 16. Analyze the process of dehumanization and how it can lead to people justifying great acts of cruelty. 17. "Evil asks little of the dominant caste other than to sit back and do nothing," Wilkerson writes. Whether in the dominant caste or not, what are some of the ways that each of us, personally, can stand up to the caste system? 18. Wilkerson gives examples that range from the horrifying (lynching) to the absurd (the Indian woman who walked across an office to ask a Dalit to pour her water from the jug next to her desk) to illustrate caste’s influence on behavior. How do both of these types of examples—and everything in between—help cement her points? Why do we need to see this range to clearly understand caste? 19. Discuss how overt racism subtly transformed into unconscious bias. What are the ways that we can work to compensate for the unconscious biases inherent in a caste system? 20. Wilkerson writes about the "construction of whiteness," describing the way immigrants went from being Czech or Hungarian or Polish to "white"—a political designation that only has meaning when set against something "not white." Irish, Italian … people weren’t "white" until they came to America. What does this "construction of whiteness" tell us about the validity of racial designations and the structure of caste? 21. It is a widely held convention that working-class white Americans may often "act against their own interests" by opposing policies designed to help the working class. Discuss how the logic of caste disproves this concept and redefines that same choice from the perspective of maintaining group dominance. 22. How does the caste system take people who would otherwise be allies and turn them against one another? 23. Wilkerson describes dinner with a white acquaintance who was incensed over the treatment they received from the waitstaff. Why did the acquaintance respond the way that she did, and how did it hurt or help the situation? 24. What do we learn from Albert Einstein’s response to the American caste system upon arrival from Germany? 25. What are some of the steps that society, and each of us, can take toward dismantling the caste system? ( Questions issued by the publisher .)

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Caste by Isabel Wilkerson Is a Trailblazing Work on the Birth of Inequality

And it may be the book that helps save us.

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Her historical opus draws on years of research, stories, and previously published works to reveal, for example, that the Nazis used U.S. miscegenation laws as a blueprint for their own approach to genocide, and that Martin Luther King Jr., on a 1959 visit to India, observed, “Yes, I am an untouchable, and every Negro in the United States of America is an untouchable.” That realization informed his civil rights work thereafter. Wilkerson unearths bone-chilling parallels in systems of oppressive regimes that otherwise seem radically dissimilar to explain caste and how it predated and helped define racism in America.

Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents

Caste opens with an iconic image from a 1936 Nazi rally in Germany, in which all the shipyard workers photographed, except one, are saluting the führer. That lone man stands, arms crossed, refusing to heil Hitler, “on the right side of history,” epitomizing the energy and resilience we all must summon to get free of “the shape-shifting, unspoken, race-based caste pyramid” that still molds our society.

Weaving in and out of past and present, Wilkerson provides the kind of history lesson that gives rise to countless aha moments. She shares relatable personal anecdotes alongside inspirational accounts of how people from Albert Einstein to Satchel Paige found their own unique ways to oppose racism. Wilkerson also revisits chapters of American history often ignored in textbooks and delineates what she terms “eight pillars of caste.”

“We in the developed world,” she observes, “are like homeowners who inherited a house on a piece of land that is beautiful on the outside, but whose soil is unstable loam and rock, heaving and contracting over generations, cracks patched but the deeper ruptures waved away for decades, centuries even.”

We may not have built the house—or the caste system—but we are its heirs, and it’s up to us to acknowledge that what we ignore will not fix itself. “Whatever you are wishing away will gnaw at you until you gather the courage to face what you would rather not see,” writes Wilkerson. Caste offers a forward-facing vision. Bursting with insight and love, this book may well help save us.

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Emily Bernard is author of the acclaimed 2019 essay collection Black is the Body: Stories from my Grandmother’s Time, My Mother’s Time, and Mine . She holds a PhD in American Studies from Yale and is Professor of English at the University of Vermont.

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Caste Summary and Review | Isabel Wilkerson

The lies that divide us.

Life gets busy. Has Caste been gathering dust on your bookshelf? Instead, pick up the key ideas now.

We’re scratching the surface here. If you don’t already have the book, order the  book  or get the  audiobook for free  on Amazon to learn the juicy details.

Isabel Wilkerson’s Perspective

Isabel Wilkerson studies journalism at Howard University. Here she became the editor-in-chief of the college newspaper, The Hilltop. Subsequently, she obtained internships at the Los Angeles Times and the Washington Post. Isabel became the first woman of African-American heritage to win the Pulitzer Prize in journalism. Additionally, she has also won the National Humanities Medal. Her debut work, The Warmth of Other Suns, won several awards. It was also shortlisted for both the Pen-Galbraith Literary Award and the Dayton Literary Peace Prize.

Structural Problems Persist

Structural problems will become gradually more challenging to fix the longer they are left unaddressed. The authors explain this point by using the analogy of inheriting an old house that needs considerable structural work. Suppose you notice a crack in the ceiling but decide to just leave it, as you believe it is merely superficial cosmetic damage. Subsequently, this crack continues to grow until a specialist identifies damage to the integrity of the foundation of your home. Clearly, these problems were caused by mistakes made by those building the house. However, this does not mean these structural problems are not your responsibility. You have the responsibility to identify these mistakes as wrong and remove them from the foundations. Otherwise, these problems will just fester and become worse.

As with this house, structural problems within your country are unlikely to be a direct cause of you. However, the author argues this does not mean you shouldn’t take responsibility for these problems. You now live within this ‘home’ filled with structural problems. Importantly, if you keep passing the blame and avoiding these problems they will only grow bigger. Then, it will be even more challenging for future generations to eradicate these structural problems. 

America is now over three hundred years old. Hence, the structural problems apparent at the inception of the country are becoming increasingly influential. Specifically, Isabel Wilkerson talks about drastic income gaps, ongoing police violence, and issues with healthcare highlighted by the Coronavirus pandemic. 

Caste’s Influence on Systemic Racism

Isabel Wilkerson outlines we can only truly understand the structural problem of systemic racism present today by considering caste. Caste has allowed systemic racism to be particularly resistant to change. Caste is a social hierarchy in which people experience varying degrees of superiority. Subsequently, some individuals will experience subjugation purely based on the caste to which they belong. 

A caste system has been used for thousands of years within India. However, American society has also had a caste system since its inception. Caste systems essentially mean that being born into poverty significantly increases your chances of living in poverty for the entirety of your life. Similarly, if you are born into wealth, then you will have greater opportunities to continue creating wealth.

India has attempted to pass legislation to reduce the discrimination associated with their caste system. Despite this, prejudice against the lower classes still exists. For example, the Dalit people are those in the lowest tier within the caste system. These individuals are frequent victims of acts of violence and are treated as outcasts in their own country. This caste system has existed in India since Ancient India thousands of years ago. Therefore, it has become increasingly challenging to remove it from society. 

Colonized America has a significantly shorter history than India. Despite this, a caste system is still concrete and has been since its founding. In America, African-Americans have been placed in the lowest caste since day one. African-Americans have fought to be free from this caste system for centuries to no avail. The power is with the ‘dominant’ caste of white Americans who seek to maintain the status quo within the system. The dominant caste will avoid change as they are currently benefiting from the structure of society.

Caste and Slavery

Generally, people get class and caste confused. As Isabel Wilkerson states, class can be easily transcended through marriage or employment. However, there is no viable way of escaping the caste you have been placed in at birth. Isabel also points out that racism and casteism are not equivalent. There can be significant overlap between these two forms of prejudice. However, race is a relatively new concept while caste has been present in society for thousands of years. The reason these two prejudices are often conflated is that the US’ caste system has been built around ideas of racial superiority and inferiority. 

The author explains the idea of race was first introduced during the transatlantic slave trade. Race was used as a way of categorizing the people that European colonists experienced. Crucially, this use of race was a way of excluding certain people within society. Despite this, race is a pseudo-scientific concept. The author provides an example of the origin of the term Caucasian. She explains that Johann Blumenbach, a German professor of medicine, was credited as coining the term Caucasian. He had a passion for collecting and analyzing human skulls. In 1795, he found what he considered the best shaped skull that came from the Caucasus Mountains in Russia. Subsequently, due to European society’s belief that they were genetically superior, Blumenbach gave Europeans the name Caucasian. 

