"Oprah's book club, 2020"--Book jacket.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

The man in the crowd -- Part one: Toxins in the permafrost and heat rising all around. Chapter one: The afterlife of pathogens -- The Vitals of History -- Chapter two: An old house and an infrared light -- Chapter three: An American untouchable -- An Invisible Program -- Part two: The arbitrary construction of human divisions. Chapter four: A long-running play and emergence of caste in America -- Chapter five: "The Container We Have Built for You" -- Chapter six: The measure of humanity -- Chapter seven: Through the fog of Delhi to the parallels in India and America -- Chapter eight: The Nazis and the acceleration of caste -- Chapter nine: The Evil of Silence -- Part three: The eight pillars of caste. The foundations of caste: The Origins of Our Discontents -- Pillar number one: Divine will and the laws of nature -- Pillar number two: Heritability -- Pillar number three: Endogamy and the control of marriage and mating -- Pillar number four: Purity versus pollution -- Pillar number five: Occupational hierarchy: The Jatis and the Mudsill -- Pillar number six: Dehumanization and stigma -- Pillar number seven: Terror as enforcement, cruelty as a means of control -- Pillar number eight: Inherent superiority versus inherent inferiority -- Part four: The tentacles of caste. Brown eyes versus blue eyes -- Chapter ten: Central miscasting -- Chapter eleven: Dominant group status threat and the precarity of the highest rung -- Chapter twelve: A scapegoat to beat the sins of the world -- Chapter thirteen: The insecure Alpha and the purpose of an underdog -- Chapter fourteen: The intrusion of caste in everyday life -- Chapter fifteen: The urgent necessity of a bottom rung -- Chapter sixteen: Last place anxiety: Packed in a flooding basement -- Chapter seventeen: On the early front lines of caste -- Chapter eighteen: Satchel Paige and the illogic of caste -- Part five: The consequences of caste. Chapter nineteen: The Euphoria of Hate -- Chapter twenty: The inevitable narcissism of caste -- Chapter twenty-one: The German girl with the dark, wavy hair -- Chapter twenty-two: The Stockholm Syndrome and the survival of the subordinate caste -- Chapter twenty-three: Shock troops on the borders of hierarchy -- Chapter twenty-four: Cortisol, telomeres and the lethality of caste -- Part six: Backlash, Chapter twenty-five: A change in the script -- Chapter twenty-six: Turning point and the resurgence of caste -- Chapter twenty-seven: The symbols of caste -- Chapter twenty-eight: Democracy on the ballot -- Chapter twenty-nine: The price we pay for a caste system -- Part seven: Awakening. Chapter thirty: Shedding the sacred thread -- The Radicalization of the Dominant Caste -- Chapter thirty-one: The heart is the last frontier -- Epilogue: A world without caste.