Starring: Aunjanue Ellis, Jon Bernthal, Niecy Nash-Betts, Vera Farmiga, Audra McDonald, Nick Offerman, Blair Underwood, Finn Wittrock, Jasmine Cephas-Jones, Connie Nielsen
OUR RATING: ★★★☆☆
Story: Drama written and directed by Ava DuVernay. Inspired by the life and work of Pulitzer Prize winner Isabel Wilkerson (Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor), Origin (2023) follows Wilkerson, who while grappling with tremendous personal tragedy, sets herself on a path of global investigation and discovery. Despite the colossal scope of her project, she finds beauty and bravery while crafting one of the defining American books of our time.
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'You don't escape trauma by ignoring it. You escape trauma by confronting it.' - Isabel Wilkerson (Origin) Share on X
Isabel Wilkerson: I am a better writer than I am a speaker.
Amari Selvan: Yeah, well, you’re a better writer than most people do anything.
Amari Selvan: So, that one book you wrote took way too damn long. It was a masterpiece, and whatnot, but it took too long, Isabel, if you ask me. Writers write. So write.
Isabel Wilkerson: I want to be in the story. Really inside the story. And, yes, that takes time.
Isabel Wilkerson: I don’t write questions. I write answers.
Isabel Wilkerson: We call everything “racism”. What does it even mean anymore? It’s the default. When did that happen?
Isabel Wilkerson: Racism as the primary language to understand everything is insufficient.
'“Should have” and real life are two different things.' - Ruby Wilkerson (Origin) Share on X
Brett Hamilton: [to Isabel] People are asking you to write because of your voice, because the way you think.
Isabel Wilkerson: I guess, in the end, we miss them no matter no matter what they were like.
Isabel Wilkerson: There is connective tissue here. I could build a thesis that shows how all of this, all of it, is linked.
'Where you burn books, you end up burning men.' - Nigella (Origin) Share on X
Sabine: [to Isabel] I understand you’re trying to make sense of American racism. It is noble. But your thesis linking caste in Germany with the United States is flawed.
Sabine: [referring to Isabel] She is trying to connect the United States to Germany, but it doesn’t fit. It’s as if you’re trying to “fit a square inside the circle”, as they say.
Isabel Wilkerson: You read the label and we think we know what’s on the inside. We trust the label. We put the container on the shelf. And that’s it. That’s it.
Isabel Wilkerson: It was all lies. They knew we weren’t inferior, but they magnified, they magnified the myths. They codify them, set them in stone, in systems, in our laws, in our healthcare, in where we live, how we learned, the kind of work that we do, even our food.
Isabel Wilkerson: All these containers have something in common. Race is not one of them. It’s caste.
Marion Wilkerson: Only took you ten minutes for that comeback. Figure out how to say more of what you just said, make it plain. Talk to real people like you just did to me. Real people. Real things.
Miss Hale: Daddy tell me again and again, “Always live up to your name.” He said, “Miss, they don’t have the corner on humanity. They don’t have the corner on femininity. They don’t have the corner on what it means to be a whole, noble, honourable person.”
Isabel Wilkerson: [referring to her and Brett] Most relationships end. Friendships, romances. Divorces. I mean, separations, people grow apart. They break. But we didn’t break.
Isabel Wilkerson: [referring to her and Brett] We did not break. We were together. Til the end. He should be here, Miss. He should be here. And the one person that I could talk to about, she’s gone too. What the hell am I supposed to do now?
Isabel Wilkerson: I just want to scream.
Miss Hale: Then scream.
Isabel Wilkerson: That’s the point of travelling. Meeting new people.
'Travelling to places where you are warmly welcomed by familiar faces is underrated.' - Marion Wilkerson (Origin) Share on X
Dr. Ambedkar: We have been carrying on with untouchability for the last two thousand years. Nobody has bothered about it.
Suraj Yengde, Ph.D.: And if we think about our histories through the wonderful ability of love, the symbols of hate and diets of violence will be replaced by compassion, care and solidarity. This is the world that we have to imagine for ourselves and for others who have not yet seen the beauty that human beings have to offer.
Martin Luther King Jr.: And I had to say to myself, I am an untouchable. And segregation is evil and sinful because it stigmatizes the segregated as an untouchable in a caste system. And this is why I’m convinced that we have the moral edict, a moral mandate, to work to get rid of this unjust and evil system.
Isabel Wilkerson: [to Marion] I called to say goodbye. I believe you can hear me. You mean so much to me. I remember everything you have ever said to me. From the time that we were kids until the last time I heard your voice. I’ll never forget it. I’ll never forget you. You will walk with me. You will live in me. For as long as I’m here. Watch over me. Cover me, okay? I won’t see you, but you’ll see me. There’s more to life than what you can see. You’re going to experience it all. I love you. I love you. I love you.
Isabel Wilkerson: A caste system needs scaffolding in order to maintain its hierarchies. Dr. Ambedkar wrote, “Caste is an artificial chopping up of the population into fixed units. Each unit is prevented from fusing into another through the custom called endogamy.”
Isabel Wilkerson: One of the foremost scholars of caste in America once wrote, “Tied to what one looked like, membership in either the upper or the lowest caste is immutable. Fixed from birth to death. Inescapable. “One may neither earn nor wed their way out.” That scholar was Dr. Allison Davis.
Isabel Wilkerson: It is harder to dehumanize a single person standing in front of you, harder to dehumanize an individual you’ve gotten the chance to know. Which is why people and groups who seek power and division don’t bother with dehumanizing an individual. Better to attach a stigma, a taint of pollution, to an entire group. Dehumanize the group and you’ve successfully dehumanized every individual person within it.
Isabel Wilkerson: Racism is not the same as caste. Because race does not matter in order for the system to work.
Isabel Wilkerson: The tragedy of caste is that we are judged on the very things that we cannot change. Signposts on our bodies of gender and ancestry, superficial differences that have nothing to do with who we are on the inside.
Isabel Wilkerson: The goal of this work has not been to resolve issues of a millennia-old phenomenon, but to bear witness to its presence in our everyday lives, to shine a light on its history despite those who would deny it, despite those who would withhold it from us even, who try to convince us that we don’t need to know. We need to know.
Isabel Wilkerson: Not one of us was around when this house was built. But here we are. The current occupants of a property with stress cracks built into the foundation, and a roof that must be replaced. We are the heirs to whatever is right or wrong with it. We didn’t erect the uneven pillars, but they are ours to deal with now. The cracks won’t fix themselves. Any more deterioration is on our watch.
Isabel Wilkerson: Caste is not simply hatred. It is the worn grooves of routine and expectation. Patterns of a social order that have been in place so long, it looks natural when it isn’t.
Isabel Wilkerson: Caste is everywhere, yet invisible. No one avoids exposure to its message, and the message is simple. One kind of person is more deserving of freedom than another kind. Freedom to love whoever you want to love. Freedom to go wherever you want to go. Freedom to express yourself however you want to express yourself. Freedom to resist and fight for your human right to do so.