What I’m Reading: Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents

Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents, by former New York Times reporter and Chicago bureau chief Isabel Wilkerson, is a combination study and meditation on caste in the United States. Wilkerson posits that the United States is a caste society like India, and that racism is merely the form that caste takes. That is to say, the early settlers created a societal hierarchy at which black African slaves were at the bottom, but that was almost incidental. It could have been indentured servants at the...