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In 2020, former New York Times journalist Isabel Wokerson published Cast The Origins of

Our Discontents. The book tells a compelling story, but the root of our

social divisions is the invented hierarchy of casts, not as we often assume in America race.

Race, she writes, is only another manifestation of Caste.

And while it's certainly an important topic here in America,

Wokerson shows, through the investigation of the long-standing

caste system in India, the social divisions in Nazi Germany,

and America's founding and expansion through chattel slavery,

that cast is a universal phenomenon.

Wokerson has had quite a career.

She was the first African-American women to win a Pulitzer

Prize in journalism for her reporting on Midwestern floods in 1993. Then she spent 15 years researching and writing her first book, The Warmth of Other Sons,

which was published in 2010 and won the National Book Critics Circle Award among many others. A decade later cast was published to similar acclaim and in

2023 Ava Duverne made a film adaptation called Origin, which I highly recommend as I do the book.

In fact, I'd picked up the book cast a few times, but never purchased it,

and it was only after seeing that amazing film that I finally bought it.

...