Caste: The Origins of our Discontents, by Isabel Wilkerson

This is mandatory reading for every single person in the United States. Wilkerson put an inordinate amount of research into this book to shine a spotlight on the caste system in the United States and its parallels to the caste system of Nazi Germany and India. Nazi Germany, in creating its eugenic laws determining how much Jewish blood made a person Jewish, thought that the United States' policy of "one drop of blood" determined that someone was black, was too over the top. That bears repeating:

Nazi Germany thought that the United States of America was too harsh in its eugenic laws.

Wilkerson covers caste history as far back as the slave trade and up to the present day, where just one year ago a white woman on an airplane slapped a black, crying, infant across the face, and faced zero punishment. She writes, as a black woman, about the injustices the American caste system fueled back in the Jim Crow south, and how it is still perpetuating hatred, racism, and "otherness" in our present day society. She shares personal stories of solicitors knocking on the door of her own home and asking for"the lady of the house", infuriating micro-aggressions everywhere from airplanes to restaurants, to being asked to prove her identity to complete strangers who have no right to ask. This book is raw and painful, but very real and necessary for all rungs of the caste ladder to hear.

Wilkerson compares this country to an old house. If you buy an old house, one with cracks in the walls, black mold on the ceiling, a dangerous splintering porch, you don't hang a curtain over the mold and prop up the porch. You fix it. You take down parts of the wall and ceiling, and replace them with new ones. This country is an old house. It is broken, it is toxic, it is from another time. Instead of monuments to the suffering that went on in the hands of the confederate south, reminders of pain and suffering America inflicted on human beings, we have monuments idolizing them. As the owners of this old house, this broken country, it is our job, all of our jobs, to acknowledge that we live in a very real caste system and that in order to break it and take steps to having a country that is ACTUALLY free, free for everyone, not just the dominant caste, we must talk about it. This calls for radical empathy, not just sympathizing from a distance, but really imagining ourselves in a caste lower than what we were born into, and all the injustice, hatred, and savagery that you, yourself don't deal with on a daily basis, but that so many, many others do. Only after we do this can we come together to break the caste system.

"You cannot solve anything you do not admit exists" (Wilkerson).