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Martin Luther King

In Wilkerson’s view, racism is only the visible manifestation of something deeper, a hidden system of social domination.

Isabel Wilkerson’s World-Historical Theory of Race and Caste

By Editors' Choice

By comparing white supremacy in the U.S. to the caste system in India, her new book at once illuminates and collapses a complex history. By Sunil Khilnani, The New Yorker — As the summer of 1958 was coming to an end, Martin Luther King, Jr., was newly famous and exhausted. All of twenty-nine years old, he had been travelling across the country for weeks promoting his first book, “Stride Toward…

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A demonstrator next to a fence bearing names of black people killed by police, Washington DC, June 2020.

America’s ‘Untouchables’: the Silent Power of the Caste System

By Editors' Choice

More than a century and a half before the American Revolution, a human hierarchy had evolved on the soil of the future United States. To comprehend the current upheavals one must understand the human pyramid encrypted into us all: the caste system. By Isabel Wilkerson, The Guardian — In the winter of 1959, after leading the Montgomery bus boycott that arose from the arrest of Rosa Parks and before the trials and…

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