ORIGIN EXPLAINS HOW ISABEL WILKERSON CONDUCTED RESEARCH
Isabel Wilkerson’s book Caste: The Origin of Our Discontents, published in 2000, was awarded a Pulitzer Prize. Director Ava DuVernay decided to make a film to demonstrate not only the thesis of the book but how she did her field research to derive insights stated in the book. Accordingly, the film is not a docudrama but instead a docubiography, a type of film similar to those made by Michael Moore.
A journalist, Wilkerson engages in field research similar to an anthropologist by visiting parts of the United States where racism is still embedded in social life, post-Nazi Germany where a display of the swastika is now banned, and India with a focus on the lowest caste, the Dalits. (She does not go to South Africa, where the caste system has also existed.) She concludes that American racism can best be understood as a belief by many Whites that Blacks occupy a distinct inferior caste. What she learns in her research in Germany is that Nazis had to invent the notion that Jews constituted a caste inferior to Germans, whereas Dalits are of the same race as other Indians and are still treated as inferior because they are believed to exist as a caste somehow separate from other castes.
Whereas many academic researchers have long come to the same conclusion, her contribution is to identify several “pillars” that sustain the view that castes exist: (1) A basic belief that the dominant caste is “pure” and therefore must be protected from efforts of other castes to poison or pollute the “purity.” (2) To support the idea of “purity,” religion is invoked, such as the curse of Ham, and thus a view that castes are divinely ordained and exist from birth. (3) Prohibition of marriage between castes is one way to maintain purity. (4) Segregation in housing and in use of private and public facilities is another purity measure. (5) Certain occupations are assigned to the lower caste. (6) When members of a lower caste are viewed as in violation of the “natural order,” the superior caste will engage in acts of dehumanization and even terrorism to enforce the system.
Nevertheless, Wilkerson demonstrates no interest is how caste perceptions can be overcome. She has been informed that the academic book How to Demolish Racism: Lessons from the State of Hawaiʽi (2016), also nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, details how the caste system existing in Hawaiʽi before statehood was overcome after statehood. And thus far she demonstrates little interest in progress in race relations elsewhere in the United States. Although she does appreciate how Germany now repudiates Nazism, she shows no interest in learning how that occurred.
In an early part of the film, she claims that a Hispanic shot a Black youth, Treyvon Martin, to protect Whites living in a Florida gate community. Yet the residents were not all White, since Treyvon Martin was returning from a market in an evening during 2012 with groceries for a Black family. In addition, Wilkerson appears to imply without evidence that the Hispanic was a member of an intermediate caste between Blacks and Whites, though most Hispanics declare themselves Caucasians on the U.S. census. A filmviewer thus might become suspicious that later examples also involve misinterpretation, thereby interfering with the enjoyment of the rest of the film.
Nevertheless, Origin provides a window into how journalist Isabel Wilkerson derived the insight that racism in the United States is actually rooted in the underlying view of some that the human race consists of castes. Why a journalist receives more publicity than academics who have devoted their attention to the same issues may reveal how journalists see themselves as a caste superior to academics, whom they inexplicably scorn. MH