Around 2700 BC, The King of Kish, Enembaragesi, invaded Elam and was victorious. This war almost 5,000 years ago between the Sumerians of Kish and the Elamites in what is today Iraq and Iran is the first recorded conflict between peoples that we have archaeological evidence to support. Other than tribalism and humanity’s natural Us vs. Them condition, we’re not sure about the origin of that particular war, but around the same time we have The Epic of Gilgamesh where said king took his people to battle over cedar to build a temple in Uruk.
And this is the general state of people as a species:
I am in this group, you are in that group.
If your group has something I want, I will take it.
If your group moves into my area, I will destroy you.
If your group is too close to my group, you will need to move so that my group can expand.
In some ways, this is the natural progression of civilization when you move from hunter/gatherer societies to sedentary farmers. Once you have a need to own the land you are using for your resources, you also need to both defend that land against others and cast an eye toward your neighbors to see if their land is better than yours. If someone else has more desirable resources on their land, why should your family suffer when you can simply take their land from them? There is no peaceful time in the historical record. If two groups — differentiated by ancestry, beliefs, culture, or resources to a degree that they see themselves as separate tribes — are close together, they will periodically kill each other.
Othering is one of the mechanisms by which humans can justify brutality against other humans, and as othering is the basis of caste systems, this is the foundation of Ava DuVernay’s latest film, Origin.
Origin is based on the book Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents published in August 2020 by Isabel Wilkerson, a Black journalist who wanted to explore race relations in the US through a broader lens separate from skin color. By comparing racism in the US to Nazism during WWII Germany and the caste system in India, she was able to draw parallels between systems that function as a way to uphold a social hegemony irrespective of race. Caste is a book of non-fiction that was released during the height of the pandemic, so many of us read the book as a reaction to how poorly the US handled COVID-19. Ava turned the book into a narrative largely about the author and what she was experiencing in the years leading up to writing it. She opens the movie with the murder of Trayvon Martin and used this as the foundation for Isabel to step back into writing.
It’s a heavy movie, and I hope Ava has a strong support system around her, given how much emotional labor she has given us over the years to help audiences understand the human condition of the oppressed. She has once again shown what a masterful storyteller she is, and though some of the imagery is heavy-handed (there’s a montage that flips back and forth between a concentration camp, a slave ship, and the Dalit being forcefully degraded), Origin also has some of Ava’s most impactful cinematography. Aside from that, she also pulls the very best from her actors. Much has been said about Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor, but Audra McDonald took ten minutes of screentime and showed why she is Audra McDonald. She finished a monologue partway through the movie where I wanted to stand up and shout. An actress!!!
I would like to say it’s uplifting, but if anything, it reinforces what I believe as a student of history and a lover of information: people, as a species, are not that great. I saw the movie with a friend who has never considered that statement in any way, so Origin was his first time confronting a possibility where groups of people may not actually be inherently good, where brutality and arbitrary human suffering may not be exceptions, where the general state of humanity has always been conflict between tribes. He cried.
I have a couple of degrees in anthropology and I read a lot of history books. Add that to my natural inclination toward pessimism and a very real streak of misanthropy (that has certainly grown exponentially since Trump’s election and the pandemic), and there is nothing about people behaving abysmally toward other people that will surprise me. I don’t believe in any sort of inherent goodness in people, but I don’t really think people are bad necessarily either so much as they are self-serving, like any other organism on this planet. You are here to live, grow, pass on your genetic code (or leave a legacy), and die. Anything you do is in service of that, so naturally, once you have become aligned with a group, anything the group does is in service of that, even at the expense of the next group who is trying to do the same.
Doesn’t that sound awful? Are you depressed? Do you feel a little bit of “well what is this all FOR?!” about it all? That sounds like a spiritual question to me, but I’m an atheist so I can’t help you there. I’m not interested in the big questions, but I can tell you a story about the little ones.
Late last year between Thanksgiving and Christmas, I got a text from this guy (we’ll call him Dr. Mark) who lives outside of Philadelphia. Mark grew up in the Bronx, but at Temple University he met his now-wife, and after graduation, they bought a house and started having kids. He missed Thanksgiving with his family in the Bronx, and he would miss Christmas too, because as a resident, he’s on call during during the holidays and didn’t want to be too far away from the hospital. He had some time off between the holidays, and while he was visiting his family, he wanted to check in with me to see if I would be free for dinner and drinks.
When I first met Dr. Mark he was a 13-(maybe 12?)-year-old runaway. I started volunteering at a domestic violence shelter the year I moved to NYC (almost 15 years ago now), and he had shown up with his mother after she ran away from a boyfriend they had been staying with. She was on and off drugs and her latest boyfriend, and drug pusher, had assaulted her in multiple ways. They weren’t at the shelter very long before they moved in with another guy. Mark fought with this guy, and he and the mother basically put him out, so he ran away to us. As a general rule, we didn’t take in kids for overnight stays without the mom, but he was there for a night before we found other housing for him.
Mark was smart, yet wholly uninterested in school or his future. He wanted to sell drugs, chase girls, and buy shoes, but he also liked hanging around the after-school center. It was less structured than school, but with the safe familiarity of being around kids. Back then, I was at the center a lot because I was tutoring the older kids and covering shifts in the day care center, so Mark and I were able to bond over music. He would record his little raps at his cousin’s house and I would help him tweak them a bit, showing him how to paint pictures with his words with a little metaphor and imagery. Eventually I helped him make the connection between reading and being a better rapper. A wider range of experiences gives you more reference points to draw from. The more art you ingest, the better artist you become.
By the time he was 14, Mark was seriously thinking about college, and that’s what we worked toward. When he got his acceptance letter, I think I cried for days. I’ve worked with kids for almost half my life now, and you just lose so many. The wins keep you going, and Mark was my biggest win. At this point, I think Dr. Mark knows that I need to be reminded of that win as much as he needed me to help him get there, so he never comes to NYC without checking in with me to see if I’m free.
And for me, that’s the point of it all. I don’t know what happens when we die. I can’t control the machinery directing our modern day tribes to go to war against each other. What I can do is save the next Mark. I can decrease suffering by redirecting the course of someone’s life. His kids, who wouldn’t be here if I hadn’t pushed him to stay in school, will hopefully be better people because their father had a mentor who believes your job is to decrease suffering where you can.
The long arc of history points toward greater understanding between tribes, and fear of the unknown becomes less potent with each cultural exchange. We have the entire world at our fingertips helping to flatten the differences, making it harder to see various peoples as Other. Films like Origin might serve to confirm some negative biases about humanity in ardent misanthropes, but exposing the systems and how they operate helps push the conversation forward to a place where more people look at those systems and vow to dismantle them.
There was a time in my life where I spent most of my free time trying to find ways to dismantle those systems. At some point, I hit a wall where I could no longer try to save the world at the expense of myself. It took some years to shake off the guilt of “not doing enough” but I’ve learned that it’s okay to let everyone take their own path toward making the world a better place. Ava is showing you the system. Someone out there is working to dismantle it. I can be content with saving Marks in my city. Maybe Mark Jr. will be the one who finally topples the caste system altogether.
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