Caste by Isabel Wilkerson

This book has so much interesting premise which is that the most effective way to look at, think about, and talk about racism in America is to view it through the lens of a caste system.  Interestingly, even a book about caste has two different lenses, one for an American audience and one for a British one.  The American subtitle of the book is "The Origins of Our Discontent" whereas the UK version, pictured here, is "The Lies That Divide Us".
The book makes a strong case for adopting a term associated with traditional society and heritable hierarchy to describe American racism. Caste is typically viewed as both intensely local, and essentially Indian. Wilkerson suggests the opposite and she makes a very strong case. She boldly argues that what we call race in the United States is actually a caste system. “Caste is the infrastructure of our divisions,” Wilkerson writes, “the architecture of human hierarchy” that “embeds into our bones an unconscious ranking of human characteristics and sets forth the rules, expectations and stereotypes that have been used to justify brutalities against entire groups within our species.”  It has the added advantage of not using the trigger word racist, but rather a person who supports a separation of people based on race, that race is something rather than nothing.  This is a must read, a book so well written and thought out that it is sure to become a classic on the topic.