Oprah Winfrey names “Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents” her most important Book Club selection ever

In partnership with Apple, Oprah Winfrey is unveiling the newest selection for Oprah’s Book Club, “Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents,” by Isabel Wilkerson. The book is available now on Apple Books in both ebook and audiobook formats at apple.co/OBCCaste, and customers can enjoy it across iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple Watch, and CarPlay.

Publisher Penguin Random House calls “Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents” a masterful portrait of the unspoken caste system that has shaped America. Through an immersive, deeply researched narrative and stories about real people, Wilkerson explores how America has been defined by a rigid hierarchy of human rankings throughout its history and even today.

“This might be the most important book I’ve ever chosen for my book club,” said Oprah Winfrey. “‘Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents’ provides a new way of seeing racial inequality, giving rise to countless aha moments and helping us truly understand America as it is now and how we hope it will be.”

“I am honored and thrilled that ‘Caste’ has been chosen for Oprah’s Book Club and that its humanitarian insights will now reach a wider audience,” said Isabel Wilkerson. “This work shows that the term racism may be insufficient in our current era. We need new language, a new framework for understanding our divisions and how we got to where we are. ‘Caste’ gives us this language. ‘Caste’ allows us to see ourselves through a different lens and the chance to work toward healing from the wounds of artificial hierarchy. We must first see it to begin to resolve it.”

Customers can read and listen to an exclusive excerpt of “Caste” on Apple News and further explore the themes highlighted in “Caste” in curated collections on Apple Books and Apple Podcasts. Next week, customers can listen to Apple Music’s Beats 1 host Ebro Darden interview Wilkerson about how her book is reflective of the times. Later this month, customers can also read a collection of related articles on Apple News, curated by Winfrey as the app’s first-ever guest editor, and next month, they can enjoy a “Caste” discussion guide on Apple Books to help host their own conversations around the book and the important issues it explores.

Oprah’s Book Club connects a worldwide community of readers to stories that truly matter by today’s most thought-provoking authors. Readers around the world can easily discover Oprah’s Book Club through the Apple Books app on iPhone and iPad (apple.co/OprahsBookClub), learn more about the latest selection, and browse previous selections. Customers can also follow Oprah’s Book Club on Apple Books for updates.

Apple Books makes discovering and enjoying ebooks and audiobooks effortless on iPhone and iPad. Customers can tap on the Book Store tab to browse all available titles, top charts, editorially curated collections, and books by genre, as well as the dedicated Audiobooks tab to find great new stories to listen to, including ones narrated by celebrities and popular narrators. The Reading Now tab makes it easy for customers to get right to their latest book or audiobook, or uncover a new favorite with personalized recommendations, and they can track their progress by using the Reading Goals feature and make reading a daily habit. Customers can also enjoy Apple Books on Mac, or listen to their audiobook library on Apple Watch and CarPlay. 

Customers can also enjoy Oprah’s Book Club through the “Oprah’s Book Club” series available for free exclusively on Apple TV+, where they can watch all of Winfrey’s discussions with Book Club authors. In the “Caste” episode, which will premiere this fall, Winfrey will speak with Wilkerson for an important and insightful discussion about the book and the history it explores. Apple TV+ is available on the Apple TV app on iPhone, iPad, Apple TV, iPod touch, Mac, select Samsung and LG smart TVs, Amazon Fire TV and Roku devices, as well as at tv.apple.com.

Drawing parallels between the caste systems of America, India, and Nazi Germany, Wilkerson outlines a revolutionary framework for understanding how caste plays out across civilizations, both historically and today. Backed by years of research, she identifies eight ideological pillars that underlie all caste systems. Using riveting stories from the lives of Martin Luther King Jr., baseball's Satchel Paige, an ordinary single father and his toddler son, and many others, Wilkerson shows how the insidious undertow of caste is experienced by each of us every day. She documents how the Nazis studied the racial systems in America to plan their debasement of the Jews; she discusses why the cruel logic of caste requires that there be a bottom rung for those in the middle to measure themselves against; she writes about the surprising health costs of caste, in depression and life expectancy, and the effects of this hierarchy on our culture and politics. Finally, she points forward to ways America can move beyond the artificial and destructive separations of human divisions, toward hope in our common humanity.