To finish out 2020, this month we’re reading Isabel Wilkerson’s Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents with the Austin360 Book Club powered by Texas Book Festival.
Wilkerson was one of the highlights of the 2020 Virtual Texas Book Festival in conversation with writer and poet (and previous book club author) Saeed Jones. We’re keeping the video up for you to continue to view through the end of the year, so once you’re done reading Wilkerson’s excellent book, head to this link to watch this illuminating conversation.
About Wilkerson:
Isabel Wilkerson, winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Humanities Medal, is the author of the critically acclaimed New York Times bestsellers Caste and The Warmth of Other Suns. Her debut work won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction and was named to Time’s 10 Best Nonfiction Books of the 2010s and New York Times’s list of the Best Nonfiction of All Time. She has taught at Princeton, Emory, and Boston Universities and has lectured at more than two hundred other colleges and universities across the United States and in Europe and Asia.
About the book:
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.
Past 2020 book club picks:
- November: Transcendent Kingdom by Yaa Gyasi
- October: Dear Justyce by Nic Stone
- September: The Only Good Indians by Stephen Graham Jones
- August: Mexican Gothic by Silvia Moreno-Garcia
- July: The City We Became by N.K. Jemisin
- June: How We Fight for Our Lives by Saeed Jones
- May: The Glass Hotel by Emily St. John Mandel
- April: Stories of Your Life and Others by Ted Chiang
- March: My Dark Vanessa by Kate Elizabeth Russell
- February: You and I Eat the Same edited by Chris Ying
- January: Trust Exercise by Susan Choi