The Iron Book Discussion Group will read Isabel Wilkerson’s Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents in July 2023:
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BOOK DESCRIPTION: 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 outcasting 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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Copies of Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents can be picked up from the Book Discussion Shelf on our first floor, and its available digitally through Overdrive/Libby as an ebook or an audiobook.
An in-person discussion of Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents will be held at the library on Tuesday, July 11, at 7:00 PM.
And an online discussion of the book will be held via Zoom on Thursday, July 13, at 3:00 PM. If you’d like to attend the online discussion, please register through our Event Calendar. Participants will receive an email with the login information for Zoom after registering.
Published on June 16, 2023.
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