Book Review: Caste
I recently read the second edition of Caste: The Origin of Our Discontents written by Isabel Wilkerson and originally published by Penguin in 2020, with an updated “Afterword by the Author” published in 2023. This international bestseller has a long list of awards, including the Time nonfiction book of the year in 2020, a #1 New York Times bestseller, a Goodreads Choice Award winner, and part of Opera’s Book Club in 2020. Additionally, Wilkerson had won the 1994 Pulitzer Prize in Feature Writing, the first African-American woman to be given the prize. Few authors have as much experience in writing and reporting.
Wilkerson begins her book with the haunting story of a heatwave in Siberia during the summer of 2016, which caused the permafrost to met and exposed the bodies of reindeer killed by anthrax in 1941, which cause local indigenous children to become sick and even die because of the pathogen. In the next chapter, she clearly defined a caste system: “rigid, often arbitrary boundaries to keep the ranked groupings apart, distinct from one another and in their assigned places” and “an artificial construct”. She emphasized that while Americans tend to think of caste as the same as race, the two concepts are separate, even if these reinforce each other.
The remaining chapters were a combination of personal anecdotes and the history from three distinct cultures: Hinduism in India, the United States, and Nazi Germany. She even found incidents where these cultures overlapped. American civil rights leaders and Indian activists have drawn inspiration from each other. Martin Luther King, Jr. and his wife, Coretta Scott King, traveled to India to visit Mohandas Gandhi and also spoke with Dalits or Untouchables, who are considered the lowest rank in society and excused from the caste system. Dalit leader Bhimrao Ambedkar had a similar role to King although he lived several decades earlier and corresponded with W.E.B Du Bois. Dalits are not permitted to own land and survived through saldari, just as African-Americans in the United States survived through sharecropping. When the Black Panther Party formed in the United States, the Dalit Panthers formed in India. Dalits and their supporters sang “We Shall Overcome” and read books by African-American authors like James Baldwin and Toni Morrison.
Parallels were also drawn between the Holocaust and the Jim Crow South. During the early stages of the Their Reich, German scholars studied Jim Crow law to create the Nuremberg Laws, as the United States was considered the most advanced country for "race purity and eugenics". Besides strict anti-miscegenation laws, the country had led a genocide against Native Americans, which was praised by Adolf Hitler. Some German laws were actually less strict than American laws. While a person with 50% or less Jewish ancestry who did not practice Judaism was considered not Jewish, a person with any percent of African ancestry was considered African-American. Albert Einstein recognized these parallels when he fled Germany and came to the United States, where he spoke at historically black colleges and joined the NAACP. Du Bois noted, “He hates race prejudice, because as a Jew he knows what it is.”
The book shone at its brightest when Wilkerson shared personal stories, whether she encountered racism as a reporter or at an academic conference, or when she told the story of overlooked activists. These portions most mimicked Wilkerson’s award-winning newspaper articles, combining dialogue supported by history. Personal stories included her reception of a bronze bust of Ambedkar while in India, having a business owner refuse to speak to her while he was waiting for a news reporter and refusing to believe a Black woman would have that job, and bonding with a man wearing a MAGA cap over the deaths of their mothers. Perhaps the most interesting story of activists followed Burleigh & Mary Garner and Allison & Elizabeth Stubbs Davis, Harvard anthropologists who moved to Natchez, MS to research for their book Deep South: A Social Anthropological Study of Caste and Class.
When section relied on pure historical research, with a style similar to a textbook, these were highly accurate and well-written but somewhat repetitive. The narrative sometimes circled back to the same examples, reminding the reader of what had already been said. This works well for a serialized newspaper format, where Wilkerson is among the best in the field, but not as well for a book. At 528 pages, the book felt long in places, and less repetition may have improved the pacing. This circling may better suited Wilkerson’s intended audience: Westerners curious about how their society compares to others, rather than historians who deeply studied this history.
This book is foundational for ambitious readers wanting to better understand caste throughout history and in the present, especially where it is found in the United States, western Europe, and India. However, its length may make it daunting. For those who prefer audio, an audiobook version read by Robin Miles lasts fifteen hours and ten minutes. For those who prefer film, Origin (2023) is based on the book, which I learned while watching the MasterClass Reframe Your Thinking with Ava DuVernay. With a two hour and twenty minute watch time, it is the shortest option; I will have to watch this on Kanopy in the near future.
Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents by Isabel WilkersonMy rating: 4 of 5 stars