Caste

Wilkerson draws an explicit structural comparison between the caste systems of India, the racial hierarchy of the United States, and Nazi Germany's racial laws — arguing that all three are variations of the same fundamental human impulse to create hierarchies and enforce them through law and violence. She is an African American journalist writing about India as a visitor, but her argument is that America's racial system is a caste system and that understanding India's helps Americans see their own more clearly. The most important comparative dispatch on this shelf — the book that makes the connection visible.