Caste cover art

Caste

The Origins of Our Discontents

Preview
Get this deal Try Premium Plus free
Offer ends 29 January 2026 at 11:59PM GMT.
Prime members: New to Audible? Get 2 free audiobooks during trial.
Just £0.99/mo for your first 3 months of Audible.
1 bestseller or new release per month—yours to keep.
Listen all you want to thousands of included audiobooks, podcasts, and Originals.
Auto-renews at £8.99/mo after 3 months. Cancel monthly.
Pick 1 audiobook a month from our unmatched collection - including bestsellers and new releases.
Listen all you want to thousands of included audiobooks, Originals, celeb exclusives, and podcasts.
Access exclusive sales and deals.
£8.99/month after 30 days. Renews automatically.

Caste

By: Isabel Wilkerson
Narrated by: Robin Miles
Get this deal Try Premium Plus free

£8.99/mo after 3 months. Cancel monthly. Offer ends 29 January 2026 at 11:59PM GMT.

£8.99/month after 30 days. Renews automatically. See here for eligibility.

Buy Now for £12.99

Buy Now for £12.99

LIMITED TIME OFFER | £0.99/mo for the first 3 months

Premium Plus auto-renews at £8.99/mo after 3 months. Terms apply.

About this listen

Brought to you by Penguin.

'The hierarchy of caste is not about feelings or morality. It is about power - which groups have it and which do not'


Beyond race or class, our lives are defined by a powerful, unspoken system of divisions. In Caste, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Isabel Wilkerson gives an astounding portrait of this hidden phenomenon. Linking America, India and Nazi Germany, Wilkerson reveals how our world has been shaped by caste - and how its rigid, arbitrary hierarchies still divide us today.

With clear-sighted rigour, Wilkerson unearths the eight pillars that connect caste systems across civilizations, and demonstrates how our own era of intensifying conflict and upheaval has arisen as a consequence of caste. Weaving in stories of real people, she shows how its insidious undertow emerges every day; she documents its surprising health costs; and she explores its effects on culture and politics. Finally, Wilkerson points forward to the ways we can - and must - move beyond its artificial divisions, towards our common humanity.

Beautifully written and deeply original, Caste is an eye-opening examination of what lies beneath the surface of ordinary lives. No one can afford to ignore the moral clarity of its insights, or its urgent call for a freer, fairer world.

© Isabel Wilkerson 2020 (P) Penguin Audio 2020

Americas Asia India Racism & Discrimination Social Classes & Economic Disparity Social Sciences Sociology South Asia United States Discrimination Thought-Provoking Social justice

Listeners also enjoyed...

The Humanity Archive cover art
Dirty Linen cover art
Think Like a White Man cover art
Afropean cover art
Assata cover art
The Autobiography of Malcolm X cover art
The Fate of Abraham cover art
Malcolm X cover art
Rise Up cover art
Seen and Unseen cover art
Why I'm No Longer Talking to White People About Race cover art
The American Civil War cover art
This Is the Fire cover art
Blackout cover art
White Like Me cover art
Learning from the Germans cover art

Critic reviews

If you haven't read Caste yet, you absolutely must (Edward Enninful)
Powerful and timely... I cannot recommend it strongly enough (Barack Obama)
Such is Wilkerson's gift as a writer that she leaves you looking at the world differently (Afua Hirsch)
Elegant and persuasive... Caste will spur readers to think and to feel in equal measure (Kwame Anthony Appiah)
Probably the most important piece of non-fiction published this year (Sarah Hughes)
A surprising and arresting wide-angle reframing... Her epilogue feels like a prayer for a country in pain, offering new directions through prophetic new language (Bilal Qureshi)
An expansive interrogation of racism, institutionalised inequality and injustice... This is an American reckoning and so it should be... It is a painfully resonant book and could not have come at a more urgent time (Fatima Bhutto)
Persuasive and unsettling... The case Wilkerson puts forward is inspiring and hopeful... caste can be dismantled, setting everyone free (Ashish Ghadiali)
Important and timely... If repudiation of past assumptions is the first step towards healing, Wilkerson's book offers a powerful frame for this. It is essential reading for anybody who feels angry, guilty or threatened by the tangled issue of "race" in America today (Gillian Tett)
Magisterial... [Wilkerson's] reporting is nimble and her sentences exquisite. But the real power of Caste lies tucked within the stories she strings together like pearls... Caste is a luminous read, bearing its own torch of righteous wrath in a diamond-hard prose that will be admired and studied by future generations of journalists (Hamilton Cain)
All stars
Most relevant
Being of Indian origin I am only too aware of Caste and the pernicious nature thereof. It was revelatory to have caste applied to the American condition. I was engrossed from beginning to end. Be prepared to be put through a gamut of emotions, ranging from aching sadness to visceral rage at the treatment of our African American brothers and sisters at the hands of the dominant caste (white people). Such treatment spans slavery, Jim Crow through to the present day. I sincerely hope that this book is made required reading in schools, colleges and Universities in the US. I cannot recommend this book highly enough. A masterpiece. Thank you Isabel Wilkerson for your tour de force. In Solidarity.

Brilliant book that should be required reading

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.

The grim skeleton of the structural racism that haunts and frames modern American life is laid bare here. This book presents clearly the effect of the human impulse to create hierarchy and then to raise up that creation to quasi-religious status so that it may not be questioned or properly seen, understood and demolished. That American society should be held in a self-reinforcing vicious cycle that blinkers 'good people' to the cause of the malaise in their country, and simultaneously allows a moneyed elite to profiteer from the discord sown and cultivated between groups even as ALL are being sold an unattainable, unsustainable 'American Dream' is saddening beyond words. Wanting to persist with a child's faith in the fairytale of one's nation's history is a sign of immaturity: it's time to stop patronising so many people by not challenging this fantasy. It is my sincere hope that my fellow human beings on the far side of the Atlantic can rise to the hyperbole of the marketing of the USA as the 'land of the free'. Reading this book may just help some citizens to discover the 'matrix' and begin to find a way out of it.

Essential to one's education

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.

The time flies by with such an insightful and powerful book. Wilkerson’s word are both personal and widely relevant. This book is a fascinating introduction to caste as a complex and structural concept. I will come back to this again and again.

Brilliantly written, brilliantly read

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.

Phenomenal, learned so much about African American history and the basis for race relations in the US

A truly enlightening piece

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.

I learned so much from this book despite many decades studying political and social sciences and around 30 visits to India since the mid 1990s.
The beginning felt a bit clunky, with a heavy and somewhat tedious emphasis on US politics, and oft-repeated assertions that the USA is the world’s oldest democracy (which will come as a surprise to the Greeks). But beyond that it becomes less trite and more profound by the chapter, exposing the underlying problems of all societies through the more obvious examples of American, Indian and Nazi German caste systems. A must-read for any informed discussion of social issues today.

Required reading regardless of ethnicity or nationality

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.

See more reviews