Joint Multicultural Book Club | Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents

Caste “is an instant American Classic about Our Abiding Sin.”

—NY Times

“Isabel Wilkerson’s second book is a masterwork of writing—a profound achievement of scholarship.”

—NPR

Please join us via Zoom for a joint book club with the Red Bank Public Library and the T. Thomas Fortune Cultural Center. For this book club we will be reading Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents by the Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Isabel Wilkerson. In her first book, The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration, argues that the Great Migration in of Black people from the south to the north in the 19th and 20th centuries can be better understood as a form of “domestic immigration.” In Caste, Wilkerson argues that beyond race, class, or other factors, there is a powerful caste system in place in the United States that influences people’s lives and behavior and the nation’s fate. Wilkerson examines this “unspoken caste system” through individual stories from people such as Martin Luther King Jr., Satchel Paige, herself, and others combined with thorough research. Oprah Winfrey calls the book “beautifully written, original, and revealing.”

You can purchase the book by calling The Red Bank Library at 732.842.0690.