The mapping of the human genome in 2000 made it clearer than ever that race was arbitrary. All humans could be traced back to a handful of tribes originating in Africa. Despite this, race has still been used to categorize people based on arbitrary features, such as height, hair color, or eye color. In America, skin color became the feature that determined caste lines.

Jim Crow Laws

There have been attempts post-slavery to include African-Americans within the white caste. However, instead of creating a genuine positive change, Jim Crow Laws were introduced in the late 19th century. Southern leaders were encouraged to introduce reconstruction efforts. Freed slaves would have a path to equality. Instead, Jim Crow Laws were established that created a new type of slavery. By introducing these laws, the government was actively aiming to maintain the caste system. 

These laws were associated with segregation and a constant threat of violence and lynching. These threats helped keep African-Americans at the bottom of the caste system as they were dissuaded from changing their circumstances. For example, African-Americans attempting to start their own business or to move North were often blocked by people in higher castes. For example, Black people were kept out of higher-caste neighborhoods through redlining. 

Redlining was a nationwide policy of denying financing and movement between zones for people from predominantly African-American neighborhoods. 

Foundational Pillars of Casteism

The caste system has a foundation of eight pillars.

• Divine Will and the Laws of Nature – The caste system within India is based on religious teachings. Specifically, ancient Hindu texts explain Manu, an all-knowing being who explained a social order within society. Additionally, due to their religious beliefs, society believed that people deserved their lower caste level due to karma from a previous life. The American caste system is also based on a religious foundation. Within the Bible, Noah has one son named Ham. One day, Ham walked into a tent and accidentally saw Noah naked. Subsequently, Noah cursed Ham’s son, Canaan. Hence, some biblical interpreters suggest Ham had black skin.
• Heritability – Essentially, this pillar suggests you are born into a specific caste. However, there are also specific rules within this. For example, colonial America stated it was the mother’s caste status that dictated the caste of their children.
• Endogamy and the Control of Marriage and Mating – Endogamy suggests that people should marry their caste. Within India, this is brutally enforced. Within America today, society has made interracial relationships a taboo. However, historically, any suggestion of a Black man touching a White woman would have been met by a lynching.
• Purity Versus Pollution – Individuals from a lower caste have been consistently considered polluters. This is the same idea propagated in Nazi Germany. In America, whole swimming pools would be drained and cleaned if an African-American was known to have been in a swimming pool.
• Occupational Hierarchy – There are menial jobs within society that few people want to complete. There is a history of politicians stating that the Black ‘race’ are the best fit for these jobs.
• Dehumanization and Stigma – Humans naturally understand we are all human beings and no better or worse than the next. Hence, we struggle to dehumanize individuals. Instead, we aim our dehumanization to large groups of people. This is exactly how the Nazis dehumanized the entire Jewish community and the same dehumanization is taking place in the US with African-Americans. In both countries, the people in the lowest castes were subjected to medical experiments and tortured for the amusement of the dominant castes. For example, at amusement parks in the US, there were “Son of Ham” shows. At these shows, people could pay money to throw baseballs at a Black man’s head. In this way and others, generations were desensitized to racial violence.
• Terror and Cruelty – Caste is perpetuated by using terror as enforcement and cruelty as a means of control. Violence has been used on African-Americans as a way of producing control and providing warnings. For example, American slave owners would deliver as many as four hundred whippings. These whippings were public, as were hangings and burnings. Those in the higher castes wanted the lower caste to imagine what could happen to them if they stepped out of line. Although some might wish to believe that hangings and burnings stopped with the slave trade, these practices actually continued into the twentieth century. 
• Inherent Superiority Versus Inherent Inferiority – There are several unspoken expectations within society relating to caste. Within India, the Dalit are expected to wear poorly kept clothing to reflect their inferiority. Similarly, lower-caste people in America are expected to move out of the way if a dominant caste person is walking past. 

Monuments Either Support or Dismantle Caste

All humans are susceptible to propaganda. Adolf Hitler was cheered by mass crowds of Germans. We may tell ourselves that we wouldn’t be one of those people, but it is impossible for us to say this. We naturally fall into a position within society and it can take considerable courage to stand up to the majority of society.

Additionally, although Nazi Germany is viewed as an independent evil, the Nazis actually took significant inspiration from America. They wrote their laws, including racial segregation and punishment, based on the existing US laws. In fact, they even made decisions about what people were allowed to wear based on the US’ laws at the time. Isabel Wilkerson explains that the tides have turned. Now, the US needs to learn from modern, democratic Germany. 

Monuments are one way that America is continuing to encourage a caste system. In 2015, there were still 230 memorials to Robert E. Lee. He was the commander of the Confederate Army during the Civil War. In 2015, New Orleans mayor Mitch Landrieu set in motion an effort to take down one of General Lee’s statues. This sparked angry debate from Confederate sympathizers. However, Richard Westmoreland, a retired lieutenant colonel, explained that Germany was ashamed by their equivalent general, Erwin Rommel. Instead of putting statues up of generals who perpetuated casteism, Germany erected memorials for the victims of the Nazis. In fact, Berlin is filled with individual names embedded on the sidewalks of the homes where Jewish victims were taken. This approach humanizes these victims and prevents them from becoming a number. This is generally accepted as the most positive way of utilizing statues and monuments. In America, there were several death threats sent to the contractors who were offered the job of removing the statue in New Orleans. 

The Caste System Remains Post-Obama

Obama’s two terms in power are often considered a turning point in American history. For some, these political events were a sign of a country that had removed its systemic racism. However, Wilkerson highlights this impact was fictional. Obama’s presidency was merely a fantasy of a turning point rather than a turning point itself.

How Can We Break Down the Pillars?

Isabel Wilkerson ends the book by outlining how readers can start to dismantle the pillars of casteism. COVID-19 has only re-surfaced the presence of a caste system within America. Those within dominant castes have benefited from health-care insurance offered through their jobs. In comparison, those in lower castes have had to continue working with no healthcare coverage. The statistics from the pandemic have shown it is disproportionately deadlier to marginalized communities. 

Here are the tips that Isabel Wilkerson provides on how you can start breaking down the pillars of caste:

• Make people aware of the presence of a caste system within the US.
• Support people who have managed to break free from their subordinate castes.
• See people as individuals with ideas in common rather than part of a homogeneous group. This should help prevent dehumanization.
• Vote with an awareness of how the caste system is currently dominating politics.

Final Summary and Review of Caste

Caste describes racism in the United States as an aspect of a caste system. America is like the caste systems of Nazi Germany and modern India. African-Americans are considered lower in society’s hierarchy. Subsequently, they are excluded from certain opportunities, included with certain negative labels, and considered impure. These characteristics drive the worse social and economic outcomes for African-Americans, the taboo surrounding interracial relationships, and many more social issues. Isabel Wilkerson explains why race is an arbitrary concept introduced based on racist ideas. We are all far more genetically similar than we think. Skin color has been arbitrarily used to form a caste system in America and parts of Europe. Caste was chosen to be part of Oprah Winfrey’s 2020 book club.

Final Rating

We rate this book 4.3/5.

Caste PDF, Free Audiobook and Animated Book Summary

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Book Review: Isabel Wilkerson’s “Caste: The Origins of Our Discontent”

 Posted on September 28, 2020 by Rokeby Museum

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by Richard Bernstein, M.D.,  Rokeby Museum Trustee

“…Wilkerson pries open the lid on this country’s racism and exposes the underlying truth—that from the beginning, America has created a caste society, Whites on the top, those of African descent on the bottom.” 

Isabel Wilkerson’s 2010 work,  The Warmth of Other Suns , was an extensively researched and beautifully narrated account of the Great Migration of 1915–1970, which saw nearly 6 million people of color escape the poverty and racial injustice of the South for the promise of better lives in the North only to encounter the same racism and limited opportunities, and sometimes the same overt brutality, in their new homes. Her book introduced many to the largest migration of modern times and a little remarked phenomenon of the twentieth century. 

In her latest book,  Caste: The Origin of our Discontents , Wilkerson pries open the lid on this country’s racism and exposes the underlying truth—that from the beginning, America has created a caste society, Whites on the top, those of African descent on the bottom. This rigid structure has endured from seventeenth-century Virginia to the present, and it allows those in the dominant caste to deny racist tendencies while supporting a social structure that benefits them to the detriment of those of the lower caste.

Wilkerson defines casteism and distinguishes it from racism. “Any action or institution that mocks, harms, assumes, or attaches inferiority or stereotype on the basis of the social construct of race can be considered racism. Any action or structure that seeks to limit, hold back, or put someone in a defined ranking or seeks to keep someone in their place by elevating or denigrating that person on the basis of their perceived category, can be considered casteism.” In addition to the caste system of the U.S., she describes the world’s oldest caste system, that of Hindu India, and the newest and shortest-lived, that of Nazi Germany.

Wilkerson shows how upper castes reinforce their dominance of lower castes through violence that instills terror and reinforces servility. In horrifying detail, she attaches victims’ names to those lynched by White mobs, those whipped by White enslavers, and those subjected to other acts of violence in post-Reconstruction America. She describes how as the Nazis were coming to power in 1934, they looked at the Jim Crow South seeking models to guide them to a society of Aryan supremacy and racial purity. They adopted the American definition of what constituted Black to decide what constituted Jewish—1/16th Jewish. However, she writes, “[w]ith restrictions and separate facilities in America, some Nazi officials thought the U.S. had gone overboard… [And] one drop of Negro Blood [the standard in some southern states] was too harsh even for the Nazis.” The fact that the light-skinned people with a “drop of Negro blood” reached back to the rape of slaves by White plantation owners does not escape Wilkerson’s notice.

In contemporary times, aside from state-sanctioned police violence and the legal system that incarcerates Black males at an alarming rate, terror tactics to maintain the caste system are less prevalent, but Wilkerson describes how Whites are persuaded of their dominant status. “Whites are surrounded by images of themselves, from cereal commercials to sitcoms, as deserving, hardworking, and superior in most aspects of American life.” She notes that only 22% of Black people are poor and makeup only 27% of poor people in America. Yet 59% of poor people shown in the news are African-Americans. And whereas only 10% of crimes involve a Black perpetrator and White victim, these comprise 42% of crimes shown on TV. These images have created in Whites what sociologists call unconscious bias. According to Wilkerson, “By adulthood, most Americans have been exposed to a culture with enough negative messages about African-Americans and other marginalized groups that 80 percent of White Americans hold an unconscious bias against Black Americans that lead to disparities in housing, hiring, and medical treatment.”

Monuments to the slave era and those who fought to perpetuate slavery abound in both the North and the South. Roads, schools, and other public buildings, named for military and public figures of the Lost Cause of the Confederacy, are more common than we’d like to think. Especially in the South, Confederate statues, erected during the early twentieth century, are outside courthouses and in other public spaces as unspoken reminders to African-Americans of their place in the system. Wilkerson describes a time she spent in Germany doing research for the book. There she found public monuments to those who suffered at the hands of the Nazis. Nowhere did she find a monument to Nazis themselves. The bunker where Hitler died is unceremoniously paved over, unmarked, and covered by a parking lot.

Parallels to the current political situation in America weave through the narrative. Wilkerson introduces the concept of cultural narcissism, which she defines as “a complex condition of self-aggrandizing entitlement and disregard for others growing out of hollow insecurity.” She describes Images of a million German citizens cheering Hitler, saluting, and waving Nazi flags, and she talks about Whites gathering at picnics to see the torture and lynching of Blacks in the twentieth-century south. She opines that these are not all evil people, but, caught up in “the euphoria of hate,” they chillingly allowed and participated in dehumanizing, sadistic, and unspeakably brutal acts of violence on fellow human beings who were members of the under caste.

Wilkerson also answers a question that arises in liberal minds when conservatives emerge successful in elections. “Why are people voting against their own interests, willing to elect right-wing oligarchs, forgo health insurance, risk contamination of the water and air? What had not been considered is the people voting this way were, in fact, voting their interest. Maintaining a caste system as it had always been was in their interest.” Here the uncomfortable fact remains: Under the caste system that exists in America, the lowest Whites feel themselves to be above the highest Blacks. No matter how degraded a White person may be, “he can never become Black.” The caste system offers Whites some solace in a stressful world. This dreadfully misplaced need for solace, in Wilkerson’s view, accounts for the Democratic Party’s failure to gain the majority of White votes in every Presidential election since the Civil Rights Act was passed in 1964.

Problems arise when Blacks advance. According to Wilkerson, Whites do not fear Black failure. On the contrary, they expect it. What they cannot countenance is a Black success, the idea that Blacks can rise above their caste. Imagine, then, the effects of the Obama presidency and the growing realization that by 2042 the majority of Americans will be people of color. Sad, but of little wonder, is the backlash that has ensued.

One might question the mental health of individuals that measure their satisfaction and self-worth by the degree they can feel superior to those they oppress, and the caste system is unhealthy in other ways as well. Wilkerson notes that “Whites with high levels of internal prejudice experience increased stress levels when having to interact with minority people. Lower class Whites have higher levels of stress than those in the upper class. Conversely, higher class Blacks, trying to meet elevated expectations but running up against the fixed boundaries of the lower caste they occupy, have higher stress levels than lower-class Blacks. Increased stress raises the incidence of hypertension, heart disease, and lowers life expectancy. Indeed, the death rate, from suicide, alcoholism, and drug addiction among White working-class people has been rising at an alarming rate in recent years.

Caste  is a deeply troubling book, the arguments profound, the images heart-rending, the writing too good to put down. White folks with any empathy will be terribly and rightly discomfited. We should act. Wilkerson maintains that only the members of the dominant caste can dismantle the system. She talks about Albert Einstein, escaping the Nazis to settle in this country. Seeing through his caste privilege, aware of where casteism and racism had led his own country, he became a strong voice for racial justice.   

Wilkerson has some hope to offer by the end. She relates a personal story of an encounter with a MAGA-hatted plumber who arrived at her house to investigate a water leak in her cellar. Initially, their meeting was tense. He seemed aloof and determined not to help. Finally, she was able to engage him. They shared stories of recent experiences of loss and began to see each other not as symbols but as people. The wall between them came down. 

This individual act of rapprochement is not the answer to the problem of caste writ large, but maybe we’re better than we seem. Appreciating Isabel Wilkerson’s book is a key step in the truth commission that needs to happen in this country, the sooner the better.

You can find  Caste  and  The Warmth of Other Suns  at Rokeby Museum, as well as other titles on the theme of social justice and history. 

Richard Bernstein, M.D.,  is a family physician, practicing in Charlotte until his retirement in 2013. During his active years, he came to see the art of medicine as a communication between two people. The secret of success in the healing encounter was based on the ability to see the other as a person, an equal, to listen fully, and to communicate without pre-judgement. Upon retirement, he joined the staff of Rokeby Museum as a volunteer guide, then as a member of the board of trustees. He embraces the social justice mission of the museum as a continuation of his medical work.

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Book Summary Caste , by Isabel Wilkerson

In Caste , Isabel Wilkerson argues that the racial tensions in the United States are better explained through the lens of caste, not race—a 400-year-old hierarchy placing white people at the top and Black people at the bottom. Wilkerson examines the different caste systems around the world and how they damage the lives of everyone involved, even those at the top. She believes that to understand how to move forward, we must examine the past and the racial structures that keep progress as a nation at bay.

