Grappling with tremendous personal tragedy, writer Isabel Wilkerson sets herself on a path of global investigation and discovery as she writes Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents.
Wilkerson is consulted for her opinion after the shooting of Trayvon Martin. She explores the idea of how race may not be the only determining factor in bigotry, since, e.g., in India, everyone may be of the same “race”, but bigotry still occurs by caste. Similarly, although Jews of European descent may have been considered “White” in some parts of the world, in Nazi Germany they were defined as an inferior race to be exterminated. Wilkerson visits Germany and debates friends about how slavery compared with the Holocaust, “subjugation” versus “extermination”.
Wilkerson chats at a cocktail party with two White women who are friendly, but do not fully understand her ideas and how different types of bigotry interrelate. Later, she works with one of the women on her book.
Intertwined with her ideas and discoveries, Wilkerson suffers the loss of her husband Brett, a White man; her elderly mother Ruby; and her cousin Marion. She often imagines herself speaking to those who have passed away, such as Al Bright, a Black boy who was on a winning Little League team, but when the team was invited to a swimming-pool party, he was not allowed to enter the water.
Wilkerson looks in German archives and discovers that the Nazis used some of America’s racist laws to develop some of their own racist laws.(Hitler said he used the Americans’ extermination of Native Americans as a guide for his own extermination of undesirables.) The history of a couple in Nazi Germany is related, a male Gentile Nazi-party member who has a romance with a Jewish woman. They try to escape Germany, but she is caught and sent to a camp.
Also told is the story of married Black researchers Allison and Elizabeth Davis, who work with a White couple, Burleigh and Mary Gardner, in an undercover project to find out about segregation in America, resulting in the 1941 book Deep South. A lynching of a Black man is shown, with a White audience watching, some of them treating it as a show.
Wilkerson eventually decides to write a book about caste, a concept which solves some of the intellectual problems which mere consideration of race does not. She visits India and the home, now a historical site, of Dr. Ambedkar, who championed Dalit (“untouchable”) rights. Eventually she speaks about her new book Caste on stage, and how it makes it easier to understand and fight bigotry.
Finally, an onscreen monologue details that Caste became a number one New York Times nonfiction best-seller around the time of the November 2020 U.S. presidential election, and spent ample time on the best-sellers list.