The American social order is generally defined by three social classes: the poor, the middle, and the wealthy; however, in America there is a fourth, African-American. It is more akin to the Indian caste system, and African-Americans are at the floor of the caste system, the untouchables. The American social order, politics, education, and geography are played out through the lenses of race. The proposed examination holds that America¿s raced based social order began and is sustained by America¿s original social response to Africans. America established a slave system akin to the European feudal system in America¿s South. The system was delineated by land owners at the top, in the middle were poor whites, and at the bottom African-Americans. Like feudalism, the economic system was predicated on agriculture.

The American social order is generally defined by three social classes: the poor, the middle, and the wealthy; however, in America there is a fourth, African-American. It is more akin to the Indian caste system, and African-Americans are at the floor of the caste system, the untouchables. The American social order, politics, education, and geography are played out through the lenses of race. The proposed examination holds that America's raced based social order began and is sustained by America's original social response to Africans. America established a slave system akin to the European feudal system in America's South. The system was delineated by land owners at the top, in the middle were poor whites, and at the bottom African-Americans. Like feudalism, the economic system was predicated on agriculture.

The issue of race is often a scab Americans choose to ignore. However social science has a responsibility and an obligation to examine not simply the amenable subjects but also the controversial. This work, in a word, is controversial. Thomas Franks (2004) argued that cultural differences led white Kansans to abandon the Democratic Party for the Republican Party during the 1980s. He specifically argued that abortion was the unifying issue in this ideological migration. Simultaneously, future President Ronald Reagan opened his campaign for the presidency in Philadelphia, Mississippi, the sight of the massacre of four young civil rights activists over a decade earlier. Race has and is a factor in the American experience; Franks’ premise is simply that the absence of the concentration of African Americans in the Kansas area negated the influence of the “black threat hypothesis” on the observed ideological switch of white Kansans. This work argues that Franks’ premise fails to incorporate the over arching ideological switch of white voter migration to the Republican party that was occurring during the same period, and that Reagan’s speech in Philadelphia, Mississippi was an overt cue that he was rejecting the civil rights consensus for an historically established “race-based social contract” that positioned people of color outside the traditional bounds of the social contract. The study is a sociopolitical analysis of the African American experience utilizing the “racial contract” framework developed by Charles Mills. The “racial contract” holds that the social contract explicitly dictates interactions and transaction costs between citizens and government. Mills supposition is that historically non-Western Europeans were excluded from the penalties for violations of the social contract, and a tacit race based contract dictated transaction costs and interactions between Europeans and non-Europeans. The work utilizes the framework to trace the sociopolitical environment from the first appearance of Africans in America to the present. It has the supposition that the initial sociopolitical status of Africans in America was as a result of the reformation of the Western feudal agrarian culture, with African captives attached to the land as the neo-serfs; but that the reformation of feudalism was only possible within the context that Africans were implicitly viewed as outside the bounds of the codified social contract. It traces American sociopolitical conflict over the expansion of the “racial contract,” which was the basis of the American Civil War; and the establishment of an implicit sociopolitical order within the bounds of the racial contract at the end of the Civil War, with codified sanctions for violations of commensality and endogamy.

This book continues an exploration begun by Charles Mills and Carole Pateman with their examinations of the nuisances of the Western social contract. The work examines the social contract within the variable of space or proximity and incorporates concepts first proposed by Benedict Anderson, that of concepts of shared communal belonging or imagined. The social contract is explored as a dynamic sociopolitical instrument that is influenced by the context of human interactions, specifically, space. Space or proximity exists as a variable, either increasing interactions and challenging sociopolitical norms, or decreasing interactions and reinforcing sociopolitical norms. We can trace proximity within a sociopolitical model, with connections becoming more and more abstract as proximity increases and group membership becomes more abstract — global, global region, nation, religion, ethnicity, national region, city, town/village, and kin. We accept that kinship or hereditary connections are the most atomistic. And within this tree of proximity, as proximity increases the ties of group membership become more tenuous, and the incentive of collective action decreases production is the binding glue of the world economic system, and the framework of the study, but it is within the bounds of the productive system that the challenge of proximity and membership collide. The collision occurs as the proximity of production increases, and the reaction is a dynamic response within the social contract, witnessed as a retraction.

