Book of the day Caste by Isabel Wilkerson review – a dark study of violence and power A renowned writer considers the social divisions in American society, many of them unacknowledged, using comparisons with India and Nazi Germany Fatima Bhutto [@fbhutto](/user/profile/fbhutto) Published on Thu 30 Jul 2020 07.30 BST 14 As US president in the 1830s, Andrew Jackson was a feverish advocate of “Indian removal”, the banishing of Native Americans from their ancestral homelands and relocation on desolate reservations. It was Jackson who oversaw the infamous “Trail of Tears”, the forced migration on which more than 20% of the Cherokee people perished. History has been kind to Jackson; it remembers him as Old Hickory, a nation-builder who drove America’s westward expansion and honours him by placing his image on the $20 bill. It doesn’t remember him as the enslaver of 161 people or as a man who went horseback riding with reins carved from the flesh of indigenous Americans. And this is precisely how caste works, according to Isabel Wilkerson: it elevates and empowers members of a “dominant caste” at the perpetual expense of a “subordinate caste”. The full pageantry of American cruelty is on display in Caste, an expansive interrogation of racism, institutionalised inequality and injustice. It was while working on her sweeping, Pulitzer prize-winning first book, The Warmth of Other Suns, a history of African Americans’ great migration out of the South, that Wilkerson realised she was studying a deeply ingrained caste system that had been in place longer than the nation itself had existed, dating back to colonial Virginia. In Caste, Wilkerson sets out to understand American hierarchy, which she compares with two of the best known caste systems in the world: that of India, the very birthplace of caste, and of Nazi Germany, where caste as a modern experiment in barbarism was ultimately vanquished.