Some books change how you think. The change is often a minute but permanent adjustment to how you see, experience, and explain the world, a deep, transformational shift that’s not necessarily visible to anyone else but you. Caste is such a book. It’s one of the two truly remarkable books I read in 2020, the other being Robert Macfarlane’s Underland.

America’s shameful history of racism is an ugly tapestry made up of millions of individual acts of discrimination, hatred, violence, and murder. Every generation, for more than three hundred years, has added to that tapestry and intensified its ugliness. Its persistence is due not just to those who actively wove it but to those who stood back and did nothing as it took shape. Isabel Wilkerson looks at American racism through the lens of caste, identifying and exploring parallels in two other notorious caste systems, the antisemitism of the Third Reich and the rigid, religiously defended divisions of India.

Although it has all the usual trimmings of an academic work (pages of notes, bibliography, and so on), Caste is written with the kind of affecting directness and warmth that is rarely displayed in a work of scholarship. It’s that combination that gives the book its remarkable power and authority. Wilkerson isn’t striving for lofty detachment. She wants to change her readers, their perceptions and attitudes. Whether or not you accept her central premise about caste (I did, but not entirely) doesn’t much matter ultimately. What matters is that her utterly compelling and brilliantly written account of racism in America should shake our understanding and that the jolt should reverberate insistently until far-reaching and permanent change is achieved.