How Isabel Wilkerson’s best-seller about caste became a powerful biopic

The first African-American woman to receive a Pulitzer Prize in journalism believes that caste, not racism, lies behind bigotry.

Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor as Isabel Wilkerson in the new biopic, Origin.

The biographical drama Origin opens with African-American teenager Trayvon Martin being shot in a white neighbourhood in Florida. It’s 2012 and Barack Obama is US President.

Martin’s death is the first link in a chain that stretches from Nazi Germany to the Jim Crow laws in the American South to the lowest caste in India, the Dalits, once known as the ­“untouchables”.

A theoretical connection between the three – the violent oppression of African-Americans in the US, Jews in Nazi Germany and Dalits in India – is developed by award-winning journalist Isabel Wilkerson (Oscar nominee Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor).

Wilkerson, the first African-American woman to receive a Pulitzer Prize in journalism, believes that racism has become the default position to explain bigotry and it is an insufficient explanation.

She thinks caste is the root of the problem. Trayvon Martin was shot by a Hispanic man. Jews and Germans are white. “If it’s racist,’’ she continues, “Why is the same thing happening in India? They are all brown.”

Later, when she travels to India and meets a Dalit scholar, he contends that Indigenous people and Palestinians are in the same boat, one propelled by hate. They are all outcasts in the caste system.

That thinking led Wilkerson to write Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents, which was published in 2020. This ambitious, thought-provoking movie tells the story of how she came to write this provocative bestseller.

In one sense, it defies another caste restriction: gender. I don’t think there are a lot of movies in which a big-brained African American woman researches an intellectual thought bubble and turns it into a landmark work of nonfiction. “We read the label,’’ Wilkerson says, “and we think we know what’s inside.”

It’s a different world to 2011 drama The Help, in which Ellis-Taylor is a domestic maid in 1960s Mississippi.

Her Oscar nomination was for her performance as the mother of Serena and Venus Williams in King Richard (2021).

This film is written and directed by Ava DuVernay, her second feature following Selma (2014), which focuses on Dr Martin Luther King Jr and the 1965 Selma to Montgomery protest marches.

She has pulled together a thesis-based plot while keeping the story human and entertaining. Towards the end it does feel a bit like passages from the book are being read out, though the associated footage – slaves chained in hulks for example – keeps the mind focused.

There is a personal side to Wilkerson’s story that the director and cast skilfully interweave. It centres on Wilkerson’s white husband (an impressive Jon Bernthal), her mother (Emily Yancy) and her cousin (Niecy Nash).

The moments between them are poignant, as is a stand-alone scene, also taken from real life, in 1951, when an 11-year-old African American boy is forbidden to enter a public swimming pool in Ohio.

The treatment of the child is dehumanising. The temptation is to think of that as the past. One of the points Wilkerson makes is that if you occupy a flawed house, it’s your responsibility to fix it, even if you didn’t build it in the first place.

And as Holocaust survivor Primo Levi, who Wilkerson reads, reminds us. “If it happened once, it can happen again.”

Two months after her book came out, George Floyd, a 46-year-old African American man, was killed by police in Minneapolis.

Origin (M)

135 minutes

In cinemas. Advance screenings March 30-31 ahead of national release April 4

★★★½