It’s a tough read, but needs to be read by everyone ( )

This is an excellent book, a must-read for anyone who wants to really understand what American society is really about.

Highlights for me include:
- A lengthy description of the "pillars" of any caste system, and how American society qualifies.
- A comparison of the American system with those of India and Nazi Germany. (Was gob-smacked to learn that the Nazis modeled their subjugation of the Jews on America's Jim Crow laws.)
- A description of the price America pays because of it's caste system (compared to other "developed" countries, we have relatively high infant mortality, poor scholastic scholastic achievement, shorter life expectancy, huge prison population, etc etc etc).
- The author's personal examples of how lower caste people are treated in America. Some are pretty devastating, all made me feel ashamed.

I felt the book had one weakness: there was very little discussion of where Native Americans, Latinx Americans, and Asian Americans fit into the system. This doesn't spoil the book, far from it, but I would have enjoyed the analyses.

Overall, this is a very engaging read, without being pedantic and with no detectable filler. It's an eye-opening challenge to thoughtful White readers, implicitly asking "how can people, who claim to be compassionate and fair-minded freedom lovers, allow such a system to exist?" This book has a permanent place in my shelves, and I will read it again.
( )

I have to say I picked up this book without hearing anything about it, which is a good thing. I thought it was an objective sociological study of caste with the obvious links to racism, classism etc. This book didn't deliver on that level. It wasn't an all-encompassing study of caste, focusing primarily on the position of the black people in the USA. While it definitely speaks about the horrendous racist history of the USA (there were some truly powerful moments in this book), the approach was a strange mix of anecdotal and factual, which was openly politically biased and very binary (in terms of black and white) with other minorities strangely underrepresented.

The biggest disappointment was that Wilkerson blames everything on this notion of caste and lists personal anecdotes that may be completely unrelated to her central thesis. She also gives very little space to talk about the class system based on the economy which is very central to the whole idea of caste. I felt disappointed with this as it seems to me that many black activists avoid this topic either because they do not want to be called out as communists or because in the American narrative it is just inconceivable to try to overthrow the holy cow of neoliberal capitalism.

I expected the central thesis of this work to be the comparison of the Indian caste system, Nazi Germany racial laws etc. with its contemporaries i.e. Jim Crow's south (that part was was done well, IMHO) etc. Unfortunately, the Indian caste system is covered very superficially, with no explanation of how that system evolved over time, especially in relation to the external (colonial) influence. The same superficial approach goes for Nazi Germany, which in the light of the recent research published in The Guardian that found that 2/3 of the US young adults don't know about the Holocaust is not something to take easily.
I gave up expecting a more scientific, systematic approach very early on in the book when I realized that this is not what the author had in mind.

This book is very successful in depicting systemic racism in the USA which is undeniable and very deeply entrenched into the social fabric of the society. I'm not convinced, however, that the current system is as monolithic as Wilkerson claims.

On the positive note, the writing style is engaging and Wilkerson uses some great metaphors to talk about her subject. It may be eye-opening for people who haven't come across caste in their education so far. But, I expected a lot more from this book. Or better said, something else. ( )

Following on Wilkerson's "The Warmth of Other Suns", this book examines the way we humans prefer to bin people based on certain characteristics. She focuses on the three most vile and reprehensible systems of caste: the Nazi program of annihilation of the Jews, the treatment of (some might say attempted annihilation) of African Americans in the US, and the human hierarchy invented in India known as the caste system. ( )

I did not enjoy the writing in this as much as I did Ms. Wilkerson’s earlier book, The Warmth of Other Suns, but her hypothesis about viewing racial tensions through the lens of caste rather than race is compelling. ( )