Origin
Written by Ava DuVernay and Isabel Wilkerson
Directed by Ava DuVernay
Starring Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor, Jon Bernthal, Niecy Nash, Emily Yancy
In cinemas

Origin begins with a recreation of the final, terrible moments when 17-year-old Trayvon Martin walked down his home streets in Sanford, Florida. His murder became the catalyst for Pulitzer Prize winning author Isabel Wilkerson to investigate the origin of racism, which grew into her best-selling book Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents.

Caste was one of Barack Obama’s favourite books on 2020 and was selected by Oprah Winfrey for her book club.

Film maker Ava DuVernay (both co-writer and director) has chosen to not make a documentary of Caste, but to make a dramatisation of Wilkerson’s personal voyage of discovery. Filmed in a little over 30 days across three continents it is quite a cinematic achievement.

An early, pivotal scene shows Wilkerson responding to her book editor’s suggestion that she look into the questions raised by Martin’s murder. “I don’t write questions, I write answers,” she says. More than that, she declares: “I want to be in the story, really inside the story.”

Exactly what Wilkerson means by being “inside the story” is not explained but Wilkerson’s point-of-view is the film’s scaffolding. Thus, Wilkerson’s revelations become our revelations and her heartbreaks become the audience’s tear-jerking fodder.

Wilkerson declares that she is tired of hearing the word “racism” being used to explain every outrage against Black Americans. She wants to find the bedrock cause for all this oppression.

In short, Origin promises us the inside story of Wilkerson’s research and the “answer” of the source of racism. Spoiler alert: it fails.

Moreover, it fails in a manner typical of US cinema. We are treated to large servings of Wilkerson’s personal upsets – the deaths in rapid succession of her nearest and dearest family members – and a surface-skimming summary to the thesis of Caste.

As is standard in US films, Wilkerson and her husband live (without children) in a huge, luxurious house in a leafy suburban street. Why is it that compulsory in American cinema?

Caste presents an argument that is easily recognised by large swathes of the world’s population, that discrimination is not necessarily based on physical differences of skin colour. For US audiences this is earth-shattering news.

It is an embarrassing reality that within the United Sates there is precious little understanding about anything outside its borders.

In Australia, for example the arrival of capitalism with the British invasion required the dispossession of the Indigenous people. With this arose racism against them, which continues to this day. However, the discrimination against the Irish rebels transported as convicts persisted as anti-Catholic sectarianism well into the 1950s but has since totally disappeared.

The difference between the two forms of caste, to use Wilkerson’s terminology and their evolutions is the story of Australian capitalism’s development. Such ruling class evolutions and associated ideological progressions are not unusual but appear invisible to Wilkerson.

In Origin we see a dinner table conversation about the Holocaust between Wilkerson and a German Jewish woman. The Jewish woman argues against equating the Holocaust with US slavery, Jim Crow and its ongoing effects, because the Nazi Holocaust was designed for extermination whereas US racism was and is not.

The film presents this as “whitesplaining”, a white person patronisingly refusing to understand Black oppression. In reality it demonstrates the limited parameters of Wilkerson’s and DuVernay’s world view.

The oppressive systems of slavery, Jim Crow and its myriad variations in the US were (and are) designed to provide a pliant, internally divided labour force for US capital. The Holocaust, to put it mildly, was not about creating surplus value from labour. It was about the German capitalist class throwing its Jewish section to the wolves in order to stave off a proletarian revolution.

Following this conversation, we are treated to Wilkerson’s revelatory research into Nazi anti-Jewish laws that were based on US Jim Crow legislation. That is supposed to close the case that both forms of oppression were identical.

We see vision of Wilkerson inspecting the deeply moving Holocaust memorial in Berlin. But questions hang in the air unaddressed. How have the needs of the German ruling class changed such that anti-Semitism is no longer its weapon of choice to the point where the Memorial can grace its capital city? What is unchanging in US society so that racism seems immutable?

From there Wilkerson travels to India to research the position of Dalit’s, the most oppressed layer of India’s population.

She is seen speaking with Suraj Yengde, a world-leading Dalit intellectual (playing himself). He summarises Dalit oppression and introduces her to the heritage of Dr B. R. Ambedkar, one of the Indian republic’s founders and an author of its constitution. It is explained that statues of Ambedkar, which are dotted all over India are often vandalised.

What is not explained is how and why the caste system arose in India thousands of years ago and how it was utilised by a variety of different rulers, including the British. Most tellingly, the motivations for the current, right-wing authoritarian Modi regime for using caste differences and Islamophobia are not uncovered.

Wilkerson seems ignorant of the use to which British colonialism used Indians in other colonies. For example, Indian traders were introduced into Uganda. The effect was that the African population were induced to rage against the traders rather than the colonialist rulers who manipulated the situation.

After the travelogue, Wilkerson is depicted using a white board to assemble her analysis of caste (so the audience can read it).

She identifies eight points of belief: “divine will”, that social stratification is God-given not human-constructed; “heritability”, that social status is determined by birth; “endogamy”, outlawing of sex and marriage between castes; “purity and pollution”, only the dominant caste is “pure”; “occupational hierarchy”, preserving best jobs for the superior castes; “dehumanization”, denying individual human dignity to lower-caste people; “terror and cruelty”, cementing the caste system, and; “inherent superiority and inferiority” among different castes.

She says that African slaves were traded by Europeans because Black people were seen as inferior. This is false. Black Africans came to be seen as inferior because they were traded as slaves.

Before the slave trade, as Malcolm X said, Europeans admired African civilisation.

The ancient Romans built their Empire upon slavery. It made no difference to them what their skin colour was. They were a labour force to be exploited and nothing more. The highest social prestige went to those who were wealthy enough to not have to work (especially from landed property). Even Black freed slaves who achieved such wealth were honourable in the Roman social system.

Malcolm X learned from doing the Hajj to Mecca that his socialisation into US racism had not prepared him for encountering white Muslims as equals. A month before his assassination he said that the particular strand of Black Nationalism he inherited from the Nation of Islam had alienated him from “people who were true revolutionaries dedicated to overturning the system of exploitation that exists on this earth by any means necessary”.

His journey outside the USA revolutionised his thinking and he returned determined to build a unified struggle with predominately white leftist organisations, such as the then-revolutionary Socialist Workers Party.

Malcolm fingered capitalism as the source of racism. The capitalist system, he said, “needs some blood to suck.” He identified its international dimension, imperialism.

Imperialism is the world system that divides the rich and poor countries and drops enough crumbs from the table of the rich in its homelands to convince some individuals that opportunism is a way out of the pain of the struggle. Opportunism can take many forms, but all are designed to create a quiet life and successful career for a small sector of the oppressed.

Viewing Origin, it could be said that Wilkerson has successfully argued for replacing the vocabulary of race and racism, especially in the USA with the terminology of caste. But she simply does not address why caste oppression exists or how it has evolved over the centuries and why it takes particular forms. Moreover, her thesis reeks of opportunism.

Perhaps she could have saved on her carbon footprint and stayed at home reading Malcolm X.

The Origin trailer can be viewed here: