Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents

by Isabel Wilkerson

The 2014 epidemic struck 28,000 people and killed more than 11,000 in the largest outbreak of Ebola the world had ever seen. The virus brought the interconnectedness of the planet into vivid, terrifying relief. Distance and geography could contain Ebola for a time, but Ebola did not recognize race or color or caste or national origin. A human being was a human being and a prospective new host to a frighteningly efficient virus. The contagion had initially not been seen as the global human crisis it was. Those suffering were West Africans with ill-equipped health systems, a hemisphere away. But Ebola, and potentially planet-wide catastrophes like it, as the world would discover beyond imagining six years later, have a way of reminding human beings that we are all indeed one species, all interwoven, more alike than different, more interdependent on one another than we might otherwise want to believe. Ebola had been merely a whispered forewarning of what was to come.