Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents

by Isabel Wilkerson

A caste system is an artificial construction, a fixed and embedded ranking of human value that sets the presumed supremacy of one group against the presumed inferiority of other groups on the basis of ancestry and often immutable traits, traits that would be neutral in the abstract but are ascribed life-and-death meaning in a hierarchy favoring the dominant caste whose forebears designed it. A caste system uses rigid, often arbitrary boundaries to keep the ranked groupings apart, distinct from one another and in their assigned places.

This is a definition of caste that came after 25 years of studying it, discussing it, observing it, living it, and then testing it against other ways of looking at the word and the world. I built on the definition over time, adding and deleting a point or phrase, refining it until it had been distilled to a comprehensive description that could apply to most any caste system.