Origin, the movie, claims to be about
the origin of racism in America, but its own origin story lies with the
Ford Foundation, Laurene Powell Jobs, the widow of Steve Jobs, the Apple
guru, and Pivotal Ventures, the nonprofit started up by Melinda French
Gates after she dumped Bill Gates, which provided much of the money
needed to fund the $38 million smear of the United States.
What kind of movie would two wealthy woke white women fund? A pop history take on racism.
Origin
is based on Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents, another one of those
2020 books about a racial reckoning of the kind that Mrs. Jobs and Mrs.
Gates would have encountered in book clubs and while browsing The
Atlantic (Mrs. Jobs owns it) or Slate (Bill Gates used to.)
Isabel
Wilkerson, the protagonist of book and film, is another one of those
critical race theory ‘public intellectuals’ with a media platform, a
former New York Times bureau chief, who stars in it because it follows
her deep thoughts about race which unroll with the depth and
sophistication of a college freshman browsing Wikipedia while pulling an
all-nighter to turn in a midterm paper.
Like Between the World
and Me by Ta Nehisi Coates or Ibram X. Kendi’s How to be an Anti-Racist,
Caste tried to pretend that its familiar and simplistic premise,
(‘America is racist’) had some kind of depth by inappropriately linking
it to other people’s historical experiences, the Holocaust and the caste
system in India, while filtering it all through Wilkerson’s deep
thoughts.
Trayvon Martin, Wilkerson’s personal life and Nazis
goose stepping through Berlin all get mixed up in some intersectional
tangle of narrative oppressions in both book and movie. Wilkerson taking
plane trips to Germany or India allows her to bag up and appropriate
two very different sets of histories to bolster her own feelings of
oppression as a New York Times bestselling author.
The premise
was thin enough in book form, but it’s downright absurd to make a writer
into the protagonist of a movie because she’s reading about things that
happened to other people and then flying off to other countries to
study and listen to things that happened to other people..
And then makes it about herself.
What
makes a New York Times bureau chief married to a white man into a
victim? Wilkerson’s secondary trauma comes from listening to tapes of
the Trayvon Martin case. What a violent encounter between a Latino man
and a black teen has to say about racism in this country is dubious
already, and even more dubious when it’s someone entirely unrelated to
the case writing about dealing with the trauma of hearing about it.
But
Caste, the book, like most literature of this kind, is about feelings,
not facts, and Origin, the movie, adds yet another layer to this
palimpsest in which we are seeing an actress portraying a writer who is
writing about something that she did not see and was not even witness
to. Origin might have dropped the baffling hall of mirrors and just cut
to a documentary clumsily tying together disparate historical events in
Germany and India, or in Wilkerson’s own memories, but this is an Ava
DuVernay project and the Selma director clearly wanted to make a movie.
While
the premise may be absurd, the contents are even more so. Only using
Wilkerson as the ‘My Truth’ focus holding the narrative together makes
it seem like it has any credibility. A good storyteller can weave
together different stands to make them seem like they hold together,
while a bad one compensates for her failings with special pleading and
calls for sympathy.
Wilkerson, who has spent a whole lot of time
in the company of the kinds of woke white women who would buy her books
and fund the film, understood that what they really wanted was her
emotional journey and the history would always matter less than her
pain. And she delivers it. Her mother is dying, her husband is dying and
she’s writing about racism in America.
That the subjects of her
personal pain have nothing to do with her indictment of America is
besides the point. The point of ‘My Truth’ narratives is that anecdotes
trump history and that the only meaningful currency in a woke society is
the emotional unburdening of personal suffering.
Caste was
already bad history. The book promoted the idea that the Holocaust was a
result of American racism because the Nazis had gotten some ideas from
racial eugenicists in this country. While that’s passingly true, German
antisemitism had a long history before America even existed. The Nazis
put together a grab bag of ideas all over the place, including Marxists,
pagan folklore and the Thule Society which believed that there was a
secret inner world inside a hole in the planet, not to mention
appropriating a Buddhist symbol for their swastika because they were
obsessed with Tibet and the secret origins of the Aryans over in that
part of the world.
Long before intersectionality, the Nazis were
the original intersectionalists, gluing together random pieces of
history, economics, politics and myth into an intellectually
inconsistent mess that served their political purposes. That is also the
shape of Origin’s scrambled eggs history.
Wilkerson’s misreading
of the role of caste in India, the thing that gives her book its title,
is equally wrong, but, like the Holocaust, all of human history is just
a grab bag of oppression narratives to build to the conclusion that
racism in this country is a permanent institution with deep roots in
history, rather than an ugly accident from an era where everyone who was
at all different was viewed with prejudice overlapping with the
temporary export of the ruinous practice of slavery, which had been long
suppressed in Europe from Africa and the Middle East.
Racism in America is not a permanent institution, but that the Left has labored to make it one.
The
essence of critical racial theory or anti-racism is the idea that
racism is inescapable and that it permeates everything, an “original
sin”, as Obama put it, that we cannot escape except by adopting the
leftist ideology and policies of Mrs. Gates, Mrs. Jobs and the Ford
Foundation..
Caste and Origin provide false historical props that
misattribute the true origins of the persistence of racism in America.
It’s not white racists who cling bitterly to a caste system, but the DEI
industry and its voluntary beneficiaries who mandate the caste system
and oppose any efforts, such as the Supreme Court decision striking down
affirmative action, to end it.
It’s no coincidence that the
title of the movie was changed from emphasizing Caste (an insulting
idea) to Origin. From the 1619 Project, another work of historical
revisionism from another New York Times reporter, to ‘Stamped from the
Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America’, the book
that first made Ibram X. Kendi famous, there is an obsession with
creating a revisionist origin story of racism to justify the myth that
things are just as bad as they ever were.
Origin lacks the
bleakness and malicious racial antipathy of Between the World and Me and
How to be an Anti-Racist, the former so defined by its hatred of white
people that Coates actually wrote that the police officers and
firefighters who died on September 11 “were not human to me. Black,
white, or whatever, they were menaces of nature; they were the fire, the
comet, the storm, which could — with no justification — shatter my
body”.
There are moments of understanding and hope in Caste even
if they are based on the author’s insistence on her own victimhood. In
the movie, Nick Offerman, a liberal Democrat who ever since playing Ron
Swanton on Parks and Recreation built a career playing a liberal’s idea
of a right-winger, shows up as a rude plumber in a MAGA hat only to open
up to Wilkerson.
That condescending otherness is still more open
to the humanity of others than much of the critical race theory which
insists on the absolute evil of white people and ‘whiteness’.
America
is not defined by racial castes and the invocation of a MAGA plumber
reveals far more about Wilkerson’s actual caste and her perception of
working class white conservatives. It’s not a racial prejudice, but a
class one, that she shares with the wealthy woke white women who read
over her volume in their book clubs, and will flock to indie theaters to
catch the movie.
The country’s true caste system is that of
coastal, urban and suburban laptop elites who condescend to the rest of
the country. Its origins are too complicated and messy to fit in an easy
pop history template like the 1619 Project or Caste, but they reflect
displacement, economic turmoil and a seizure of power in the name of
ideology that comes with personal benefits.
Those benefits
include New York Times bestsellers and movie deals, and when Hollywood
won’t fund a movie, a few nonprofits flush with money from dubious
fortunes, will pay the bill.
To find the real caste system, don’t
look at race, look to the wealthy woke institutions that dominate the
high ground of American culture and media.
Daniel Greenfieldis a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine. Click here to subscribeto my articles. And click here to support my work with a donation.Thank you for reading.
