Houston Southard
a name that looks so fake you'll care just as little to learn it's not
Isabel Wilkerson - Caste
Caste is often thought to refer to India's social order, specifically between the priestly brahmins and the untouchable dalits, but the brahmins only bucketed themselves as such to insulate part of the population from slavery under britain's colonization.
The spanish, inventors of race (or raza, referring to the caste of a horse's authenticity) and the atlantic slave trade, subsequently invented caste with their british brethren. Empire has taught humans the language of race with caste as its underlying grammar, both under an umbrella of what those at the top consider pure.
In India, both castes look the same. Absent religion, the same is true of germans and the jews they slaughtered in the third reich, a regime made successful courtesy of the fallout of slavery's abolition in america.
For 12 years, reconstruction attempted to integrate newly freed 4 millions black americans into a society that only knew them as slaves. With Lincoln assassinated, the federal government left those vulnerable to those who had just recently owned them. Its 3 constitutional amendments (13th for abolition (save for a loophole allowing slavery for those convicted of crimes, which incentivized locking free blacks up in a system that had a free labor void to now fill), 14th for citizenship, and 15th for voting) fell flat as sharecropping replaced slavery, the KKK rose up with federal backing, and state and local municipalities had measures to stop black votes.
The jews, their fates sealed by the nuremberg laws - the third reich design explicitly based on the jim crow laws and interracial marriage statutes - gave the nazis a vocabulary to make the jews impure. That, and madison grant's eugenicist manifesto of white supremacy, which hitler claimed as his "personal bible."
MLK's trip to india and the Dalit's association with american blacks as similar to their own station against the brahmins would affect his mission to integrate both races to equal status during the civil rights movement.
With his assassination, as with Lincoln's during reconstruction, we see how his mission has gone (please see voting rights rollbacks courtesy of america's most spray-tanned cult leader as recently as today).