In doing so, Wilkerson gives us a language uniquely tailored for our times. Yet Wilkerson, like many before her, unequivocally centers her work on the United States, with caste as a larger framework-a structure of gradation to explain how race represents the skin atop the bones of the fixed, immovable ranking that is known as caste. The parallels between caste and race are not new, and Wilkerson leans heavily on the work of several early 20th-century researchers, notably the pathbreaking African American anthropologist Allison Davis, to trace how racial inequalities in the United States mirrored those in India and how the inhuman life conditions of African Americans reflected those of Dalits. And in some 400 pages, she obliterates decades of New Delhi’s diplomatic attempts to prevent caste from getting the global notoriety it has always deserved.

Wilkerson patiently peels each carefully matted layer of racial hierarchy to lay bare the history of oppression that people such as myself, a Dalit, have inherited from our ancestors. In order to understand how an unconscious ranking of human characteristics has been “used to justify brutalities against entire groups within our species,” she looks to the concentrated evil of Nazi Germany, which lasted 12 years, and the Hinduism-rooted caste system of varnas in India, which has lasted, in various forms, for millenniums. Wilkerson introduces caste as a framework to analyze the United States’ graded racial hierarchy that holds African Americans near the bottom and explains why conventional concepts of racism alone are no longer sufficient to explain how it has endured, nearly intact, for four centuries. In the new bestseller Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents, a work Oprah Winfrey has said “might be the most important book I’ve ever chosen for my book club,” the Pulitzer Prize-winning Isabel Wilkerson ensures that the topic of caste gets a major platform. But at an international platform designed to hold nations accountable for the continued mistreatment of marginalized populations, the Indian government informed the world that the issue of caste-and the institutionalized suppression of those who fall at the bottom of its hierarchies-was an internal matter. Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents, Isabel Wilkerson, Random House, 496 pp.,, August 2020Ĭaste: The Origins of Our Discontents, Isabel Wilkerson, Random House, 496 pp., $32, August 2020įor decades, New Delhi had championed boycotts against apartheid-era South Africa.

Coming out as dalit by yashica dutt