'Caste'

The award-winning 2020 book by author Isabel Wilkerson, titled ‘Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents’, argues that Black Americans who are descendants of slaves in the United States occupy the lowest position in a racial caste system, which Wilkerson compares to the caste system in India. She draws a comparison between the descendants of American slaves and Dalits, historically referred to as “Untouchables,” and argues that the continued socioeconomic disadvantages experienced by Black Americans are the lasting effects of a system whose roots trace back to Jim Crow. However, since the end of Jim Crow and the Civil Rights reforms of the 1960s, some measures of social and economic well-being in Black communities have improved, while other problems—including family instability and crime—have gotten worse. Can these contemporary disparities be solely attributed to the residual effects of slavery and Jim Crow, or were there other developments over the past 60 years that contributed to these outcomes? Join the conversation and get answers to this question and more on According2Sam episode #441.