From the bestselling author of The Warmth of Other Suns:
Caste
The Origins of Our Discontents
“Wilkerson’s work is the missing puzzle piece of our country’s history.”
Caste
The Origins of Our Discontents
Poetically written and brilliantly researched, Caste invites us to discover the inner workings of an American hierarchy that goes far beyond the confines of race, class, or gender.
“As we go about our daily lives, caste is the wordless usher in a darkened theater, flashlight cast down in the aisles, guiding us to our assigned seats for a performance.
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A book steeped in empathy and insight, Caste explores, through layered analysis and stories of real people, the structure of an unspoken system of human ranking and reveals how our lives are still restricted by what divided us centuries ago.
“Modern-day caste protocols,” Wilkerson writes, “are often less about overt attacks or conscious hostility. They are like the wind, powerful enough to knock you down but invisible as they go about their work.”
Wilkerson rigorously defines eight pillars that underlie caste systems across civilizations, including divine will, heredity, and dehumanization. She documents the parallels with two other hierarchies in history, those of India and of Nazi Germany, and no reader will be left without a greater understanding of the price we all pay in a society torn by artificial divisions.
“The hierarchy of caste is not about feelings or morality,” Wilkerson writes. “It is about power — which groups have it and which do not.”
Before its release, the Chicago Tribune declared that Caste “should be at the top of every American’s reading list." Dwight Garner, the chief critic of The New York Times, called Caste “an instant American classic and almost certainly the keynote nonfiction book of the American century thus far.”
Upon publication, Oprah Winfrey announced that Caste was her Summer 2020 pick for Oprah’s Book Club and proclaimed it “the most essential...the most necessary-for-all-humanity book that I have chosen.”
The Warmth of Other Suns
The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration
In this critically acclaimed, modern classic of narrative nonfiction, three young people set out on a perilous journey out of the Jim Crow South to the North and West in search of what the novelist Richard Wright called “the warmth of other suns.”
“They did what human beings looking for freedom, throughout history, have often done. They left.
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An intimate epic that puts in perspective our current era, The Warmth Of Other Suns follows Ida Mae Brandon Gladney, George Swanson Starling, and Robert Joseph Pershing Foster over the tumultuous decades of the 20th century as they join the six million African-Americans fleeing southern repression in what would come to be known as the Great Migration, a watershed in American history.
This deeply researched book interweaves their stories with the larger forces that triggered one of the largest migrations within the borders of this country.
“Absolutely revolutionary,” Ta-Nehisi Coates said of The Warmth of Other Suns. “I always felt like it was the spiritual mother of ‘The Case for Reparations.’”
The Great Migration was a leaderless quest for freedom, lasting from World War I to the 1970s, and became one of the biggest underrecognized stories of the 20th Century. It changed the country, North and South. It brought us John Coltrane, Thelonius Monk, Toni Morrison, August Wilson, Bill Russell, Motown, Denzel Washington, Michelle Obama -- all children or grandchildren of the Great Migration. It changed the social, cultural and political landscape of the United States, with consequences that persist to the current day.
The Warmth of Other Suns became an instant New York Times bestseller upon publication and has reappeared multiple times since its release. It has been named to TIME’s 10 Best Nonfiction Books of the Decade and to The New York Times Magazine’s Best Nonfiction of All Time.
About Isabel Wilkerson
Isabel Wilkerson, winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Humanities Medal, has become a leading figure in narrative nonfiction, an interpreter of the human condition, and an impassioned voice for demonstrating how history can help us understand ourselves, our country, and our current era of upheaval.
Through her writing, Wilkerson brings the invisible and the marginalized into the light and into our hearts. Through her lectures, she explores with authority the need to reconcile America’s karmic inheritance and the origins of both our divisions and our shared commonality.
Her debut work, The Warmth of Other Suns, won the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Heartland Prize for Nonfiction, the Anisfield-Wolf Award for Nonfiction, the Lynton History Prize from Harvard and Columbia universities, and the Stephen Ambrose Oral History Prize and was shortlisted for both the Pen-Galbraith Literary Award and the Dayton Literary Peace Prize.
She is a native of Washington, D.C., and a daughter of the Great Migration, the mass movement that she would go on to write about. She won the Pulitzer Prize for Feature Writing in 1994, as Chicago Bureau Chief of The New York Times, making her the first African-American woman to win a Pulitzer Prize in journalism. She then devoted fifteen years and interviewed more than 1,200 people to tell the story of the six million people, among them her parents, who defected from the Jim Crow South.
As for her new book, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents, the venerable U.K. bookseller, Waterstone’s calls it an “expansive, lyrical and stirring account of the unspoken system of divisions that govern our world.”
“Wilkerson combines impressive research … with great narrative and literary power…. She humanizes history, giving it emotional and psychological depth.
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News, Reviews & Interviews
Apple TV+ Podcast Series on Caste
Apple TV+ and Oprah Winfrey launched a new podcast miniseries devoted to Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents.
Reviews
“Caste: The Lies That Divide Us by Isabel Wilkerson — review,” Ashish Ghadiali, The Observer: Culture: Society books, The Guardian, August 31, 2020.
“Oprah's New Book Club Pick: Caste by Isabel Wilkerson,” Oprah.com, August 4, 2020.
“Isabel Wilkerson’s ‘Caste’ Is an ‘Instant American Classic’ About Our Abiding Sin,” Dwight Garner, New York Times, July 31, 2020.
Interviews
“Isabel Wilkerson: Writer” in “You Said Hope,” essay By Jacqueline Woodson, interview by Justine Goode, Vanity Fair, September 2020.
“Isabel Wilkerson, ‘Caste’ (with Bryan Stevenson),” Politics and Prose, August 20, 2020.
“'Racism' Did Not Seem Sufficient: Author Isabel Wilkerson on the American Caste System,” Justin Worland, TIME, July 23, 2020.
“Isabel Wilkerson This History is Long; This History Is Deep,” On Being with Krista Tippett, November 17, 2016.
“Race And 2016: Isabel Wilkerson Weighs In,” The Last Word, MSNBC, 2016.
Q&A with Isabel Wilkerson, C-Span, 2010.
“Great Migration: The African-American Exodus North,” Fresh Air with Terry Gross, 2010.
Articles by Isabel
“America's 'untouchables': the silent power of the caste system,” Isabel Wilkerson, The Guardian, July 28, 2020.
“America’s Enduring Caste System,” Isabel Wilkerson, New York Times Magazine, July 1, 2020.
Talks & Media Appearances
“There’s No Place Like Home: Michelle Obama and Craig Robinson in conversation with Isabel Wilkerson,” Obama Foundation, Oct 29, 2019.
“Isabel Wilkerson, J.D. Vance, Diane Guerrero,” Face the Nation, 2017.
“Isabel Wilkerson: 2011 National Book Festival,” Library of Congress, September 24, 2011.
“A Conversation with Isabel Wilkerson,” The Poynter Fellowship in Journalism at Yale University, 2011.
“What Wilkerson urges, isn’t argument at all; it’s compassion. Hush, and listen.”