If you haven’t seen ORIGIN – Ava DuVernay’s film about Isabel Wilkerson’s life and why and how she came to write CASTE – I urge you to. If you have seen it, I’d love to know how it made you feel, what it made you think and, most importantly, what it made you do or think about doing.
CASTE – in case you don’t know – is about the hidden caste system, the rigid hierarchy of human rankings that underpin any and all forms of human-imposed superiority over other humans, including the demonisation of the Jewish race that led to the holocaust; the dehumanisation of Black people that is racism and the dehumanising Indian caste system. But Wilkerson’s thinking is based on caste (not racism) because, as she says in the film:
Racism as the primary language to understand [the imposition of inferiority / superiority] is insufficient.
When Wilkerson went to India she witnessed the imposition of superiority and inferiority among people whose pigmentation is similar. She witnessed caste.
Here’s DuVernay talking about the film, about Wilkerson and how her thoughts and ideas ‘could be formative to us, especially in these [run-up to the US election] times’ and how DuVernay made ORIGIN so more of us would become aware of how Wilkerson is thinking and more of us would ask ourselves ‘What can I do?’
DuVernay suggests – as Nova Reid does – that we use the skills we already have when we’re asking ourselves what we can do about racism, the caste system or any form of human-imposed superiority. DuVernay makes films, so she made ORIGIN to spread Wilkerson’s ideas. I write so I write here about what I’m discovering about my own racism and how to dismantle it (Nova Reid’s course, Becoming Anti-Racist with Nova Reid, and her book, The Good Ally, have been instrumental) and I find ways to stand in solidarity with Black people against racism through organisations like Stand Up to Racism among other things.
What can you do?
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