For Black History Month 2024 Oprah Winfrey supplied us with two movies: the musical remake of The Color Purple, the 1985 Spielberg/Winfrey movie based on Alice Walker’s 1982 novel and Origin based on writer Isabel Wilkerson’s 2020 book Caste: The Origins of our Discontents, which won a Pulitzer and was also a selection of Oprah’s book club.
Both movies, and perhaps the books from which they are derived, “de center” African Americans, racism, and white supremacy from the progressive narrative, perhaps without intending to do so.
In The Color Purple it seems that the chief oppressors are men, who rape and beat the women around them and then steal their children and sell them off to others. Only when the movie is two thirds over does a white oppressor appear, and she is perhaps not so much white as a member of the government ruling class, a mayor’s wife who won’t take no for an answer when she offers a black woman employment as a maid and the offer is refused.
Origin is an intellectual history, the story of the birth of an idea, or at least the impression the idea leaves on one person, Isabel Wilkerson. Wilkerson, who had a decade earlier written a book on the Great Migration, The Warmth of Other Suns, about African Americans escaping a feudal south for industrial capitalism in northern and western cities, in Caste comes to the realization that people are oppressed, even wiped out by genocidal regimes, all over the earth, from Jews in Europe to untouchables in India, when the racial or ethnic differences between the subjugating and the subjugated involves either no or much lesser differences in pigmentation. (In this she differs from some black supremacist writers, like the late psychiatrist Frances Cress-Welsing, who reclassified Jews as biracial and partly black so she could both subsume all oppression under white supremacy and so she could claim that white people have the lowest average IQ of all races, as well as being genetically inferior in every other way.)
Wilkerson is played by an actress unknown to me, Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor, who may mainly share with Wilkerson truly great hair. I’m not convinced that Ellis-Taylor can portray an intellectual, though she is deeply sincere, as she travels to India and to Germany and to Holocaust museums and archives to study victims of oppression and genocide. The movie does offer future film makers (anyone want to take another crack at Atlas Shrugged?) suggestions about how to film a novel of ideas, showing the protagonist traveling to the sites of her research, from the Taj Mahal to Dachau, interviewing experts and archivists, and explaining her deep ideas to her childhood and nonacademic friend, played by Niecy Nash, who tells her she needs to break it down simple so everyone can understand it. (Blair Underwood, Finn Wittrock, Connie Nielsen, Audra Macdonald and Vera Farmiga pitch in to sex up these roles as historical figures resisting Nazism, etc.)
The big idea is just that there is something deeper than race when it comes to oppression, namely caste. “Race is the skin, caste is the skeleton.” Somewhat tautologically caste just comes down to a powerful ruling class rules and exploits the powerless. But if it does it long enough it begins to codify its rule culturally. The rulers do not intermarry with the ruled. The rulers do not live near, go to school with, dine with, socialize with, the ruled. The ruled do not have access to the education the rulers have. The ruled are re-imagined as subhuman, smelly, dirty, rodent- or insect-like. Casual violence against the ruled is allowed or not prosecuted. But this just means Wilkerson has backed into libertarian histories of the origin of the State, like D.A. Rustow’s massive study Freedom and Domination.
Excited about this film - I saw it two months ago before it was released in theaters - I checked out Wilkerson’s books, and began to read Caste. The result was sad. Wilkerson - a one time Washington Post op ed writer and an itinerant journalism professor - discusses how Trump voters represent white people asserting their dominance over non-whites. Perhaps Wilkerson herself is writing what she needs to write for the caste above her that provides her with employment.
She seems clueless that the Trump voters (including black men and Hispanics) are blue collar and small business people who believe they are being eradicated by a corporate and governing class that calls them names, smears them, posts dating ads refusing to date them, denies them access to educational credentials (rationing education by race and price and federal student loan formulae) and denies them access to careers unless they have the approved politics and educational credentials. She doesn’t see Trump voters as a suppressed caste in revolt.
But that is what they are. And their revolt is part of the revolt that slowly created individual rights and liberties in Europe - the Peasant's Revolt, the Glorious Revolution - until the Magna Carta and then the Bill of Rights were written and then Europeans (and others) slowly began to wipe out slavery, which still exists in Africa, just without as big an international market for those enslaved.
This ran in SpliceToday this week.
Careful what you wish for regarding Atlas Shrugged: Daily Wire owns the rights currently and plan to make it in the next year or so.