\n<\/p>\n
\u201cWe younger Negro artists who create now intend to express our individual dark-skinned selves without fear or shame,\u201d a young Langston Hughes proclaimed in an essay nearly 100 years ago. \u201cIf white people are pleased we are glad. If they are not, it doesn\u2019t matter.\u201d<\/p>\n
Seeking to establish his autonomy as a Black writer, he concluded, \u201cIf colored people are pleased we are glad. If they are not, their displeasure doesn\u2019t matter either. We build our temples for tomorrow, strong as we know how, and we stand on top of the mountain, free within ourselves.\u201d<\/p>\n
I thought a lot about Hughes\u2019s landmark 1926 essay, \u201cThe Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain,\u201d after watching how Ava DuVernay\u2019s \u201cOrigin\u201d and Cord Jefferson\u2019s \u201cAmerican Fiction\u201d explore the fates of Black writers who push back against political and publishing pressures to focus exclusively on racism in their works.<\/p>\n
Like Hughes, the protagonists of these movies \u2014 the journalist Isabel Wilkerson and the novelist Thelonious Ellison, known as Monk \u2014 strive to write as they please. But, by depicting their characters\u2019 struggles, the films offer refreshing commentaries on the social construction of race and its devastating consequences for those at the bottom of the hierarchy.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
DuVernay\u2019s historically sweeping \u201cOrigin\u201d<\/a> follows a fictionalized version of Wilkerson (powerfully rendered by Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor) as she conceives her nonfiction best seller \u201cCaste: The Origins of Our Discontents\u201d (2020) and discovers that hierarchical systems of power \u2014 not race \u2014 link the oppression of Blacks in the Jim Crow South to Jews in Nazi Germany and Dalits, India\u2019s most oppressed group, formerly called Untouchables.<\/p>\n