In this guide, we’ll explore the basics of Wilkerson’s caste theory, the eight tenets of a caste system, how the caste system affects the lives of people in the upper and lower castes, and how we can move away from caste and create a more equitable society. We’ll also compare Wilkerson’s ideas to those of other books on the subject of race, such as Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow .

1-Page Summary 1-Page Book Summary of Caste

Part 1: the basics of caste.

In Caste , Isabel Wilkerson argues that the racial tensions in the United States are better explained through the lens of caste, not race—caste being a 400-year-old hierarchy placing white people at the top and Black people at the bottom. In this guide, we’ll explore:

• The basics of Wilkerson’s caste theory
• The eight tenets of a caste system
• How the caste system affects the lives of people in the upper and lower castes
• How we can move away from caste and create a more equitable society

The Definition of Caste

According to Wilkerson, caste describes a man-made social order developed to rank the value of certain groups of people. This order is based on the assumed supremacy of one group and assumed inferiority of others according to heritage, personal characteristics, religious preferences, or economic status. More often than not, Wilkerson argues, the characteristics used to delineate groups are arbitrary and benign in other contexts. They only become important when one group uses them to segregate people and assign parameters for the appropriate behaviors of each group.

(Shortform note: Ibram X. Kendi, author of How to Be an Antiracist , agrees that skin color, the defining characteristic of the American caste system, was originally a neutral signifier. According to Kendi, modern racist ideas sprang up out of racist policies : People needed a way to justify economically self-serving policies, so they used skin color as a marker to decide who to exclude, then invented rationale to justify that decision. If those policies never existed, we wouldn’t associate any darker or lighter skin colors with any inherent meanings.)

How Casteism Differs From Racism

Wilkerson believes that while race and caste are not synonyms, they support each other within American culture. Race is the physical evidence of difference and the set of meanings assigned to that evidence. Caste is how we organize that evidence to maintain division among groups and ascribe the appropriate lifestyles. Therefore, Wilkerson believes it would be more accurate to refer to someone who discriminates against another race as a casteist , not a racist. That’s because, according to the author, the definition of racism has changed over time.

Originally, racism signified one group that uses their social power to oppress another group based on race. However, Wilkerson argues that in the last century, racism has become synonymous with beliefs, actions, and character. Today, if you’re a racist, it means you hate people who are not like you and condone oppression. Wilkerson believes that this misunderstanding is why the dominant caste flinches at the term. The author argues that if racism were understood as a byproduct of casteism, society might actually be open to acknowledging racial problems.

Are “Race” and “Caste” Really Different? To understand the difference between race and caste, it helps to understand how other scholars define “racism.” As Ijeoma Oluo describes in So You Want to Talk About Race , there are two culturally accepted definitions of racism . The first is personal (bias against a person based on their race), and the second is structural (racially biased power structures and institutions that discriminate against a particular racial group). Wilkerson argues that most people rely on the personal definition, while only social scientists tend to use the structural definition. Wilkerson’s solution to the confusion over how to define “racism” is to focus on caste, not race. However, her description of caste as the structure of American inequality sounds almost identical to the second (systemic) definition of racism. If this sounds confusing to you, you’re not alone: Multiple reviewers have questioned whether there’s a meaningful difference between discussing “casteism” and discussing “systemic racism.” They argue that Wilkerson’s distinction is arbitrary and weak. Other reviewers, however, argue that reframing the situation in terms of caste “ neatly lift[s] the mind out of old ruts ,” even if readers don’t fully buy into Wilkerson’s logic.

The Three Major Caste Systems—America, India, and Nazi Germany

Wilkerson believes there are three main examples of caste systems in history—the American South, India, and Nazi Germany.

(Shortform note: Wilkerson’s list of the primary examples of caste systems in history contains a notable exclusion: the apartheid system that governed South Africa from 1948 to the early 1990s . Like the systems in Nazi Germany, India, and the US, the South African caste system was codified into law and impacted every aspect of citizens’ lives, including where they could live and work, who they could marry, and even which train car they could ride in.)

The American Caste System

According to the author, the American caste system is divided into two primary castes: The dominant caste consists of people considered “white,” and the lowest caste consists of people considered “Black.” This system has its roots in the American institution of slavery, which was the standard mode of operation on American soil for 246 years, from 1619 to 1865.

(Shortform note: Wilkerson focuses her analysis on these two groups because racial tensions in the United States have historically revolved around the distinction between “white” and “Black.” While focusing specifically on anti-Black...

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Caste Summary Shortform Introduction

In Caste , Pulitzer Prize and National Humanities Medal winner Isabel Wilkerson explores America’s unacknowledged caste system and how the concept of “caste” explains the country’s legacy of discrimination better than the concepts of race and class alone.

About the Author

Isabel Wilkerson is an American journalist who previously served as Chicago Bureau Chief of The New York Times. In 1994, she became the first African-American woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for journalism ; later, then-President Barack Obama awarded her the 2015 National Humanities Medal .

Wilkerson has taught journalism and narrative nonfiction at Harvard, Princeton, Emory, Northwestern, and Boston University. Since publishing Caste in 2020, she’s also become an in-demand speaker. She was the keynote speaker at the 2021 annual meeting of the American Psychiatric Association and [the University of...

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Caste Summary Part 1: The Basics of Caste | Chapter 1: What Is Caste?

In Caste , Isabel Wilkerson argues that the racial tensions in the United States are better explained through the lens of caste, not race. In this guide, we’ll explore:

In this first part of the guide, we’ll discuss the definition of “caste” and how it differs from “race.” Then, we’ll compare the American caste system to two other notable examples of caste systems: India and Nazi Germany.

According to Wilkerson, caste describes a man-made social order developed to rank the value of certain groups of people. This order is based on the assumed supremacy of one group and assumed inferiority of others according to heritage, personal characteristics, religious preferences, or economic status. More often than not, Wilkerson argues, the characteristics used to delineate groups are arbitrary and benign in other contexts. They only become important when one group uses them to segregate people and assign parameters for the...

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Caste Summary Chapter 2: The Three Major Caste Systems

Wilkerson believes there are three main examples of caste systems in history—the American South, India, and Nazi Germany. In this chapter, we’ll explore the basic structure and function of each of these systems and note their similarities.

(Shortform note: Wilkerson briefly mentions a “middle...

Shortform Exercise: Reflect on Your Caste

Reflect on the impact of the white-dominated caste system in the U.S. on your life.

What caste are you part of? While growing up, what were you taught about your caste and other castes?

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Caste Summary Part 2: Caste Tenets | Chapter 3: Justifying the Creation of a Caste System

Each of the three examples of caste systems we explored in Part 1 represents a belief system, and every belief system is governed by a set of tenets. For caste systems, Wilkerson believes there are eight tenets that uphold the structure and allow for unquestionable participation by the related societies. The tenets are:

• Laws of divinity
• Ingrained superiority
• Dehumanization at the group level
• Laws of love
• The purity of the dominant caste
• Division of labor
• Terror and violence

As each tenet is repeated and supported by attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors, it becomes rooted in civilization. Wilkerson argues that once all of these eight beliefs are ingrained, they become the standard mode of life in the form of social hierarchies.

(Shortform note: Not all definitions of caste agree that all eight of these tenets are needed for a caste system to form. For instance, the Encyclopedia Britannica defines caste systems as “ ranked, hereditary, endogamous social groups, often linked with occupation .” This definition encompasses only the second, third, fifth, and eighth of Wilkerson’s eight...

Caste Summary Chapter 4: Maintaining Caste Divisions

Once a society installs a caste system, the dominant caste must work hard to maintain the system and ensure no one questions their right to rule. According to the author, dominant castes across the world have historically used four main tactics to accomplish this: dehumanization at the group level and laws of heritage, love, and purity. Let’s explore each of these tenets of caste in detail.

