13TH Film Review: Circumstantial Slavery Abolition and the Industrial Prison Complex, Director Ava Duvernay

This documentary style film takes a look at the direct relationship between the circumstantial abolition of slavery and the modern era of mass incarceration. Ava DuVernay, directed, wrote and produced the documentary, threading together interviews from Michelle Alexander, Angela Davis, Jelani Cobb, Henry Louis Gates Jr., David Keene, James Kilgore, with other activist and scholars. These interviews were paired with historical video, texts, films, clips and images that sent audiences through an emotional roller coaster, beginning with these statistics:

Americans = 5% of the world’s population

America = 25% of the world’s incarcerated population (40% of the U.S. incarcerated are Black)

Media Framing of the Black Male Image 

Actors costumed in the full regalia of the Ku Klux Klan chase down a white actor in blackface in a still from 'The Birth of a Nation,' the first feature-length film, directed by D. W. Griffith, California, 1914.

Actors of the Ku Klux Klan chase down a white actor in blackface in a still from ‘The Birth of a Nation,’ the first feature-length film, directed by D. W. Griffith, California, 1914

Shortly after the emancipation of Blacks, in 1915 the film Birth of a Nation (dir. D, W. Griffith) was released depicting Black men as savage criminals. The Ku Klux Klan was a protagonist character in the movie, chasing and torturing Black men (antagonist/villain character) in response to a perceived constant threat of the potential rape of a White woman. Black men were shown as animal like savage beasts, unable to tame their desire to attack, particularly White women. This film not only has a 100% on Rotten Tomatoes today, but it was also extremely popular in the Box office at its time, exasperating the idea of Black men as innately criminal.

 

 

http://www.imdb.com/

http://www.imdb.com/

Television programs and mainstream media even today continue to perpetuate this same negative ideology of innate Black criminality. In 13TH we also see how popular television shows today, like Cops, repentantly air arrests and prosecution of black and brown bodies. The constant consumption of these images in Western White supremacist culture, especially in areas where whites do not interact with many Blacks, perpetuates the idea of Blackness being innately criminal. However, this idea is not only cemented into the minds of the White American majority, it also negatively effects Black and Brown people who watch these shows and consume these images.

 

 

 

Technological Revolution
The film also delves into the positive correlation between technological advancements and the advancements of people of color in the United States. The film goes over how Blacks access and use resources like print, film, television, photograph and video, they are able to document their experiences and share their stories with other audiences. It looks at how Slaves who (illegally) learned how to read were able to write memoirs to document and share their experiences. This ability to communicate beyond borders revolutionizes the ways the Black people have been able to organize, another example can be seen in how television programing during the Civil Rights Era allowed Southern Blacks to connect with Northern Blacks in order to strengthen their power and resistance against Segregation during the Jim Crow Era.

Today we can see how the internet and social media have been able to connect minority groups worldwide.

“From Palestine to Standing Rock" banner (Photo: Haithem El-Zabri with creative help from PYM)

“From Palestine to Standing Rock” banner (Photo: Haithem El-Zabri with creative help from PYM)

An article published on Mondoweiss earlier, Palestinians join Standing Rock Sioux to protest Dakota Access Pipeline, documenting the unification in solidarity between Palestine and Native Americans fighting against the North Dakota Pipeline in Standing Rock. In both eras we can see how technology has shrunk our divisions and allowed us to strengthen by unifying under the common core belief that everyone should enjoy their human rights. The documentary mentions how the police brutality has always been happening, the difference now is the fact that we all have a camera in our pockets we can use to record incidents and upload them to YouTube. In this way now we are able to force a conversation about police brutality that otherwise would have been undocumented.

Black Lives Matter
13TH also touches on the current Black Lives Matter Movement, recognizing that it is today’s civil rights

A photo from the documentary "13th." (Netflix)

A photo from the documentary “13th.” (Netflix)

movement, continuing the fighting for the legitimacy of Black life in America as Black men and women are arrested, prosecuted, and killed by police at an alarmingly genocidal rate. The film addresses the movements’ ability to unite all Black people through social media with the hashtag #BlackLivesMatter. Black Lives Matter does this under the unifying identity of Blackness in order to protest against the nationwide attacks against our community. It points out how BLM, like the Black Panthers, has been able to use media to unify Black leaders and push a social-economic agenda. However, unlike Black Power organizations of the past BLM has been strengthened by their non-central model, with branches in urban centers across the nation and with social media #’s flooding Americas timelines and news feeds.

The film also shows a powerful image of file headers that represent the many ‘unresolved’ cases of black lives lost. The file headers covered the screen as the camera panned out to reveal more and more names, symbolizing the countless number of Blacks who’ve unjustly and unlawfully died at the hands of executive forces. This is not the case of ‘bad apples’ that the police have been claiming to be dealing with. This is in fact a war and Black America is waking up as new hashtags of loved ones flood social media nearly every day. Recently Police Chief Terrence Cunningham, president of the International Association of Police Chiefs, apologized for police historical mistreatment of communities of color. This acknowledgement, is one that Blacks have been denied for centuries, as policemen have consistently not been held accountable for their wrongful actions which have in many cases have led to unjust arrests, prosecutions and deaths of African Americans. This acknowledgment was not accompanied with any concrete solutions.

Black Twitter has been trending #13TH since the film’s release on Netflix October 7th, 2016, a few weeks ago. The release of the 13TH has come in the middle of a great American awakening.  Americans, of all colors, are realizing that slavery isn’t over and slave practices have been continuing legally in the United States for centuries under another name, the industrial prison complex. A system that allows corporations to profit from prison labor in the same economic structure that dehumanized slaves. The documentary finishes on a powerful note, addressing the idea that many Americans today would have never allowed slavery to continue and that many Americans would never stand idly by as people were being mistreated. However, we must recognize that this is exactly what we are doing, many Americans are standing by as millions of people are being grossly mistreated and abused by our criminal justice system. In the last interview scene we see that, “We are living in it now”. Right now we are living in an era where people are being abused, mistreated and killed for the simple assumption of criminality, an assumption that weighs much heavier on Black men than that of any other group. This is the same mentality that allowed people to idly stand by while people were abused during the slave era for the simple reasoning of their being Black.

 

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