Join us for a discussion of Caste. Book copies are available across from the first-floor circulation desk for a month-long checkout. The book is also available through OverDrive as an ebook (click here to access) or as an audiobook (click here to access).  

Library programs are open and beneficial to all. We invite people with physical and/or cognitive disabilities to attend any of our activities and will strive to support individual needs. If you need accommodations to participate, please contact one of our Inclusion Coordinators, Matt Krueger and/or Amy Holland, one week prior to the program.

This program will be held online using a communication app/website called Zoom. Registration required with an email address. Participants will receive an email with the log-in information for Zoom.

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.