really divides humanity
C
aste is an important book for this time, for any time. But it may wind up being to the literary world as oatmeal is to the dietary world important but not widely consumed. Those of us who treasured Isabel Wilkerson s Pulitzer Prize-winning
The
Warmth of Other Suns may be disappointed with
Caste, which lacks the compelling narrative thread and personal storytelling that made her first book highly readable as well as necessary to a fuller understanding of Black life and history in America. In
Caste Wilkerson builds a sturdy case for recognizing the history of race as the hidden work of a caste system that has gone unnamed but prevails among us. This is more than merely changing terminology. She calls out the underlying fallacy of race as a real thing, citing noted geneticist J. Craig Venter of gene-mapping fame who calls race a social concept, not a scientific one. In fact, the study of the human genome established two decades ago that al