Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents is a nonfiction book by the American journalist Isabel Wilkerson that was initially published in August 2020 by Random House. The book follows Wilkerson's 2010 book The Warmth of Other Suns and describes racism in the United States as an aspect of a caste system ? a society-wide system of social stratification characterized by notions such as hierarchy, inclusion and exclusion, and purity. Wilkerson does so by comparing aspects of the experience of American people of color to the caste systems of India and Nazi Germany, and she explores the impact of castes on societies shaped by them, and their people