Origin(2023)
dir. Ava DuVernay
Racism is the symptom. Caste is the disease.
Where to watch: Streaming on HuluLetterboxd ↗
While grappling with personal loss, Pulitzer-winning writer Isabel Wilkerson traces a hidden architecture connecting racial hierarchy in America, the caste system in India, and the machinery of Nazi Germany. Adapted from Wilkerson's book Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents.
Why it’s here
Punk in daring to name America's racial order as a caste system, kin to India's and Nazi Germany's, rather than a uniquely American aberration. Pedagogical in dramatizing how a writer's own grief becomes the engine of rigorous, world-spanning research.
Where This Film Lives
Read Alongside
Books that share a topic, theme, or setting with this film.
Caste
Isabel Wilkerson
India, America, Nazi Germany. Three caste systems. One logic.
✦ READ – REFLECT → RESIST
Claudette Colvin: Twice Toward Justice
Phillip Hoose
She refused first. History forgot her anyway.
✦ READ – REFLECT → RESIST
How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America
Clint Smith
A tour of how America tells it.
✦ READ – REFLECT → RESIST
The Complete Maus: A Survivor's Tale
Art Spiegelman
The only comic to win the Pulitzer. Banned anyway.
✦ READ – REFLECT → RESIST
The Warmth of Other Suns
Isabel Wilkerson
Six million people left the South. Here are three of them.
✦ READ – REFLECT → RESIST
We Are Not Yet Equal
Carol Anderson & Tonya Bolden
History’s receipts for injustice.
✦ READ – REFLECT → RESIST
Annihilation of Caste
BR Ambedkar
The speech so radical they cancelled the conference.
✦ READ – REFLECT → RESIST
Ants Among Elephants
Sujatha Gidla
An untouchable family. Christianity didn't help. Communism didn't either.
✦ READ – REFLECT → RESIST