“Caste” an essential read

I applaud you for publishing Jerry Willins’ review of “Caste,” by Isabel Wilkerson, in your Dec. 23 edition. This book is riveting and a literary pleasure, both for the ease of its narrative and for its elegant thought and language.

It is also hard to read because of what it reveals, page after page. From slavery to Jim Crow to Obama to Trump, Wilkerson illuminates how we have sustained an artificial construction of society that deems some of us to be favored and some of us to be stigmatized as less worthy based on the shade of our skin, white or black or brown. The consequences are dehumanizi...