FILM & BOOK REVIEW | OPINION

A Book and a Film That Offer Paradigm-Shifting Visions

Isabel Wilkerson’s empathy-laced analysis is essential in these turbulent times

We must understand the source of our problems before we can transcend them. As a whyte¹ mother in the U.S., I’m trying to comprehend these sad times when so many seem unable to sense one another’s pain.

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Watching the film Origin felt cathartic. To me, it offers a new source of hope. Directed by Ava DuVernay, Origin holds key lessons for this dehumanizing era. The film follows Isabel Wilkerson’s life as she researched her thesis and wrote Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents.

Throughout Origin, Isabel uncovers evidence of how cultures have designed caste systems to maintain engineered social orders. Watching her thoughts take shape, this time when our leaders downplay and normalize genocide blends into a larger pattern. Listening to news from Gaza, I keep sensing parallels between the horrors Palestinians are enduring and those Isabel depicts.

The U.S. and most other imperialist countries have yet to fully admit to, apologize, and make amends for the trauma they have inflicted. If they had found the courage and humility to do so, this cycle of violence might have ceased years ago. Instead, these self-righteous nations continue to act with impunity.

Origin and Caste show how our social systems have unsound foundations. Designed to elevate some and crush others, the original cracks continue to widen.

COVID found its way through these cracks. It ravaged the most vulnerable before reaching the ‘dominant castes’.

Caste systems have also led to climate catastrophe. When some communities become ‘sacrifice zones’ (where people designated as lower castes live) the entire planet heats. Those who enjoy upper caste status usually pollute the most. Their homes tend to be well protected — at least in the short term.

Mother Earth and her abused, now awakening masses have built up immunity to this trauma-induced madness. Her seas are rising. Her saltwater tears will soon intrude through the foundational cracks. When the ‘pillars’ that have held these caste structures intact wash away, they’ll leave fertile ground. Healing and regeneration will begin.

DISCLAIMER: This story includes graphic descriptions that may be triggering to some readers, particularly those suffering from the generational trauma of brutal racism and classism in the U.S., Europe, Israel, and Palestine. As a member of the U.S.’s dominant (whyte) caste, I write to help other dominant caste members understand how our lives are intrinsically connected with those who suffer because of our blindness.

Caste systems ultimately harm us all and our planet.

In September 2020 when evacuation orders were lifted, I drove up to my California mountain home. I planned to disinfect my warm fridge and wash away smoke residue from the CZU Wildfire. I hoped an N-95 mask purchased for COVID, would keep some of the toxins in the still-smoky air from entering my lungs.

I’d been listening to the audible book of Caste. Hearing how white families picnicked, laughed, and cheered as black men and boys were tortured and murdered sickened me. Blackened wood fragments in the yard brought up images of charred fingers and toes. Demonic profiteers sold these as souvenirs after such lynchings.

While I cleaned the smoke dust from my windows, the narrator spoke of the areas surrounding concentration camps in Nazi Germany. Neighbors likely cleaned similar residue from their windows. Did they wonder where that smoke with its undeniable stench had originated?

As a climate activist and a whyte mother, I was waking up to the ways supremacist powers exploit people, communities, and countries for profit. The climate-driven fires had just burned 400 homes in my (dominant caste) community. Engineered hate has unleashed perpetual senseless violence. Our battered ecosystems are responding.

Caste is a poison. Empathy is the antidote.

Caste spent 58 weeks on the New York Times Bestseller List. It debuted during the wave of Black Lives Matter protests following George Floyd’s murder. In it, Wilkerson describes eight pillars of caste systems. To illustrate how these pillars function, she connects slavery and Jim Crow laws in the U.S. South to Nazi Germany’s plan to exterminate the Jews and the brutal treatment of Dalits, or ‘untouchables’ in India.

Watching Origin, my heart ached to see Wilkerson lose the three people she loved most. She wove together her paradigm-shifting premise in her book, amid deep personal loss.

It was inspiring to see her channel her suffering into empathy. Sharing the pain of losing her mother, she asked a plumber wearing a “Make America Great Again” hat about his mother. They were in a basement in a Southern town. She was a black woman he may have seen as a lesser human. He was a whyte man wearing a sign of his racist values. Still, this moment of connection with a stranger allowed him to shed his mask and share the painful fact that his mother had died young. Her response that he was lucky to have his father, led him to imply that his father had been abusive and coldhearted.

DuVernay’s strategic filming of this scene shows how curiosity and deep listening can build bridges over seemingly insurmountable divides. Beneath our differences, our perceived ‘castes’, and our masks, we all share human experiences of pain and loss.

This deep empathy is woven throughout Caste. Listening to it in the summer of 2020, I recall wishing the whyte people defending Confederate statues and flags would find the courage to read it.