Dehumanization at the Group Level

According to Wilkerson, even with the other tenets in place, there’s always the possibility that reality might slip into the social consciousness and expose the injustice of how the subordinate class is treated. To keep this from happening, Wilkerson argues, the dominant caste must change the collective view of the subordinates from humans to objects. If society sees the underclass as mere objects, the abhorrent actions taken against them become more palatable. (Shortform note: According to psychologist Paul Bloom, Wilkerson is correct to frame mass dehumanization as a deliberate strategy on the part of the upper caste . This contradicts the previous, widespread...

Caste Summary Chapter 5: Mistreatment of the Lowest Caste

Another aspect of the American, Indian, and Nazi German caste systems is the rampant mistreatment of the lowest castes. Wilkerson argues that this mistreatment often manifests in two ways: the division of labor and widespread terror and violence. In this chapter, we’ll explore each in detail.

Division of Labor

The building of a society requires labor; according to the author, in a caste structure, the division of labor determines who will build the foundation and who will use that foundation to thrive. The menial tasks required to lay the foundation for progress are given to the subordinate caste, solidifying their place as the backs on which everyone else steps. This is true in both India and the United States.

(Shortform note: The author doesn’t go into detail about how this tenet applied in Nazi Germany. The Nazis established forced labor camps where Jews and other prisoners worked for no pay under inhumane conditions. This served two purposes for the Nazi regime: It created a constant supply of laborers to do the nation’s most backbreaking jobs, and it was a tool of the “Final Solution” because [prisoners were often literally worked to...

Caste Summary Part 3: Caste’s Influence on Individuals | Chapter 6: Unintended Consequences

So far, we’ve learned the basics of Wilkerson’s theory of caste and the eight tenets that support a caste system. In Part 3, we’ll learn about the lasting impacts of caste systems on individuals. In this chapter, we’ll discuss how the American caste system impacts people in the dominant caste.

The Impact of the Caste System on White Americans

Although the dominant caste’s actions aim to oppress the subordinate caste, Wilkerson believes the effects often create repercussions for dominant members, as well. As an example, she cites a 2015 study in which researchers discovered an increasing mortality rate in middle-aged white Americans from middle- to lower-income demographics between 1998 and 2013. During this period, Americans of similar age and class from marginalized groups didn’t experience this same increase, nor did those from other Western nations. In fact, both groups had experienced decreases in their mortality rates.

According to the author, many of the deaths experienced by white Americans aged 45 to 54 were “deaths of despair,” such as suicide, drug overdoses, and substance-related diseases. Some hypothesized that these deaths were due in part to stagnating...

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Caste Summary Chapter 7: The Fallacy of Leadership

According to Wilkerson, the dominant caste’s beliefs in an innate right to be in control give them a sense of entitlement and the authority to police the actions of the subordinate caste. This causes three general problems that we’ll explore in this chapter: First, upper caste entitlement can lead to violence; second, people in the lower caste internalize and reproduce that violence; and third, society misses out on the talents of people from the lower caste, who are arbitrarily prevented from assuming positions of power.

Problem 1: Upper Caste Entitlement Leads to Discrimination

Historically, white people have been so convinced of their own superiority that they responded with resistance and criminal acts to any effort by the subordinate caste to uplift their lives. According to the author, Jim Crow laws and the Ku Klux Klan were both responses to Reconstruction, and the subordinate caste faced angry mobs in both the North and South in response to progress, with the mobs specifically targeting blacks who showed signs of prosperity. (Shortform note: Unfortunately, these backlashes can sometimes prevent or slow future progress. According to historian Lawrence...

Caste Summary Chapter 8: The Health Effects of Caste

In addition to causing social disruption, Wilkerson argues that the American caste system negatively impacts the health of lower and upper-caste Americans. In this section, we’ll learn more about these negative health outcomes and how the psychology of caste contributes to them.

Physical Manifestations of Caste Mentalities

According to the author, the caste system damages the health of the lowest caste because the psychological strain of constantly navigating prejudice and discrimination damages the body. The body produces higher levels of cortisol, the stress hormone released in response to a crisis, when danger is perceived, and consistent high levels of cortisol damage muscle tissue and the circulatory and digestive systems. Fear also restricts blood flow to the heart. The result is poor heart and immune system functioning, leading to a number of deadly diseases.

However, according to Wilkerson, prejudice doesn’t just damage the bodies of the receivers. Studies show it has similar damaging effects on the perpetrator. Harboring negative emotions or hate also increases blood pressure and releases cortisol. One study found that even simple negative interactions...

Caste Summary Part 4: The Influence of Caste Systems on Society | Chapter 9: The Fallout of Progress

Now that we’ve addressed the individual consequences of caste, let’s take a look at the impact of caste systems on entire societies. In this chapter, we’ll explore the shift that happened in the U.S. in 2008 that sparked a resurgence of inter-caste tensions.

According to the author, caste tensions in post-Civil Rights era America simmered beneath the surface until the 21st century. The first harbinger of renewed racial animosity was the 2008 election of Democrat Barack Obama and the resulting vengeful quest by many white Americans to restore power to the dominant caste.

(Shortform note: Barack Obama’s successful campaign for the 2008 election presented such a threat to the established racial order that assassination was a looming threat. As a result, the Department of Homeland Security authorized Secret Service protection for then-Senator Obama beginning in 2007 , a full 18 months before he was first elected president. This is the earliest any president has received Secret Service protection.)

White America’s Revenge

**Most white...

Caste Summary Chapter 10: The Legacy of the American Caste System

The American caste system’s impact goes beyond just the political arena. In this chapter, we’ll explore the way the U.S. memorializes the worst days of its caste system and how that approach compares to the way modern Germany memorializes the Nazi’s reign of terror. Then, we’ll discuss other ways the caste system has left a lasting impact on the United States, such as the low measures of health and wellbeing compared to other countries.

Confederate Pride

One way in which the legacy of caste remains visible in American society is through ongoing Confederate Pride and memorialization. According to Wilkerson, the Confederacy, or the Confederate States of America, was an anti-democracy, pro-slavery group of states that seceded from the United States after the election of Abraham Lincoln. The Confederacy is not part of the American heritage, but rather a separate faction of 11 states that banded together to overthrow the national government to gain their sovereignty. (Shortform note: The Confederacy was small compared to the Union (the name for the collection of states that did not secede from the country), but not so small as to be...

Caste Summary Epilogue: A Shift Away From Caste

According to Wilkerson, the only way to dismantle caste in society is for each of us to open our minds and hearts enough to see how we’ve been manipulated into division. That’s because our actions and thoughts feed the machine of hate and prejudice based on superficial physical traits.

Wilkerson argues that no one chooses to be born into one caste or another, but we do choose whether to abide by the confines those castes dictate. A person born into the dominant caste can choose to uplift others in the subordinate caste. A person born into the subordinate caste can choose to break the barriers around them.

Dismantling Caste: Mindsets, Policies, or Both? Other scholars disagree with Wilkerson’s conclusion that individual actions and mindsets are the driving force behind the caste system. For instance, in How to Be an Antiracist , Ibram X. Kendi argues that it’s impossible to dismantle American racism by ignoring policy and focusing on individual mindsets . Kendi believes we should focus on changing racist policies first rather...

Shortform Exercise: Reject the Caste System

The caste system endures because a majority perpetuates it, either actively or unthinkingly. Reflect on your role and how you can stop participating.

How did you feel overall as you read this guide? What aspects evoked your strongest reaction and why?

Table of Contents

Movie Reviews

Tv/streaming, collections, great movies, chaz's journal, contributors, black writers week, the watchers.

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When it comes to kooky, creative thrillers, Shyamalan is practically a brand. Though M. Night is the present precedent for this surname, his daughter Ishana hopes to carry the torch into the next generation, making a name for herself in a similar genre. Based on the book by A.M. Shine, “The Watchers” is Ishana Night Shyamalan ’s directorial debut, a fabled narrative that seesaws between fantastical whimsy and proposed horrific terror with lots of ambition but little finesse.

