Caste

with the sins of the past. My ancestors never attacked indigenous people, never owned slaves. And, yes. Not one of us was here when this house was built. Our immediate ancestors may have had nothing to do with it, but here we are, the current occupants of a property with stress cracks and bowed walls and fissures built into the foundation. We are the heirs to whatever is right or wrong with it. We did not erect the uneven pillars or joists, but they are ours to deal with now. 

And any further deterioration is, in fact, on our hands. 

Unaddressed, the ruptures and diagonal cracks will not fix themselves. The toxins will not go away but, rather, will spread, leach, and mutate, as they already have. When people live in an old house, they come to adjust to the idiosyncrasies and outright dangers skulking in an old structure. They put buckets under a wet ceiling, prop up groaning floors, learn to step over that rotting wood tread in the staircase. The awkward becomes acceptable, and the unacceptable becomes merely inconvenient. Live with it long enough, and the unthinkable becomes normal. Exposed over the generations, we learn to believe that the incomprehensible is the way that life is supposed to be. 

The inspector was facing the mystery of the misshapen ceiling, and so he first held a sensor to the surface to detect if it was damp. The reading inconclusive, he then pulled out the infrared camera to take a kind of X-ray of whatever was going on, the idea being that you cannot fix a problem until and unless you can see it. He could now see past the plaster, beyond what had been wallpapered or painted over, as we now are called upon to do in the house we all live in, to examine a structure built long ago. 

Like other old houses, America has an unseen skeleton, a caste system that is as central to its operation as are the studs and joists that we cannot see in the physical b

definitive contemporary study of African Americans twentieth-century Great Migration from the Jim Crow South to northern, midwestern, and western cities. It deepens the resonance of that book (a seemingly impossible feat) by digging more explicitly into the pervasive racial hierarchy that transcends region and time. Steve Nathans-Kelly, New York Journal of Books

Caste will spur readers to think and to feel in equal measure. Kwame Anthony Appiah, The 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. Kenneth W. Mack, The Washington Post

Should be required reading for generations to come . . . A significant work of social science, journalism, and history, Caste removes the tenuous language of racial animus and replaces it with a sturdier lexicon based on power relationships. Joshunda Sanders, The Boston Globe

[Caste] should be at the top of every American s reading list. Jennifer Day, Chicago Tribune

An expansive interrogation of racism, institutionalised inequality and injustice . . . This is an American reckoning and so it should be. . . . It is a painfully resonant book and could not have come at a more urgent time. Fatima Bhutto, The Guardian

Full of uncovered stories and persuasive writing . . . Opening up a new bank of language in a time of emboldened white supremacism may provide her readers with a new way of thinking and talking about social injustice. . . . A useful reminder to India s many upper-caste cosmopolitans . . . that dreams of resistance are just one part of the shared inheritance of the world s oldest democracy, and the world s largest. Supriya Nair, Mumbai Mirror

It is bracing to be reminded with such precision that our country was built through genocide and slavery. But Ms. Wilkerson has also provided a renewed way of understanding America s longest, fiercest trouble in all its complexity. Her book leaves me both grateful and hopeful. I gulped it down. Tracy Kidder, Pulitzer Prize winning author of Mountains Beyond Mountains 

Like Martin Luther King, Jr. before her, Isabel Wilkerson has traveled the world to study the caste system and has returned to show us more clearly than ever before how caste is permanently embedded in the foundation and unseen structural beams of this old house called America. Isabel Wilkerson tells this story in prose that is so beautiful, the only reason to pause your reading is to catch your breath. You cannot understand America today without this book. Lawrence O Donnell

This enthralling exposé deserves a wide and impassioned readership. Publishers Weekly (starred review)
 
Similar to her previous book, the latest by Wilkerson 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)