
Caste
The Origins of Our Discontents
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Narrated by:
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Robin Miles
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By:
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Isabel Wilkerson
About this listen
#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • OPRAH’S BOOK CLUB PICK • “An instant American classic and almost certainly the keynote nonfiction book of the American century thus far.”—Dwight Garner, The New York Times
The Pulitzer Prize-winning, bestselling author of The Warmth of Other Suns examines the unspoken caste system that has shaped America and shows how our lives today are still defined by a hierarchy of human divisions—now with a new Afterword by the author.
#1 NONFICTION BOOK OF THE YEAR: Time
ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: The Washington Post, The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, The Boston Globe, O: The Oprah Magazine, NPR, Bloomberg, The Christian Science Monitor, New York Post, The New York Public Library, Fortune, Smithsonian Magazine, Marie Claire, Slate, Library Journal, Kirkus Reviews
Winner of the Carl Sandberg Literary Award • Winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize • National Book Award Longlist • National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist • Dayton Literary Peace Prize Finalist • PEN/John Kenneth Galbraith Award for Nonfiction Finalist • PEN/Jean Stein Book Award Longlist • Kirkus Prize Finalist
“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. The hierarchy of caste is not about feelings or morality. It is about power—which groups have it and which do not.”
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.
©2020 Isabel Wilkerson (P)2020 Random House AudioListeners also enjoyed...
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Critic reviews
"This enthralling exposé deserves a wide and impassioned readership.” (Publishers Weekly, starred review)
“Similar to her previous book, the latest by Wilkerson is destined to become a classic, and is urgent, essential reading for all.” (Library Journal, starred review)
"This is a brilliant book, well timed in the face of a pandemic and police brutality that cleave along the lines of a caste system.” (Booklist)
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Story
Seldom does a book have the impact of Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow. Since it was first published in 2010, it has been cited in judicial decisions and has been adopted in campus-wide and community-wide reads; it helped inspire the creation of the Marshall Project and the new $100 million Art for Justice Fund; it has been the winner of numerous prizes, including the prestigious NAACP Image Award; and it has spent nearly 250 weeks on the New York Times best seller list.
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Shocking, Important and Brilliant
- By Tim on 10-06-14
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Casta [Caste]
- As origens de nosso mal-estar [The Origins of Our Discontents]
- By: Isabel Wilkerson, Denise Bottmann, Carlos Alberto Medeiros
- Narrated by: Naruna Costa
- Length: 15 hrs and 39 mins
- Abridged
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Neste best-seller internacional, a jornalista Isabel Wilkerson, vencedora do prêmio Pulitzer, compara os Estados Unidos, a Índia e a Alemanha nazista, revelando como nosso mundo foi moldado pela noção de casta — e como suas hierarquias rígidas e arbitrárias nos dividem ainda hoje. Escrito de modo criativo e original, Casta fornece pistas importantes para entender a crise da democracia nas sociedades ocidentais e o que está por trás dos protestos antirracistas que assumiram dimensões globais após o assassinato de George Floyd.
By: Isabel Wilkerson, and others
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Poverty, by America
- By: Matthew Desmond
- Narrated by: Dion Graham
- Length: 5 hrs and 40 mins
- Unabridged
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The United States, the richest country on earth, has more poverty than any other advanced democracy. Why? Why does this land of plenty allow one in every eight of its children to go without basic necessities, permit scores of its citizens to live and die on the streets, and authorize its corporations to pay poverty wages?
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A testimonial based on facts and witness
- By Alonzo Nightjar on 03-27-23
By: Matthew Desmond
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The Color of Law
- A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America
- By: Richard Rothstein
- Narrated by: Adam Grupper
- Length: 9 hrs and 32 mins
- Unabridged
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In this groundbreaking history of the modern American metropolis, Richard Rothstein explodes the myth that America's cities came to be racially divided through de facto segregation - that is, through individual prejudices, income differences, or the actions of private institutions like banks and real estate agencies. Rather, he incontrovertibly makes clear that it was de jure segregation - the laws and policy decisions passed by local, state, and federal governments - that actually promoted the discriminatory patterns that continue to this day.
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Better suited to print than audio
- By ProfGolf on 02-04-18
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Between the World and Me
- By: Ta-Nehisi Coates
- Narrated by: Ta-Nehisi Coates
- Length: 3 hrs and 35 mins
- Unabridged
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Americans have built an empire on the idea of “race”, a falsehood that damages us all but falls most heavily on the bodies of Black women and men - bodies exploited through slavery and segregation and, today, threatened, locked up, and murdered out of all proportion. What is it like to inhabit a Black body and find a way to live within it? And how can we all honestly reckon with this fraught history and free ourselves from its burden? Between the World and Me is Ta-Nehisi Coates’ attempt to answer these questions in a letter to his adolescent son.