Mina ( Dakota Fanning ) is a lost soul. A twentysomething American living in Galway, she spends her days working at a pet shop and her nights cosplaying at bars as anyone but herself. When her car breaks down in the middle of a dense, directionless wood, Mina is forced to search for help. As the sun sets and every bird occupying the forest springs into a shrill, hurried flight, she’s left as (seemingly) the only living thing around. The woods become taunting: dark, growling, and with something giving chase. With her car nowhere in sight, Mina begins to run, encountering a small bunker with a woman at the door, Madeleine (Olwen Fouere), who ushers her inside. 

Also in this bunker, which they refer to as “The Coop,” resides Ciara ( Georgina Campbell ) and Daniel ( Oliver Finnegan ). The coop consists of three walls and a large one-way window, which serves as a mirror for them and a display for the forest creatures, the titular watchers. Every night, the group must greet them at the window, standing in line like shop window mannequins, and allow themselves to be observed. Madeline, Ciara, and Daniel have been trapped for months in the forest, whose labyrinthine layout and immeasurable density make it near-impossible to find a way out before dark. Their survival, and now Mina’s, hinges on a simple set of rules, the most important of which are to be in the coop before nightfall and be on time to greet the watchers when they arrive. The day is safe. but the night is not, and failure to abide by the rules is communicated to be a brutal, violent death.

Shyamalan bites off much more than she can chew with “The Watchers.” The architecture of the source material provides much to play with in terms of worldbuilding, set pieces, and character development, but Shyamalan’s limited toolbox is brutally on display. “The Watchers” lacks creative vision and guts, with only a clumsy script to fall back on. Riddled with vapid dialogue and wish-washy commitment to the genre, it struggles to establish its identity and maturity level. Madeleine's character cyclically warns against the vociferous violence of the watchers, but the film is scant to make you believe in it. It lacks teeth. The stylistic choices resemble the hopscotch cartoony, kid-friendly horror found in films like “ The Haunted Mansion ” and a few sequences that aim to draw blood, more in the styles of a James Wan classic like “ Insidious .” Shyamalan is best when leaning mystic rather than macabre, but her execution feels like blindfolded cherry picking, and “The Watchers” becomes flimsy by consequence. 

The actual design of the forest creatures is quite compelling in the dark. Nighttime sequences of silhouettes and fractional details inspire tension and buy us into the scare factor, but Shyamalan makes the classic mistake, thrusting them into the light and replacing monstrosity with the familiarity of an overused design. The exception here is when the watchers are closer to their final form, approaching an uncanny valley territory that’s imperfect but sufficient. 

“The Watchers” concerns itself thematically with the idea of duplication and voyeurism. From Mina’s peripherally mentioned twin sister, to the mimicking parrot from the pet shop she totes throughout the film, and the lore of the watchers, Shyamalan juggles ideas of individuality with Darwinian survival. The coop functions as a sort of stage, and the one DVD the group has for entertainment is a single season of “The Lair of Love,” a clear parody of “Love Island.” This parallel of an isolated group housed together to be watched for the entertainment of others is apparent, but the thesis is not. It could be that Shyamalan is taking a meta stab at the act of performance itself via the coop, an argument towards the behaviors and quotables we mimic from the world of reality TV, or perhaps how we model ourselves on the basis of celebrity, but the thinness of her pen leaves this as a hypothesis rather than a complete thought.

Performances suffer in “The Watchers,” falling victim to an unrefined script and a plethora of confounding line deliveries. As we take mental notes on the origin of the watchers, even the characters seem confused by their own words. This exposition-heavy dialogue combats characters speaking exactly their thoughts, leaving little nuance for the actors to craft. Fanning plays Mina’s hollowness well, her stoicism and seriousness shielding trauma, but she falls flat in moments that require elevation and desperation. Campbell, who’s finding her own corner in the horror sphere (“ Barbarian ,” “Black Mirror,” “ Bird Box ”), is the most interesting to watch, and the fact that she has the least dialogue is a likely testament as to why. 

“The Watchers” doesn’t leave room to breathe between crash courses in lore, heavy dialogue, and a bloated narrative. Shyamalan falters in picking between a fairytale and a horror story, and the film's potential gets lost in her indecision. Though ideas and attempts at depth are present, they’re thin, and the film fails to stand its ground. “The Watchers” prompts curiosity that’s never entirely fulfilled, displaying a director who is ambitious but still very much at the foundational levels of her artistry. 

Peyton Robinson

Peyton Robinson is a freelance film writer based in Chicago, IL. 

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Film Credits

The Watchers (2024)

Rated PG-13

102 minutes

Dakota Fanning as Mina

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The Ptolemies, Apogee and Collapse: Ptolemiac Egypt 246–146 BC

"The Ptolemies, Apogee and Collapse" is the second volume in Grainger's trilogy on the Ptolemaic Kingdom. It covers the timespan from 246 to 146 BCE, a period marked by massive battles in Syria, civil wars, and domestic unrest. As the title suggests, it is a general overview of the Ptolemaic dynasty’s decline from one of the great powers of the Mediterranean to a faded shadow of its former glory. Like the previous title in the series, it is of mixed quality but contains more good than bad.

The book opens with a summary of Ptolemaic history up to the ascension of Ptolemy III and a reasonable overview of the Ptolemaic Kingdom's constituent parts. This serves to establish the setting in which the book takes place, including Egypt , Cyrene , Coele- Syria , and Cyprus . This opening also serves to introduce readers to the uneasy hierarchy of Ptolemaic society, including priests, soldiers, and peasantry. These factions and their overlapping interests are shown to shape Ptolemaic history just as profoundly as the kings and queens who sat at the top of the hierarchy.

Grainger brusquely, and somewhat incorrectly, summarizes the internal politics of Ptolemaic Egypt as a tense conflict between impoverished Egyptians and wealthy Greeks. He treats the Egyptian aristocracy as a resentful ally of the Ptolemaic dynasty and the Greek aristocracy as its loyal guard dogs. This assessment fails to account for the more complex reality, in which both Greek and Egyptian elites sought greater power through cooperation and usurpation. Grainger’s handling of Egyptian society remains one of the weakest points in this series, which is regrettable given that Egypt is the core of the Ptolemaic Kingdom.

The book returns quickly with a summary of Ptolemy III’s early obstacles, from supporting his sister Berenike's failed coup in the Seleucid Empire to his more successful attempts to forcefully annex Seleucid territory. The book continues through the reigns of Ptolemy IV and Ptolemy V, who preside over an increasingly chaotic period of Ptolemaic history. The first Cleopatras, from Cleopatra I and Cleopatra II, are also discussed at length. The perennial conflict between the Ptolemies and the Seleucids dominates the action, followed closely by the conflict between the Ptolemies and their own subjects.

The result of territorial acquisitions was that the Ptolemaic army was stretched thin and military expenditures rose. Territorial losses led to decreased morale and a more limited population to recruit from. Famine and drought lead to uprisings in Ptolemaic territory. Moreover, the appointment of ruthless royal advisors created resentment in the capital, Alexandria , and the resulting riots and coups only weakened the politics further. At one point c. 205–187 BCE, a rebellion under a usurper pharaoh in southern Egypt divided the kingdom. Here, Grainger demonstrates a knack for summarizing military conflicts and the logistical challenges facing the Ptolemies.

The later chapters of the book deal with the lessening power and prestige of the Ptolemaic dynasty, amidst violent competition for the crown between royal siblings. This coincides with increasingly frequent interactions between Egypt and the Roman Republic , beginning with friendship and quickly evolving into a Ptolemaic reliance on Roman political support. Grainger’s central argument, that the Ptolemaic dynasty was “excessively centralized and autocratic, [...] vulnerable to disturbances at the top, by infant inheritances, by vicious court intrigues, [and] by army coups” (p. 212) is better articulated in this volume than in the first book.

John D. Grainger is a former teacher and independent scholar. He has authored numerous books on Classical history, including multiple volumes dealing with the Hellenistic period and the Diadochi.