This book continues an exploration begun by Charles Mills and Carole Pateman with their examinations of the nuisances of the Western social contract. The work examines the social contract within the variable of space or proximity and incorporates concepts first proposed by Benedict Anderson, that of concepts of shared communal belonging or imagined. The social contract is explored as a dynamic sociopolitical instrument that is influenced by the context of human interactions, specifically, space. Space or proximity exists as a variable, either increasing interactions and challenging sociopolitical norms, or decreasing interactions and reinforcing sociopolitical norms. We can trace proximity within a sociopolitical model, with connections becoming more and more abstract as proximity increases and group membership becomes more abstract - global, global region, nation, religion, ethnicity, national region, city, town/village, and kin. We accept that kinship or hereditary connections are the most atomistic. And within this tree of proximity, as proximity increases the ties of group membership become more tenuous, and the incentive of collective action decreases production is the binding glue of the world economic system, and the framework of the study, but it is within the bounds of the productive system that the challenge of proximity and membership collide. The collision occurs as the proximity of production increases, and the reaction is a dynamic response within the social contract, witnessed as a retraction.

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • OPRAH’S BOOK CLUB PICK • “An instant American classic and almost certainly the keynote nonfiction book of the American century thus far.”—Dwight Garner, The New York Times The Pulitzer Prize–winning, bestselling author of The Warmth of Other Suns examines the unspoken caste system that has shaped America and shows how our lives today are still defined by a hierarchy of human divisions—now with a new Afterword by the author. #1 NONFICTION BOOK OF THE YEAR: Time ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: The Washington Post, The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, The Boston Globe, O: The Oprah Magazine, NPR, Bloomberg, The Christian Science Monitor, New York Post, The New York Public Library, Fortune, Smithsonian Magazine, Marie Claire, Slate, Library Journal, Kirkus Reviews Winner of the Carl Sandberg Literary Award • Winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize • National Book Award Longlist • National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist • Dayton Literary Peace Prize Finalist • PEN/John Kenneth Galbraith Award for Nonfiction Finalist • PEN/Jean Stein Book Award Longlist • Kirkus Prize Finalist “As we go about our daily lives, caste is the wordless usher in a darkened theater, flashlight cast down in the aisles, guiding us to our assigned seats for a performance. The hierarchy of caste is not about feelings or morality. It is about power—which groups have it and which do not.” In this brilliant book, Isabel Wilkerson gives us a masterful portrait of an unseen phenomenon in America as she explores, through an immersive, deeply researched, and beautifully written narrative and stories about real people, how America today and throughout its history has been shaped by a hidden caste system, a rigid hierarchy of human rankings. Beyond race, class, or other factors, there is a powerful caste system that influences people’s lives and behavior and the nation’s fate. Linking the caste systems of America, India, and Nazi Germany, Wilkerson explores eight pillars that underlie caste systems across civilizations, including divine will, bloodlines, stigma, and more. Using riveting stories about people—including Martin Luther King, Jr., baseball’s Satchel Paige, a single father and his toddler son, Wilkerson herself, and many others—she shows the ways that the insidious undertow of caste is experienced every day. She documents how the Nazis studied the racial systems in America to plan their outcasting 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. Original and revealing, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents is an eye-opening story of people and history, and a reexamination of what lies under the surface of ordinary lives and of American life today.

The essays in “The Crisis of American Democracy: Essays on a Failing Institution” seek to answer central questions about American democracy, such as: if American democracy is failing, what are the causes of this failure? What are the consequences? And what can be done to fix it? These standalone essays present diverse perspectives on some of the impediments to achieving a true democracy in the present-day United States of America, as well as prescriptions for overcoming these obstacles. Leading academics from across North America, contribute their perspectives on this timely debate.