Group of Pace University students sitting on a wall in Manhattan and hanging out.
Days of Origin 2.0

About Days of Origin 2.0

What is Days of Origin 2.0?

Following the success of the Division of Opportunity and Institutional Excellence’s (DOIE) inaugural Spring 2025 Days of Origin, we are proud to launch Days of Origin 2.0: Higher Education, Higher Stakes, Radical Change, a renewed and expanded call to truth-seeking, critical inquiry, constructive and inclusive dialogue, and hopeful action.

Inspired by Isabel Wilkerson’s groundbreaking work Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents and Ava DuVernay’s critically acclaimed film Origin, Days of Origin 2.0 deepens Pace University's commitment to confronting the structural forces that shape inequity both in the United States and beyond. This year’s program sharpens its focus on the complex intersections of caste, class, and race, examining how these interlocking systems influence lived experiences, institutional cultures, and pathways to opportunity.

Educating Students on the caste systems shouldn't feel like an act of resistance, but it was.

Kate Taney Billingsley
Professor at Sands College of Performing Arts, Pace University

What is Caste?

The caste system, which originated in India and other South Asian countries, is a complex, rigid, and hierarchical social structure based on birth. As shown in the film Origin, India’s caste framework divides society according to hereditary roles and occupations. Within this system, Dalits experience some of the most severe forms of discrimination.

For centuries, the caste system has upheld widespread injustices and often denied lower castes access to basic human rights, such as clean drinking water, quality education, and the ability to enter certain public or shared spaces. These challenges continue today in many rural communities, where caste identity still limits access to fundamental resources and opportunities.

The influence of caste is not restricted to the regions where it began. Members of South Asian and African diasporic communities often carry these social dynamics with them, including to the United States. Many still conceal their caste identity because they come from a lower caste and fear stigma, exclusion, or discrimination in academic, professional, or community environments.

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How Does Caste Differ from Race?

Isabel Wilkerson describes caste an artificial hierarchy that helps determine standing and respect, assumptions of beauty and competence, and even who gets benefit of the doubt and access to resources. "Caste focuses in on the infrastructure of our divisions and the rankings, whereas race is the metric that's used to determine one's place in that," she says. Wilkerson notes that the concept of caste has been around for thousands of years: "[Caste] predates the idea of race, which is ... only 400 or 500 years old, dating back to the transatlantic slave trade." Caste, she adds, "is the term that is more precise [than race]; it is more comprehensive, and it gets at the underlying infrastructure that often we cannot see, but that is there undergirding much of the inequality and injustices and disparities that we live with in this country."

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Questions? Contact Us

Email: doie@pace.edu