Caste in India, despite its historical resilience, has been. This path-breaking book reveals how caste crushes human creativity and is disturbingly similar to other forms of oppression, such as race, class and gender. Still, it is the recognition of the similarities between the United States and India that provides the foundation for this book. This book, part personal experience of the author where he faced caste persecution even in liberal Europe, part documentation of Dalit culture introduces you to. Read reviews from world’s largest community for readers. Present-day Germany, she also points out, officially repudiates and remembers the horrors of its racial past, while the United States often celebrates the defenders of slavery. The Nazi regime, she argues, relying on recent work by the legal historian James Whitman, borrowed some of the legal structure for its notorious Nuremberg Laws from American statutes such as racial-intermarriage prohibitions that were on the books in most U.S. Yet Wilkerson devotes only limited space to comparing the Nazi regime to America or India, although she does mine that regime for other purposes.

Indeed, a central section of the book is devoted to setting out the “eight pillars of caste.” These are features that these three systems all have in common, such as hierarchies that are supposedly natural or divinely ordered, heritability of status, controls on marriage and sexuality across caste lines, prohibitions on pollution of the upper caste by contact with the lower, caste-based occupational hierarchy, and terror and violence as means of enforcement. “Throughout human history,” she asserts, “three caste systems have stood out” - those of the United States, India and Nazi Germany. Wilkerson sees something familiar about the Dalits in India, and about the racial hierarchies that the Nazi regime constructed in Germany. Wilkerson’s book is a powerful, illuminating and heartfelt account of how hierarchy reproduces itself, as well as a call to action for the difficult work of undoing it, but the fundamental conceit that drives its analysis is one of recognition.

Caste matters book review