Books like Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents

01

The Warmth of Other Suns

Isabel Wilkerson · Memoir

Isabel Wilkerson's account of the Great Migration — the movement of six million Black Americans from the South to the North and West between 1915 and 1970 — is one of the most important works of narrative nonfiction published in the twenty-first century.

Shares race and identity with Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents.

02

Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption

Bryan Stevenson · Memoir

Bryan Stevenson's memoir of his career as a capital defense attorney in Alabama, and specifically of his years working on the case of Walter McMillian — a Black man wrongly convicted of murder and sentenced to death in Monroe County, Alabama — is simultaneously a riveting legal narrative and a sustained moral argument about the American criminal justice system's treatment of the poor and of Black defendants.

Both dig into race.

03

The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness

Michelle Alexander · Politics

Michelle Alexander's central argument is stark: the United States has not ended racial caste, it has merely redesigned it.

A kindred memoir read.

04

Between the World and Me

Ta-Nehisi Coates · Memoir

Between the World and Me is a letter from Ta-Nehisi Coates to his teenage son, Samori, about what it means to live in a Black body in the United States.

Shares race and history with Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents.

05

Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance

Barack Obama · Memoir

Barack Obama wrote Dreams from My Father in 1995, before entering politics, after being elected the first Black president of the Harvard Law Review.

Shares race and identity with Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents.

06

Finding Me: A Memoir

Viola Davis · Memoir

Finding Me is Viola Davis's account of her childhood in extreme poverty in Central Falls, Rhode Island, and her path from that starting point to becoming one of the most decorated actors in the history of American theater and film.

Shares race and identity with Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents.

07

The Color of Water: A Black Man's Tribute to His White Mother

James McBride · Memoir

James McBride grew up in Brooklyn and Queens as one of twelve children raised by a white Jewish woman who had converted to Christianity and married a Black minister.

Shares race and identity with Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents.

08

The Sixth Man

Andre Iguodala · Memoir

Andre Iguodala won four NBA championships and a Finals MVP award, but The Sixth Man is less interested in the games than in the social and psychological landscape those games happened inside.

Shares race and identity with Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents.

09

On the Genealogy of Morality

Friedrich Nietzsche · Philosophy

On the Genealogy of Morality is Nietzsche's most rigorously argued work — three sustained essays that trace the historical origins of moral concepts he believes we have inherited without examining.

Shares power and history with Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents.

10

Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

Yuval Noah Harari · History

Sapiens traces the full arc of human history from the emergence of Homo sapiens in Africa roughly 70,000 years ago to the present.

Shares power and history with Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents.

11

The Fire Next Time

James Baldwin · History

The Fire Next Time, published in 1963 at the height of the civil rights movement, contains two long essays by James Baldwin.

Shares power and identity with Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents.

12

A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius

Dave Eggers · Memoir

Dave Eggers's debut memoir about losing both parents to cancer within five weeks and raising his younger brother Toph while trying to start a literary magazine in San Francisco in the mid-1990s arrived in 2000 with unusual self-consciousness about its own nature.

Both dig into identity.