“You can’t be walking around at night, on a white street, and not expect trouble.” Author Isabel Wilkerson’s mother has likely said something like this before, in one of any number of tragic contexts.

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Isabel Wilkerson’s 2020 nonfiction book “Caste” is a sort of biography of an idea, and an elusive idea at that. Americans tend to be pretty literate about race and class. Caste? Not so much, at least ...