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I found this book unimpressive and mildly offensive. The central thesis, that race in America is a caste system, seems obvious to me, mostly because people have been arguing that thesis for almost a century, if not longer. In fact, those works are cited in Caste.

What is also obvious to me is that Nazi Germany was not a caste system � it was a political ideology and genocidal program. It was based on a millennia-old caste system which, I guess, ended when they murdered or expelled those who had been in the bottom caste. The reason to include Nazis seemed purely rhetorical, so the author could claim that not even the Nazis were as bad as America in terms of race. It’s rather lazy and offensive to use the immense suffering of one people as a rhetorical device for highlighting the very different suffering of another people. Nazism still exists. It is serious. And there are so many better examples of caste! (E.g. feudal Europe or Moorish Spain).

Further, though I know this may seem like nitpicking, I found that very often the stories of American race centered non-white people and the stories of India centered Dalits, but that the stories of Germany centered Aryans. There were few, if any, Jewish perspectives alongside the Dalit and Black narratives. Why, when we discuss Nazis, are the German perspectives the most important?

Most frustratingly, the claims were not well-argued, or really argued at all. The plural of anecdote is not data. The stories supported the thesis, but they could have supported lots of theses. The whole book is about how race and caste are systemic, but the ending proposes individual-level means for addressing these issues. That contradicts one of the main points, that individual actions are determined by systems.

Generally, I think authors should stick to what they know. This could have been a decent book about race in America. It was not a good book about caste generally, and does not add to the conversation about addressing caste or race issues. Again, I agree with the central thesis (America as a caste system), which I think is why this book is so very disappointing. It could have been so much better if it were more focused.