Two Heartbreaking Emergency Phone Calls

Origin opens with a young black man walking out of a convenience store. As the camera pulls in for a close-up we hear 17-year-old Trayvon Martin tell a friend that a car is following him.

Later in the film a former colleague of Wilkerson’s emails her recordings of two 911 calls from that night. In the first, George Zimmerman, the vigilante (volunteer neighborhood watch captain) who murdered Trayvon, reports that he is tailing a “suspicious guy” walking in his neighborhood. The operator asks, “Are you following him?” When Zimmerman replies, “Yes,” the operator tells him, “We don’t need you to do that.” In other audio recordings from neighbors, we hear Trayvon’s screams and then gunshots. The emergency workers hear the murder and are helpless to respond.

The day after I watched Origin, Democracy Now! shared 15-year-old Layan Hamadeh’s last words and screams. This recording was a desperate call to the Red Crescent in Gaza City. Layan was calling from a car. She, her 6-year-old relative Hind, and five other family members were trapped. An Israeli tank was approaching and firing at them. Rana al-Faqeh, the emergency dispatcher, described the hours she spent trying to console little Hind:

It is a painful experience when you hear her voice, which was trembling, sad, and at the same time she had hope that someone would save her. But we were helpless. We felt that we were paralyzed, because we were thinking about the situation she was in. She was trapped inside a car with six bodies of martyrs, audio of tanks and aircraft firing. When the tank came close to her, she was screaming and crying. The worst minute was when she said the tank got closer, and then the phone cut. At this moment, I thought the tank climbed on the car. At this moment, I started to cry, and I was trying to be strong.

The bodies of Hind and two Red Crescent rescue workers who tried to reach her were found after a two-week search.

Trayvon was killed for being black in a whyte neighborhood. Hind and her family members were terrorized and killed for being Palestinian in Palestine. Nowhere in the U.S. is safe for black men and boys whom the dominant (whyte) caste has stereotyped as thugs. Nowhere in Palestine is safe for Palestinians because the U.S. and Israel have stereotyped them (and all Arabs) as terrorists.

The U.S. has become the self-appointed dominant caste country in the world. As such, it has created global systems that allow it to act with impunity and ignore international law.

After the Holocaust, the U.S. and European countries felt guilty. They had looked the other way for too long as Hitler enacted his plan to exterminate the Jews. Still, they didn’t want to welcome masses of Jewish immigrants. Instead, the newly-formed U.N. created Israel in 1948, expediting Theodor Herzl’s 1896 concept of The Jewish State. Jewish settlers were given official permission to steal land and homes from Palestinians. Before Herzl promoted Zionism and Britain, the U.S., and the U.N. pushed settler colonial ideals in the region, Jews, Christians, and Muslims had shared Palestine for thousands of years.

Shaving Heads, Stripping Bodies, and Spreading Rumors to Hide Humanity

Wilkerson opens Caste with a description of “The Man in the Crowd.” This famous black and white photograph shows a hundred or more shipyard workers heiling in allegiance to the Führer in 1936 Hamburg, Germany. She points out that one man keeps his arms folded in a quiet act of defiance. This photo becomes one of Origin’s storylines. Intermittent scenes reveal a clandestine love affair. The defiant man, ‘Aryan’ German August Landmesser was in love with Irma Eckler, a Jewish woman. After Nazi soldiers capture Irma, we see a female inmate shaving off her beautiful hair. The narrator explains how shaving the heads of prisoners helped to strip their humanity. If S.S. Guards had seen prisoners as human, it would have been harder to brutalize and murder them.

The photos and videos of groups of Palestinian men stripped to their underwear (compared by some to the abuse at the U.S.-run Abu Ghraib prison) show the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) using dehumanizing Nazi tactics.

Since October 7th, Israel has waged a “deliberate propaganda campaign” to justify its devastating assault on Gaza. Moneyed interests leading this effort in the U.S. have erected fearmongering billboards across the States.

The U.S. Government continues to regurgitate Israel’s unsubstantiated rumors. So do most mainstream Western media outlets. They use this false information to justify unwavering support for the mass murder of civilians. U.S. Officials boast that American companies are profiting from ongoing weapons shipments. War is great for the economy. In an ultimate act of cruelty, the U.S. led a movement to defund UNRWA, the United Nations Relief Agency for Palestinian Refugees.

The lie-filled, pro-Israel ads that aired during the Super Bowl are a modern equivalent to TV and films that romanticized Confederate glory and the white saviors of the Wild West. This tweet from Abed A. Ayoub, Executive Director of The American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, reveals the depth of this evil:

The genocide escalated as the Super Bowl kicked off. The attack on Rafah began at about the same time the Stop Hate/Antisemitism ad played. This isn’t coincidence. It is planned. They know most eyes in the US are glued to the game and not paying attention.