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King, A. (2024, June 19). The Ptolemies, Apogee and Collapse: Ptolemiac Egypt 246–146 BC . World History Encyclopedia . Retrieved from https://www.worldhistory.org/review/456/the-ptolemies-apogee-and-collapse-ptolemiac-egypt/

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King, Arienne. " The Ptolemies, Apogee and Collapse: Ptolemiac Egypt 246–146 BC ." World History Encyclopedia . Last modified June 19, 2024. https://www.worldhistory.org/review/456/the-ptolemies-apogee-and-collapse-ptolemiac-egypt/.

King, Arienne. " The Ptolemies, Apogee and Collapse: Ptolemiac Egypt 246–146 BC ." World History Encyclopedia . World History Encyclopedia, 19 Jun 2024. Web. 20 Jun 2024.

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Book Review: Katie Ledecky dishes on what makes an Olympic legend in ‘Just Add Water’

This cover image released by Simon & Schuster shows “Just Add Water: My Swimming Life” by Katie Ledecky. (Simon & Schuster via AP)

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Katie Ledecky didn’t dream of becoming an Olympian as a kid. It was just something she and her brother, Michael, did at a pool in Maryland that she describes as “maximum chill.” The lack of pressure was part of what drove her deep enjoyment of the sport from an early age, and, consequently, her eye-popping success in the years that followed. This is the story that forms the basis of Ledecky’s memoir, “Just Add Water: My Swimming Life.”

Fifteen years old and in London, Ledecky became the youngest athlete ever to win the women’s 800-meter freestyle at the Olympics. She won six more Olympic gold medals in Rio and Tokyo and broke Michael Phelps’s record of 16 individual gold medals at the World Aquatics Championships. She’s widely regarded as one of the best swimmers of all time, but like many athletes, hers isn’t just a story about her elite athleticism — it’s about the people who helped her get there.

Even when Ledecky made that Olympic final in London, her parents refused to acknowledge that she might have a chance at getting a medal, let alone winning the race. They were more invested in her overall wellbeing. “For them, it was almost like, Olympics, Schlympics,” she writes.

This low-pressure attitude combined with her dogged positivity and high ambition underpins the tone of her writing: “Keeping pace with the male swimmers? Why not? Shaving time off my records? Why not? Doing something significant every time I swim? Why not?” It’s clear to see how she’s maintained the mental toughness required to perform at an elite level for so long — she’s currently in training for the Paris Olympics, which would be her fourth.

She also delves into the techniques and training that elevated her swimming and led to her remarkable dominance as a distance swimmer: her discovery of the “loping stroke” that allowed her to get even faster, her right-side-only breathing that ensured she’d only ever come up for air on her good side, the progression-style training that allowed her to continue to swim extraordinarily long distances without getting injured.

Throughout it all, Ledecky’s writing pulses with her love for the pool and an appreciation for all the people that have shaped her into the champion she is — her coaches, her brother, her grandparents, and, of course, her parents. Readers will feel inspired by Ledecky’s enthusiasm and gratitude for everything she’s worked hard to achieve.

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WWE Clash at the Castle 2024 results: CM Punk costs Drew McIntyre; winners, highlights

Who ruled the castle?

WWE held another international premium live event, this time in Scotland for the first time in company history with Clash at the Castle. Five matches took place inside OVO Hydro, and they were all for championship gold.

Cody Rhodes and AJ Styles faced each other for the Undisputed WWE Championship after their instant classic at Backlash France, and they delivered in another title match. Drew McIntyre also went for the World Heavyweight Championship, but a familiar foe got in the way. European crowds have gained a reputation of being among the best in WWE, and it was another rowdy atmosphere.

Here is a recap of all the action from Glasgow:

World Heavyweight Championship match: Damian Priest (c) vs. Drew McIntyre

Feeding off the crowd energy, Drew McIntyre came out of the gate firing on all cylinders, getting Damian Priest outside of the ring and flying over the top rope to take him out. There was a big botch when Priest tried to jump off the ring but he got his foot caught in the ropes in what looked like could've been a dangerous misstep. It was obvious Priest was injured in the mistake and he was hobbling for the rest of the match.

I AM SO GLAD DAMIAN PRIEST IS OKAY THAT WAS ABSOLUTELY DISGUSTING HORRIFIC #WWECastle pic.twitter.com/mvf2CL6B4x — FADE (@FadeAwayMedia) June 15, 2024

It took awhile for things to settle down but once it did, McIntyre and Priest traded blows for minutes. McIntyre was the one that was able to get the upper hand and went for his first claymore, but Priest countered it with a chokeslam. Priest went for the pin and McIntyre kicked out. Somehow after taking a hurricanrana off the top rope, McIntyre recovered quickly for a claymore. Priest kicked out of the pin.

The referee got taken out of the match thanks to a bump from Priest, and when McIntyre went for a pin after a claymore, there was no referee. One came out and counted to two but didn't finish the pin. McIntyre looked up, only for it to be CM Punk and completely shock the challenger. A frustrated McIntyre went to attack Punk, but the heated rival delivered a low blow. Priest landed another choke slam and the referee came back to count the pin and give Priest the win, a stunner to the Glasgow crowd.

It's CM PUNK!!! #WWECastle pic.twitter.com/T8SsLiAaqi — WWE (@WWE) June 15, 2024

Analysis: What a chaotic way to end it. Yes, interferences are ruin matches, but this one was as perfect as it could be. The rivalry between McIntyre and Punk continues to be one of the best of the year and nothing comes close. People were so focused on The Judgment Day not being present for the match that no one remembered the hated Punk has for McIntyre. The Glasgow crowd was absolutely shocked and hated seeing their fellow countrymen lose at home, especially since Punk costed him the title yet again, but it makes for some amazing storytelling. The people may not love it, but it's just another layer in what will be a spectacular match when McIntyre and Punk finally face off in the ring.

Drew McIntyre makes epic Scottish entrance

Drew McIntyre is going all out for his title match.

A Scottish band came out and played "Scotland the Brave," one of the unofficial national anthems of Scotland. The crowd went wild when McIntyre emerged, and he held up the Scotland flag. By the time his music stopped playing, the crowd serenaded the arena by singing his name.

GLASGOW is LOUD for @DMcIntyreWWE ! 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿 #WWECastle pic.twitter.com/CPDAuWkZDF — WWE (@WWE) June 15, 2024

WWE Women's Championship match: Bayley (c) vs. Piper Niven

The crowd showing some just small favoritism to Bayley upset Piper Niven and it resulted in her going after the champion quickly in the match, which also got other fans behind her. Chelsea Green tried to intervene early and it was costly as she was kicked out of ringside. Still, it didn't faze Niven as she continued to assault Bayley in and out of the ring. Bayley had some moments where she looked like she'd be getting ready to roll, only for Niven to counter.

Green came back out in a luchador mask in an attempt to come back, but referee Charles Robinson wasn't fooled. However, it distracted him from counting a pin from Bayley. Niven was closing in on a win, but Bayley found an opening and countered to drive Niven's head on the mat and rolled her up to get the pin.

Analysis: Piper Niven showed out in front of her home crowd and her homeland was loving it. She is a talented wrestler and she got the time she needed to prove it. While it was a great match, it was a choppy ending since Bayley didn't have many opportunities on the offensive end, so it looked like she mores escaped the match rather than winning it. Regardless, it's a big win to add more legitimacy to Bayley's title reign. This should also show Niven is more than capable of being successful in a single push.

Intercontinental Championship match: Sami Zayn (c) vs. Chad Gable

Chad Gable took out his frustrations on Sami Zayn early and the technical wizard showcased impressive combinations of submissions and powerful moves, all while battling the crowd that was clearly rooting for the champion. Gable kept tabs on Otis and Maxxine Dupri at ringside, making sure they were ready for whenever he needed them.

Zayn didn't have many moments on offense since Gable was countering so many moments. Gable attempted to get Dupri to hit Zayn with the title when the referee wasn't looking, but she couldn't do it. Zayn tried to capitalize on a distracted Gable with a helluva kick, but he moved away just in time. Gable landed a chaos theory, but Zayn kicked out in surprising fashion. When Gable continue to scold Dupri, Otis got in the way, and the Alpha Academy member took a hit from Zayn as a result. Gable looked to have a window, only for Zayn to recover.

