This was a well researched and presented compendium of the underlying systemic issues that we face in the United States. By comparing the US to the caste system in India and the brief but terrible discrimination and massacre of Jews, Roma, etc. in Nazi Germany, Wilkerson asserts that the root issue of these disparate systems lies in the dangerous hierarchies forged to separate the powerful from the powerless. These hierarchies are soft but extremely flexible powers, able to withstand surface level changes to systems by sanitizing calls for change and reappropriating them into established frameworks.

Wilkerson does a great job of both providing individual anecdotes and wider systemic proofs of her thesis, and also keenly relates the semi-permeable “middle castes”, where the intersections of race and wealth cause people to often turn against their fellow subjugated people and try to ingratiate themselves to the most powerful (see: colorism in the black community, anti-black or anti-immigrant sentiments in PoC groups, etc). After just finishing Richard Wright’s memoir Black Boy, I couldn’t help but connece this to the anti-Semitism that Wright admitted to perpetuating as a youngster, along the racism he experienced at the hand of Jews as they tried to “prove” their whiteness and get on the good side of White America. Caste imbalances work to divide and conquer the subjugated by having them claw at one another for scraps of power and security instead of uniting and rising against their oppressors.

This book was well-written and accessible, but I feel that at this stage I have gotten a firm foundation in this type of material and am aching for deeper specificity and theory. 4 stars for what I feel is a fantastic introductory text, but I feel its time for me to move into denser works.