Award-winning director Ava DuVernay's new film Origin explores a new way to consider the historical subjugation of Black people in America: As the adverse result of a caste system.The film is inspired by Isabel Wilkerson's book Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents. In the movie, Wilkerson embarks on a journey to learn about caste - traveling to Germany and India to get to the root of the Black experience in America. DuVernay also directed 13th, When They See Us, and Selma. Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoices NPR Privacy Policy
On the Ted radio hour, linguist Ann Curzan says she gets a lot of complaints about people using the pronoun they to refer to one person.
I sometimes get into arguments with people.
Where they will say to me, but it can't be singular.
And I will say, but it is.
The history behind words causing a lot of debate.
That's on the Ted radio hour from NPR.
This is FRESH AIR.
I'm Tanya Moseley.
When my guest Ava Duvernay first read Isabel Wilkerson's book cast the origins of our discontents, she was so stunned she reread it two more times.
The best selling book draws a line between India's caste system, the hierarchies of Nazi Germany, and the historic subjugation of black people in the United States.
The book is academic in nature, 496 pages filled with facts and historical notes.
People told Duvernay, an acclaimed filmmaker, that it was too complex of a story to adapt into a film.
But she did it anyway.
Writing and directing origin in the film, which is opening in theaters this week, Duvernay makes Wilkerson, played by Angenu Ellis Taylor, the center of her own story as she explores how understanding the cast system can deepen our understanding of what black people experience in America.
In this scene from the movie I'm about to play, Blair Underwood plays a persistent editor who asks Ellis Taylor to write about the recent death of Trayvon Martin, a tragedy that is impacting the nation at the time.
The editor had recently given her the 911 calls of the shooting and now asks her if she's listened to them yet.
You listen?
Yeah.
Yeah, it's a lot.
Yeah, it's a lot.