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CASTE Book Club Discussion

Mon, Mar 18

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ZOOM ROOM

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CASTE Book Club Discussion
CASTE Book Club Discussion

Time & Location

Mar 18, 2024, 7:00 PM – 9:00 PM EDT

ZOOM ROOM

Guests

About the event

Those who would like to read the book CASTE

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, and beautifully written 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.  Original and revealing, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents is an eye-opening story of people and history, and a reexamination of what lies under the surface of ordinary lives and of American life today.

You may also like to watch before the ZOOM discussion. Please RSVP to receive the Zoom information.

In Conversation: Author Isabel Wilkerson (2021 Knight Media Forum) (52-minute listen) Listen to an interview with Isabel Wilkerson where she talks about how castes have fundamentally shaped American society. https://vimeo.com/521147239

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