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A Heartfelt Self-aware Literary Masterpiece
- By T Spencer on 07-30-15
By: Ta-Nehisi Coates
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How We Get Free
- Black Feminism and the Combahee River Collective
- By: Keeanga -Yamahtta Taylor
- Narrated by: Lisa Reneé Pitts
- Length: 6 hrs and 39 mins
- Unabridged
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The Combahee River Collective, a path-breaking group of radical black feminists, was one of the most important organizations to develop out of the antiracist and women's liberation movements of the 1960s and 70s. In this collection of essays and interviews edited by activist-scholar Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, founding members of the organization and contemporary activists reflect on the legacy of its contributions to black feminism and its impact on today's struggles.
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Crucial history
- By Laura T on 10-04-18
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White Fragility
- Why It's So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism
- By: Dr. Robin DiAngelo, Michael Eric Dyson - foreword
- Narrated by: Amy Landon
- Length: 6 hrs and 21 mins
- Unabridged
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In this “vital, necessary, and beautiful book” (Michael Eric Dyson), antiracist educator Robin DiAngelo deftly illuminates the phenomenon of white fragility and “allows us to understand racism as a practice not restricted to 'bad people'" (Claudia Rankine). Referring to the defensive moves white people make when challenged racially, white fragility is characterized by emotions such as anger, fear, and guilt and by behaviors including argumentation and silence. These behaviors, in turn, function to reinstate white racial equilibrium and prevent meaningful cross-racial dialogue.
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Word salad
- By Eric on 03-10-20
By: Dr. Robin DiAngelo, and others
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How to Be an Antiracist
- By: Ibram X. Kendi
- Narrated by: Ibram X. Kendi
- Length: 10 hrs and 29 mins
- Unabridged
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From the National Book Award-winning author of Stamped from the Beginning comes a “groundbreaking” (Time) approach to understanding and uprooting racism and inequality in our society and in ourselves—now updated, with a new preface.
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80% of the useful content is in the first 1-2 chapters
- By Anonymous User on 03-09-20
By: Ibram X. Kendi
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How the Word Is Passed
- A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America
- By: Clint Smith
- Narrated by: Clint Smith
- Length: 10 hrs and 6 mins
- Unabridged
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Beginning in his hometown of New Orleans, Clint Smith leads the listener on an unforgettable tour of monuments and landmarks—those that are honest about the past and those that are not—that offer an intergenerational story of how slavery has been central in shaping our nation's collective history, and ourselves.
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Sincerely grateful read
- By Kelvin Dixon on 06-08-21
By: Clint Smith
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Black AF History
- The Un-Whitewashed Story of America
- By: Michael Harriot
- Narrated by: Michael Harriot
- Length: 15 hrs and 42 mins
- Unabridged
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America’s backstory is a whitewashed mythology implanted in our collective memory. It should come as no surprise that the dominant narrative of American history is blighted with errors and oversights—after all, history books were written by white men with their perspectives at the forefront. It could even be said that the devaluation and erasure of the Black experience is as American as apple pie. In Black AF History, Michael Harriot presents a more accurate version of American history.
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LOVE It!
- By KMB on 09-29-23
By: Michael Harriot
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The Message
- By: Ta-Nehisi Coates
- Narrated by: Ta-Nehisi Coates
- Length: 5 hrs and 20 mins
- Unabridged
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Ta-Nehisi Coates originally set out to write a book about writing, in the tradition of Orwell’s classic “Politics and the English Language,” but found himself grappling with deeper questions about how our stories—our reporting and imaginative narratives and mythmaking—expose and distort our realities. In the first of the book’s three intertwining essays, Coates, on his first trip to Africa, finds himself in two places at once: in Dakar, a modern city in Senegal, and in a mythic kingdom in his mind.
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Bias
- By Dana on 10-13-24
By: Ta-Nehisi Coates
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Unapologetic
- A Black, Queer, and Feminist Mandate for Radical Movements
- By: Charlene Carruthers
- Narrated by: Charlene Carruthers
- Length: 5 hrs and 50 mins
- Unabridged
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Drawing on Black intellectual and grassroots organizing traditions, including the Haitian Revolution, the US civil rights movement, and LGBTQ rights and feminist movements, Unapologetic challenges all of us engaged in the social justice struggle to make the movement for Black liberation more radical, more queer, and more feminist. This audiobook provides a vision for how social justice movements can become sharper and more effective through principled struggle, healing justice, and leadership development.
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I learned a lot
- By Mickey on 10-28-18
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Evicted
- Poverty and Profit in the American City
- By: Matthew Desmond
- Narrated by: Dion Graham
- Length: 11 hrs and 3 mins
- Unabridged
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In Evicted, Princeton sociologist and MacArthur “Genius” Matthew Desmond follows eight families in Milwaukee as they each struggle to keep a roof over their heads. Hailed as “wrenching and revelatory” (The Nation), “vivid and unsettling” (New York Review of Books), Evicted transforms our understanding of poverty and economic exploitation while providing fresh ideas for solving one of twenty-first-century America’s most devastating problems. Its unforgettable scenes of hope and loss remind us of the centrality of home, without which nothing else is possible.
