Contributed
Origin is a 2023 biographical drama film written and directed by Ava DuVernay. It is based on the book “Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents” by Isabel Wilkerson, which describes racism in the United States as an aspect of a caste system.
The film stars Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor as Wilkerson, alongside Jon Bernthal, Vera Farmiga, Audra McDonald, Niecy Nash-Betts, Nick Offerman and Blair Underwood.
Origin was selected to compete for the Golden Lion at the 80th Venice International Film Festival, where it premiered on Sept. 6, 2023, and began its theatrical release on Jan. 19. It received positive reviews from critics.
Writer Isabel Wilkerson, grappling with tremendous personal tragedy (still living in the American South, she lost her mother, who died in 2016, and her husband, who passed away unexpectedly a year earlier after a period of illness.), sets herself on a path of global investigation and discovery as she writes “Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents.”
Wilkerson is consulted for her opinion after the shooting of Trayvon Martin. She explores the idea of how race may not be the only determining factor in bigotry, since, e.g., in India, everyone may be of the same “race,” but bigotry still occurs by caste. Similarly, although Jews of European descent may have been considered White in some parts of the world, in Nazi Germany they were defined as an inferior race to be exterminated. Wilkerson visits Germany and debates friends about how slavery compared with the Holocaust, “subjugation” versus “extermination.”
Wilkerson chats at a cocktail party with two White women who are friendly, but do not fully understand her ideas and how different types of bigotry interrelate. Later, she works with one of the women on her book.
Intertwined with her ideas and discoveries, Wilkerson suffers the loss of her husband Brett, a White man; her elderly mother, Ruby; and her cousin Marion. She often imagines herself speaking to those who have passed away, such as Al Bright, a Black boy who was on a winning Little League team, but when the team was invited to a swimming-pool party, he was not allowed to enter the water.
Wilkerson looks in German archives and discovers that the Nazis used some of America’s racist laws to develop some of their own racist laws. The history of a couple in Nazi Germany is related, a Gentile Nazi-party member man who has a romance with a Jewish woman. They try to escape Germany, but she is caught and sent to a camp.
Also told is the story of married Black researchers Allison and Elizabeth Davis, who work with a White couple, Burleigh and Mary Gardner, in an undercover project to find about segregation in America, resulting in the 1941 book “Deep South.” A lynching of a Black man is shown, with a White audience watching, some of them treating it as a show.
Wilkerson eventually decides to write a book about caste, a concept that solves some of the intellectual problems which mere consideration of race does not. She visits India and the home, now a historical site, of Dr. Ambedkar, who championed Dalit (“untouchable”) rights. Eventually she speaks about her new book Caste on stage, and how it makes it easier to understand and fight bigotry.
Finally, words on the screen note Caste became a number one New York Times nonfiction best-seller around the time of the Nov. 2020 U.S. presidential election.
Wilkerson spoke about her book, “The Warmth of Other Suns” about The Great Migration, in an appearance at the Woman’s City Club National Speaker program at Memorial Hall several years ago.