According to BoundingIntoComics:
According to director Ava DuVernay, the lack of interest in her upcoming Isabel Wilkerson biopic Origin compared to the similarly-structured Oppenheimer has nothing to do with the latter’s historical importance and everything to do with audiences’ own racist and sexist attitudes.
Born in 1961, Wilkerson is perhaps best known for having been, per the National Association of Black Journalists, “the first black journalist to win a Pulitzer Prize for individual reporting and first black woman to win a journalism Pulitzer”.
The 1994 winner in the Feature Writing category, Wilkerson received the award from Columbia University “for her profile of a fourth-grader from Chicago’s South Side and for two stories reporting on the Midwestern flood of 1993.”
From there, Wilkerson would go on to spend roughly fifteen years researching and authoring The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration.
Released in 2010 to widespread praise from mainstream media outlets, the book provides a historical examination of three popular routes taken by black Americans in emigrating north from the southern United States between 1915 and 1970.
Ten years later, Wilkerson next published Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents.
As described by the book’s publisher Pengiun Random House, Caste argues that “America today and throughout its history has been shaped by a hidden caste system, a rigid hierarchy of human rankings.”
“Beyond race, class, or other factors, there is a powerful caste system that influences people’s lives and behavior and the nation’s fate,” reads the book’s official synopsis. “Linking the caste systems of America, India, and Nazi Germany, Wilkerson explores eight pillars that underlie caste systems across civilizations, including divine will, bloodlines, stigma, and more.”
It is Wilkerson’s argument in Caste, as well as her general life story, that inspired DuVernay to adapt the book into a semi-biographical film about the journalist.
Speaking on her upcoming film to Variety’s Angelique Jackson, the woman once attached to helm DC’s New Gods film explained, “It has biographical elements, so in some ways, it’s a biopic. In some ways, it’s docu-drama. In some ways, it’s just a straight up adaptation of these really beautiful and tragic moments in history.”
“The goal was to try to stitch together a tapestry, to create a quilt — that’s how I think of it — and allow myself to color outside the lines of what I’ve been told,” she told Jackson. “Just to throw all that out and tell the story from my gut. And it came from reading this book.”