(About 1.4 million Palestinians have taken refuge in Rafah—now under attack—after Israelis ordered them to evacuate other parts of Gaza.)

Blind patriotism and groupthink also diminish humanity.

Of course, the men raising their arms in support of Hitler were also being dehumanized. Anytime a group of people is expected to think in unison their innate knowing dims.

We lived in Alexandria, Virginia near Washington, D.C. when my children were young. One of my friends was Dutch. Her parents remembered World War II. They used to say the U.S. pledge of allegiance felt like Third Reich allegiance. Since hearing that, I have abstained from participating in the pledge or the national anthem at events.

I appreciate the courage quarterback Colin Kaepernick displayed when he ‘took a knee’ in support of Black Lives. We should all stop blindly pledging our allegiance to a government that harms many and refuses to make amends.

We must face our shameful past and stop repeating it.

In a scene at a dinner party in Germany, a white German woman tells Isabel that Germany and the U.S. are incomparable. She explains that, unlike the U.S., Germany has made amends for the horrors of the Holocaust. Germans have erected memorials all over so that no one will ever forget what happened. Although there is truth to this, Isabel feels annoyed by the self-righteousness in this woman’s voice. Soon after that, she finds proof that the Nazis modeled their plan to exterminate the Jews on the Jim Crow Laws and lynching culture of the U.S. South.

That conversation opened with a discussion about Confederate flags and memorials to slave owners in the States. In Germany, Nazi paraphernalia is illegal. In Caste, Wilkerson points out that the U.S. Civil War is an anomaly since after most wars the losers fade from history. To Americans, the Confederacy became the ‘good old days’ of Gone With the Wind. This background was the red carpet for Trump’s “Make America Great Again” slogan.

Whyte historians, writers, and teachers have created books and curricula that minimize or mask the horrors of slavery, the Jim Crow South, and the genocide of Native Americans. They also omit the atrocities the U.S. has perpetrated in other countries. This selective history combined with the blind patriotism of a ‘pledge of allegiance’ culture has perpetuated the myth of U.S. exceptionalism. Many dominant caste members in the U.S. believe our government can do no wrong.

The mainstream media covers the “Israel-Hamas War” as if it were a fight between two equal sides, a good vs. evil battle. They rarely mention Israel’s U.S.-funded Iron Dome defense system and nuclear arsenal. They gloss over the fact that prison walls and an ocean trap the people of Gaza. They don’t want us to realize that Palestine has no military. We’re supposed to believe Hamas is an equal adversary, not a resistance group. They want us to feel Israeli pain but believe the Palestinian children dying by the thousands are simply ‘collateral damage’.

Origin’s intimate slave ship scene offers white viewers an unshielded view of our monstrous past. As a nation founded with the myth of ‘whiteness’ at its core, we are skilled at dehumanizing others. Wilkerson shows how dominant caste members give up empathy, compassion, and universal love as they use hate and fear to maintain social order.

Mamie Till’s decision to host an open casket funeral for her son Emmet was a turning point in the Civil Rights Movement. Her brave choice made the world witness the barbaric reality of the U.S. lynching culture.

The countless horrific videos and images coming out of Gaza have led many to take the the streets across the world. The global majority (including more and more Americans) now see Palestine as the moral compass of the world. Still, the dominant caste U.S. Government has yet to give up its exceptionalist defense of Israel’s apartheid regime.

All who have enjoyed dominant caste privilege have a choice to make:

Do we cower in comfort and feigned confusion or open our hearts and minds to join the rising tide of justice aimed at creating a world in which everyone is truly free?

When we find the courage to do the right thing, we will begin healing and working together to protect this miraculous, abused planet we share.

If, like me, you are looking for hope, I recommend reading Caste (before or after viewing Origin). Both the book and the film offer invaluable insights to help us navigate these times.

I also suggest watching Democracy Now! daily. It offers sobering updates on what’s happening in Gaza and other parts of the world mainstream media ignore. This video from Democracy Now’s YouTube channel is an example of the type of truth-exposing stories they cover:

Footnote

1. The editor Aza Y. Alam requested, and I agreed to use the spelling ‘whyte’ to denote racial categorization as a made-up category and to shift away from a binary in which “white” symbolizes fairness and purity while “black” represents evil and filth.

Gail Valker McNulty 🕊️🌱 is parenting three teenagers while getting to know herself and her parents who are in the late stages of life. She writes to explore how we can love our way through these times and work together to create the tomorrow we all want and need. If you’re dreaming about the future we can co-create as we save what we love, regenerate what we need, and learn to live in just and joyful ways, let’s connect! LinkedIn • Twitter