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Former Property Manager
- By Charla on 05-18-16
By: Matthew Desmond
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The Trauma of Caste
- A Dalit Feminist Meditation on Survivorship, Healing, and Abolition
- By: Thenmozhi Soundararajan, Tarana Burke - foreword, Aishah Shahidah Simmons, and others
- Narrated by: Thenmozhi Soundararajan
- Length: 10 hrs and 54 mins
- Unabridged
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Despite its ban more than 70 years ago, caste is thriving. Every 15 minutes, a crime is perpetrated against a Dalit person. The average age of death for Dalit women is just 39. And the wreckages of caste are replicated here in the U.S., too—erupting online with rape and death threats, showing up at work, and forcing countless Dalits to live in fear of being outed. Dalit American activist Thenmozhi Soundararajan puts forth a call to awaken and act, not just for listeners in South Asia, but all around the world.
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This book will liberate you
- By Jessica Zu on 10-16-24
By: Thenmozhi Soundararajan, and others
What listeners say about Caste
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- David A.
- 08-06-20
knowledge is an unknown of new Understanding.
A complete world wide Historical investigation of our dilemma. After learning from this EXCELLENT new book, the question will be...How, and
Who will you share it with?
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16 people found this helpful
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- Laura Mencl
- 08-10-22
Wonderful! Educational and engaging.
I was really torn about whether to get this book because I had originally been seeking out a purely “escapist”/“for pleasure” type of book. While this book is definitely not that, I was moved by the importance of this book, along with others’ reviews, which were probably the biggest reason I picked it, so thank you all. I feel like I learned so much from this book. I will also say that for anyone who thinks this might be boring, I get distracted/bored easily, but this book did not bore me in the slightest. On the contrary, I would find myself outside the grocery store in my car just listening—having lost track of time due to how interesting this book is. I will admit I am fascinated by history and by good story-telling and that is what this book has in spades. Also, her voice is extremely easy to listen to.
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9 people found this helpful
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- Morten
- 09-09-20
Stunning
Just finishing the book, I am not sure I have a clear mind to provide a coherent review. However, this is a stunning piece of work that everybody who are struggling to understand own thoughts on position in society and embedded racial programming should take time to absorb. I am truly grateful to Isabel Wilkerson for bringing this piece of work forth. Stunning, breathtaking, thought provoking, life altering.
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6 people found this helpful
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- kenny
- 08-14-22
Things I never considered
I’ve never considered America as being a cast system. I never considered that my circumstance was due to the American traditions and racial discrimination. I never thought about race being an American and not something world wide. This has opened my eyes to a lot of different things Good and bad. Once you know what’s good and bad you can govern yourself accordingly. It’s sad that just because my skin is chemically different from America’s majority I am considered less or should only aspire to be no higher than the box you put me in. I think this book should be mandatory reading for middle school up through high school. Those are the formative years and perhaps through our children we can change the world. This book was well written, easy to understand, easy to follow and it was worth every minute.
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6 people found this helpful
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- Carolyn Foster
- 08-25-20
Truly Amazing Book
This book was amazingly!
She hit the nail right on its head.
LET'S FIX THIS!
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3 people found this helpful
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- Joseph
- 08-28-20
Startling
You might think you understand why we are where we are in 2020 in the United States. but Ms. Wilkerson makes sure that you understand you know nothing at all. This book will resonate with me for the rest of my life, and it should be required reading for every single citizen in this country. Perhaps only then, can we move forward.
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3 people found this helpful
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- Amazon Customer
- 08-28-20
Important
Perhaps the most important book you’ll read this year or any year! Especially given our current political and cultural climate.
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2 people found this helpful
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- Francesca Jones
- 12-02-20
My life is changed
This is the most important book I’ve ever read. Profound and well told, I felt like this book took puzzle pieces I knew were there and arranged them in a way that brought them together for a level of clarity I didn’t realize I would have when they were all assembled in the right places. A deep look at history through today, providing the most understanding I’ve ever had about my life, our country, our world. Thank you for writing this. Thank you so much.
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1 person found this helpful
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- Eliza
- 01-24-21
Life changing
I took so long to finish this book because absorbing it’s content took time. It’s incredibly powerful and eye opening and should be required reading for every American. How can we know where we want to go if we don’t fully understand how we got here?
Thank you to Isabel Wilkerson for your brilliance and your heart breaking truths. I am different now and grateful to be.
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- Tigerron Wells
- 08-31-20
I Beautifully Written Revelation
I recall having the passing but recurring thought over the years that what we Americans refer to as “race” is actually a form of “caste.” A child instinctively knows that “black” and “white” are poor adjectives by which to distinguish the beautiful rainbow of human beings we encounter in our daily lives. But yet, we shrug our shoulders and eventually fall in line, many of us, with what society teaches us is the appropriate methodology, and the stereotypes that are true to “Black” and “White” culture.
Never have I stopped long enough to flesh out the thought of race as caste and racism as the remnants of a broken but still insidious and destructive caste system - but in Isabel Wilkerson’s latest tome, she reveals the work she has done over the years to put meat on those bones. It is a great read, and one I highly recommend.
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1 person found this helpful