Caste

Summary

Pulitzer-winning journalist Isabel Wilkerson argues that beneath American racism lies caste: an inherited ranking of human worth. She sets the United States beside India and Nazi Germany, names eight pillars that hold such hierarchies up, and shows them at work in daily encounters, her own included. Caste, on her account, needs no conscious hatred to keep running.

Rationale

Caste, as Wilkerson tells it, works the way we think deep dispositions do: absorbed from surroundings, enacted without argument, and kept in place by institutions it makes feel natural.