By Pam Hinrichs

Isabel Wilkerson gives us a masterful portrait of an unseen phenomenon in America as she explores, how America today and throughout its history has been shaped by a hidden caste system, a rigid hierarchy of human rankings.

Beyond race, class, or other factors, a powerful caste system influences people's lives and behavior and the nation's fate. Linking the caste systems of America, India, and Nazi Germany, Wilkerson explores eight pillars that underlie caste systems across civilizations, including divine will, bloodlines, and stigma. Using stories about real people, she shows the way the insidious undertow of caste is experienced every day. She documents how the Nazis studied the racial systems in America to plan their outcasting of the Jews; she discusses why the cruel logic of caste requires a bottom rung for those in the middle to measure themselves against.

Ms. Wilkerson writes about the surprising health costs of caste, in depression and life expectancy, and the effects of this hierarchy on our culture and politics. Finally, she points forward to ways America can move beyond the artificial and destructive separations of human divisions, toward hope in our common humanity.

One paragraph from early in the book that especially resonated with me is Wilkerson's explanation as to why we need to study and talk about slavery and race in America. "But in the same way that individuals cannot move forward, become whole and healthy, unless they examine the domestic violence they witnessed as children or the alcoholism that runs in their family, the country cannot become whole until it confronts what was not a chapter in its history, but the basis of its economic and social order. For a quarter millennium, slavery was the country."

There is so much rich material in this amazing book. For our discussion, I would like to suggest that people, if possible, select one or two chapters they found particularly interesting or challenging and bring their thoughts pertaining to those chapters to share with the group.