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Caste in America: Isabel Wilkerson

America’s past and present have been molded by a “shape-shifting, unspoken, race-based caste pyramid” says Isabel Wilkerson. Will the future be the same?

The new book from the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Warmth of Other Suns examines what lies underneath the surface of American life. “As a means of assigning value to entire swaths of humankind,” Isabel Wilkerson writes in Caste: the Origin of our Discontents, “caste embeds into our bones an unconscious ranking of human characteristics and sets forth the rules, expectations, and stereotypes that have been used to justify brutalities against entire groups within our species. In the American caste system, the signal of rank is what we call race…race is the primary tool and the visible decoy, the front man, for caste.” Told through intimate personal narratives and deeply researched history, Wilkerson examines the ties between the American caste system and those in India and Nazi Germany, and points to ways America can move beyond our artificial and destructive human divisions, toward hope in our common humanity.











When: Wed., Aug. 5, 2020 at 8:00 pm - 9:00 pm
Where: New York Public Library—Stephen A. Schwarzman Building
476 Fifth Ave.
917-275-6975
Price: Free
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America’s past and present have been molded by a “shape-shifting, unspoken, race-based caste pyramid” says Isabel Wilkerson. Will the future be the same?

The new book from the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Warmth of Other Suns examines what lies underneath the surface of American life. “As a means of assigning value to entire swaths of humankind,” Isabel Wilkerson writes in Caste: the Origin of our Discontents, “caste embeds into our bones an unconscious ranking of human characteristics and sets forth the rules, expectations, and stereotypes that have been used to justify brutalities against entire groups within our species. In the American caste system, the signal of rank is what we call race…race is the primary tool and the visible decoy, the front man, for caste.” Told through intimate personal narratives and deeply researched history, Wilkerson examines the ties between the American caste system and those in India and Nazi Germany, and points to ways America can move beyond our artificial and destructive human divisions, toward hope in our common humanity.

Buy tickets/get more info now