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Nearly every time I rate a work of nonfiction I just go with 3 stars because I am not the content expert to verify the facts. Isabel Wilkerson is my exception. This book is nearly perfect. My only criticism is that she used too many competing metaphors to frame the same concept (ie medical H&P and building structure). Her research is thorough and she leaves nothing out to make her case. Yet as academic as this work is, it reads like a story as though I don’t know the events she presents. It is riveting and fast paced, deceptive of its packaging. She could have included additional examples of caste systems (South African apartheid foremost) but to have done so might bog down the themes. Instead she chose what might be the original system, based on religion, from Hinduism and the Nazi German system that was created and dismantled to describe the insane racial discrimination in the USA that is clearly beyond racism.

Her description is a perfect mini summary: �...three caste systems have stood out. The tragically accelerated, chilling, and officially vanquished caste system of Nazi Germany. The lingering, millennia-long caste system of India. And the shape-shifting, unspoken, race-based caste pyramid in the United States. Each version relied on stigmatizing those deemed inferior to justify the dehumanization necessary to keep the lowest-ranked people at the bottom and to rationalize the protocols of enforcement. A caste system endures because it is often justified as divine will, originating from sacred text or the presumed laws of nature, reinforced throughout the culture and passed down through the generations.� (p. 17)