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
killing 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 of 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 died, such as
Al Bright, a black boy who was on a winning Little League team, but when the team was invited to a public swimming pool after their win, he was not allowed to enter the water. Wilkerson looks in German archives and discovers that the Nazis used some of America's racist
Jim Crow laws to develop some of their own racist laws; Hitler said he used the
Americans' genocide of Native Americans as a guide for his own
"Final Solution" extermination of Jewish people. The history of a couple in Nazi Germany is related, a male Gentile Nazi-party member who falls in love 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 Davis and Elizabeth Stubbs Davis, who work with a white couple,
Burleigh and Mary R. Gardner, in an undercover project to better understand segregation in America, resulting in the 1941 book
Deep South: A Social Anthropological Study of Caste and Class in a Southern City. The 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 the rights of the
Dalit ("untouchable") peoples, who are at the bottom of the
caste system in India. 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. ==Cast==