When Zayn got out of an ankle lock outside of the ring, it resulted in Gable taking out Dupri's hurt left leg, frustrating Otis more. It left another chance for Alpha Academy to take out Zayn, however Dupri stopped Otis. He picked up Dupri and left the ring, and with Gable distracted, Zayn finally landed a helluva kick and got the pin.

Analysis: Gable and Zayn have put on great matches in recent months and this was another one that gave the belief the challenger could come out on top. With Zayn retaining, it should put this end to this rivalry and allow Gable to focus on the struggles going on with the Alpha Academy. Accident or not, Gable made contact with Dupri and that should be the last straw from Otis constantly being berated by his leader. A feud that fans are interested in should be on the horizon and headed toward SummerSlam.

Triple threat match for the Women's Tag Team Championship: Bianca Belair and Jade Cargill (c) vs. Zoey Stark and Shayna Baszler vs. Alba Fyre and Isla Dawn

The champions showcased their power early in the match as they've been accustomed to doing, with Belair taking control of Baszler and Dawn, and then Cargill dominating Stark and Fyre before both of them unleashed a punishing assault. Realizing they were overmatched, the challengers teamed up to attack the champions, which was a success.

With Belair and Cargill out, the challengers went blow-for-blow and the crowd clearly was rooting for the natives of Fyre and Dawn. Once Belair and Cargill came in, it was a frenzy with shots all over. Belair and Cargill looked like they were about to win after the power combo on Baszler, but Dawn snuck in to get rid of Cargill and she got the pin to become new champions.

NEW CHAMPS! NEW CHAMPS! NEW CHAMPS! 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿 #WWECastle pic.twitter.com/iN9wC5ydG6 — WWE (@WWE) June 15, 2024

Analysis: This was a stunner. For as cool as it would've been for the Scotland natives to win, Belair and Cargill have been such a powerful force that it didn't seem realistic for them to lose the titles. But with it a triple threat match, it made it a perfect opportunity for the champions to be snuck up on and someone else capitalize on the moment. The reaction to Fyre and Dawn getting the win was amazing from the crowd, and it was a sweet moment seeing them celebrate with family and get their flowers in their home country. A spectacular moment for a team that didn't have much going on prior to Clash at the Castle, and hopefully they'll get a solid run as champions. Meanwhile, the loss puts Belair and Cargill in an interesting spot. Will they continue to team up, or split and eventually face one another?

The Bloodline attacks Cody Rhodes

We may know who Cody Rhodes' next challenger is, and it could be someone he's very familiar with.

After beating AJ Styles, Rhodes celebrated, only for Solo Sikoa to come out for a tense face-off, Tanga Loa and Tama Tonga came out to unleash an assault on the champion, but Kevin Owens and Randy Orton came to the aid of the champion. They were able to hold off The Bloodline, but it seems like Rhodes is headed toward another encounter with the family.

We've got a SURPRISE brawl at #WWECastle ! pic.twitter.com/PVWXBUL2fk — WWE (@WWE) June 15, 2024

"I Quit" match for the Undisputed WWE Universal Championship: Cody Rhodes (c) vs. AJ Styles

The crowd brought the electricity and made it clear it was rooting for the champion. Rhodes started the match on offense, took it outside of the ring and into the stadium hallways before the action returned to the ring. Rhodes tried a figure four lock in the first significant attempt to get someone to quit, but Styles was able to get out.

Styles then took control when he bounced Rhodes off the announcer's table, and Rhodes was cut wide open on his face with blood coming out above his left eyebrow. Styles landed a knee drop on the chair wrapped on Rhodes head and then brought out the kendo stick to lay more punishment. Styles continued the onslaught after he used an STF on the champion by handcuffing Rhodes' hands behind his back and unloading a ruthless attack. Each time Rhodes denied to say "I Quit," the crowd would erupt in cheer.

After Styles got distracted with Rhodes' mom, which included her slapping the star, Rhodes recovered and threw a chair when Styles tried a phenomenal forearm, which also cut the challenger. Rhodes landed three cross Rhodes and handcuffed Styles to the ropes as he relentlessly pelted him with the chair. Styles didn't quit, but when Rhodes brought the steel steps into the ring, Styles understood it would get uglier and said, "I Quit." Rhodes retained, but just for good measure, he hit Styles with the steel steps anyway for all the disrespect he took, and while the challenger laid in defeat, he stood on top of the steps in victory.

Analysis: The two had a hard act to follow from their first meeting, but this rematch delivered. The electricity from the crowd really added to the aura in this meeting, and there were some solid spots that gave it a unique spin on the punishment that happens during a “I Quit” match. The ending of the match was a really intriguing spot because it showed Rhodes can turn on another switch that turns him into a daunting, ruthless champion instead of being the babyface star everyone loves. It’s still hard to imagine Rhodes losing the title at any point in the near future, but his matches are doing a good job of presenting believable moments and making his reign legitimate.

Watch: Cody Rhodes makes entrance, crowd sings song

The crowd is already off to an electric start. The Undisputed WWE Champion made his entrance and the crowd erupted, singing "Kingdom" much like the crowd at Backlash France.

WWE Undisputed Champion @CodyRhodes has one spectacular entrance at #WWECastle ! pic.twitter.com/xWCQ3bkUHI — WWE (@WWE) June 15, 2024

When is Clash at the Castle 2024?

Clash at the Castle 2024 will be Saturday, June 15 at 2 p.m. ET. The event will begin at 7 p.m. local time.

Where is Clash at the Castle 2024?

Clash at the Castle will be taking place in Glasgow, Scotland. It will be held in the OVO Hydro.

How to watch Clash at the Castle 2024

The event can be streamed on Peacock , but you must have their premium or premium-plus subscription to watch. Internationally, it will be available on WWE Network.

Clash at the Castle 2024 match card

Matches not in order

• "I Quit" match for the Undisputed WWE Universal Championship: Cody Rhodes (c) vs. AJ Styles.
• World Heavyweight Championship match: Damian Priest (c) vs. Drew McIntyre.
• WWE Women's Championship match: Bayley (c) vs. Piper Niven.
• Intercontinental Championship match: Sami Zayn (c) vs. Chad Gable.
• Triple threat match for the Women's Tag Team Championship: Bianca Belair and Jade Cargill (c) vs. Zoey Stark and Shayna Baszler vs. Alba Fyre and Isla Dawn.

Clash at the Castle 2024 predictions

• "I Quit" match for the Undisputed WWE Universal Championship: Cody Rhodes def. AJ Styles.
• World Heavyweight Championship match: Drew McIntyre def. Damian Priest.
• WWE Women's Championship match: Bayley def. Piper Niven.
• Intercontinental Championship match: Sami Zayn def. Chad Gable.
• Triple threat match for the Women's Tag Team Championship: Bianca Belair and Jade Cargill def. Zoey Stark and Shayna Baszler vs. Alba Fyre and Isla Dawn.

WWE stars from Scotland

Scotland will be well represented when the first WWE premium live event takes place in the country. Drew McIntyre is the most notable star from the country, but three other Scottish natives will be in action on Saturday.

Piper Niven, Alba Fyre and Isla Dawn are from Scotland, and Dawn is from Glasgow.

What does the crowd chant for Bayley?

Piper Niven will likely get the home crowd during her WWE Women's Championship match against Bayley, but the champion is also expected to get love from the European fans.

When Bayley has gone to Europe, fans serenade her with a chant based off the 1961 song “Hey Baby” by Bruce Channel. The chant goes:

“Hey Bayley, ooh aah. I wanna know, if you’d be my girl.”

AAAAAAY BAYLEYYYYYY!!!! ...and so it begins! 😂👏 #WWECastle pic.twitter.com/5ydBo82P5y — WWE (@WWE) June 14, 2024