Ava DuVernay is a film-maker who has long been committed to a bracing cinema of ideas. Her 2016 documentary, 13th, was an investigation of the incarceration of black men and the constitutional mindset link between imprisonment and slavery in the US. It was to this film, I think, that we owed the larger revelation about the civil war: the Confederacy was not defeated like Germany was in 1945, but in fact like Germany had been in 1918 at the end of the previous world war – provisionally, and unstably.
Now she has turned to the journalist and commentator Isabel Wilkerson, the first African American woman to win a Pulitzer prize for journalism, and specifically her 2020 bestseller Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents. The book radically challenged the concept of race in thinking about inequality and injustice and asked the reader instead to consider “caste” – larger patterns and gradations of prejudice. After all, those western observers who may well agree that there are real, essential differences between white and black and gentile and Jew may be baffled by the continuing caste injustice in India – that’s if they think about it at all – which is just as brutal as Jim Crow, although the physical differences between Dalits and the rest are surely arbitrary and illusory. As Wilkerson says, there is “racism” in India, but they are all brown.
