In her extensively researched new book, “Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents,” Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Isabel Wilkerson argues the United States’ racial hierarchy should be thought of as a caste system, similar to that in India, according to Democracy Now.

She also looks at the ways Nazi Germany borrowed from U.S. Jim Crow laws. “The Nazis needed no one to teach them how to hate,” Wilkerson says. “But what they did was they sent researchers to the United States to study Jim Crow laws here in the United States, to study and to research how the United States had managed to subordinate and subjugate its African American population.”

We have inherited a world full of humans who have been healed and hurt by other humans. There was a time, in an age before this one, when ignorance was forgivable. But that time has passed. Now is not the time for the enlightened to sneer at the brutes. Sneering hurts people. And hurt people hurt people. No. Now is the time for healing. And healing begins with introspection and a recognition of our own caste, our own biases, and our own discrimination. And introspection begins with a glimpse of the past.

This short book peels back the veil and provides a brief glimpse into the history of seven virulent and persistent human biases – a glimpse that you can read in about an hour.