African Americans make up 5% of the world’s population and 25% of the world’s prisoners. 13th is a documentary by filmmaker Ava DuVernay that explores the history of mass incarceration and its influence on African Americans since the slavery era. As its namesake, the 13th Amendment of the Constitution grants freedom to all Americans, with one exception; criminals. This clause was used as a tool for systematic oppression ever since the ideologies that legitimized, perpetuated, and defended slavery had developed into the mythology of black criminality. Freedom doesn’t apply to criminals, just as it hadn’t applied to slaves. And so, this amendments ratification did little to stop the implicitly racial application of supposed “race-neutral” policies and strategies created by to keep the economic system of slavery alive. This documentary is an in-depth analysis of how systems of oppression have a tendency to find expression in new ways. By systematically targeting disadvantaged black men in the criminal justice system, the United States has found a way to subject the African American population in the reinvention of slavery, under the guise of convict labor and public safety. Instead of slaves working in the fields, the United States now has corporations operating in prisons to keep criminals working, under that same ideology of the white political elite keeping black bodies working (DuVernay, 2016).
Mauer (2018) describes mass incarceration as the method in which the criminal justice system has chosen to create law and order by criminalizing the circumstances that black men of low-income communities face. This relates to what we discuss for class in how the documentary described Jim Crow laws as a function to permanently deem African Americans as a second class status. Stevenson (2018) described the policies and strategies derived from Jim Crow as a function to maintain that racial subordination and white supremacy. The “baby boom” generation was referenced to in both sources as an ulterior cause to the rise in crime during the era of the civil rights movement. Rather than a variable of race, an increase in crime rates during this time was due to the simultaneous increase of the fifteen to twenty-four-year-old populations; which we empirically support as the age group that commits crimes at higher rates (Mauer, 2018). Since this misconception, the resulting era of mass incarceration has been deemed the primary civil rights issue of the twenty-first century (Mauer, 2018).
Following the same perspective as the class material, the documentary references Birth of a Nation as an influential film for accurately predicting how race would operate in the United States. Stevenson (2018) refers to the era of this films debut as the time in which color emerged as the defining mark for the United States to shape its culture, politics, and economy. The film referenced the black male as an animalistic threat to white society, sparking a theme in which created an implicit fear for the “white prey” versus the “black predator” (DuVernay, 2016). Randall Kennedy discussed the influence of this theme in our class lecture, when describing the supposed race-neutral policy of disparate penalties for crack cocaine and powder as a sensible response in order to protect the law-abiding white people “against the criminals preying on them” (as cited in Mauer, 2018).
The war on drugs was a historic political initiative that served as the solution to criminalize the problem of a now freed black population (Stevenson, 2018). Interpreted as a crime issue instead of a health issue, society prioritized punishment over rehabilitation simply because it was seen to be affecting only the population of lesser interest; African Americans (Mauer, 2018). Disparate sentencing then came into effect as a byproduct of which population each drug was effecting; crack was more punitive than cocaine because crack was seen to be black crime problem, while the white cocaine users needed treatment instead (DuVernay, 2016). This trend is allowed to continue through mass incarceration of drug offenders, as it serves to blacken America’s prison population because of our neglect to recognize the impact of history on black Americans.
Once you’ve been branded a criminal, some aspect of Jim Crow are now legal for these same reasons. African Americans are inherently subjected to a compound effect of mass incarceration, since the practice has lead to an increased number of criminals convicted for low-level drug offenses and increased sentences for those with a prior record; both of which we know are already common for African American population (Stevenson, 2018). It’s because of this that we have more black males under correctional supervision than we ever had in slavery (DuVernay, 2016). Stevenson (2018) goes as far to suggest that racial terror lynching, the war on drugs, and “race-neutral” policies like the habitual offender rule are all tools used to victimize African American communities. The racial biases within these policies, created to legalize racial subordination, have compromised the ability for just treatment in our criminal justice system (Stevenson, 2018). After centuries of freeing an oppressed population, only to condemn them to new forms of that same subjugation, this documentary begs the question; is the United States really the land of the free?
As this documentary led me develop a deeper understanding of this issue, I believe the answer is no. Our society is the product of the history that our ancestors had chosen, and we are left to develop it with nothing to go off of, except our history. A lack of understanding for that history is exactly what we have, in our historic failure to effectively address the legacy of racial inequality (Stevenson, 2018). And I believe that this documentary is a great tool to fill that hole; to educate society, escape resistance for understanding the victimization of black people, and confront our violent past in order to end the cycle our ancestors had created (Stevenson, 2018).
By Jenna Albitz
References
DuVernay, A. (Director) (2016). 13th, https://www.netflix.com/
Mauer, M. (2018). The endurance of racial disparity in the criminal justice system. In A. J. Davis, Policing the Black Man: Arrest, Prosecution, and Imprisonment (pp. 31-56). Vintage Books.
Stevenson, B. (2018). A presumption of guilt: The legacy of America’s history of racial injustice. In A. J. Davis, Policing the Black Man: Arrest, Prosecution, and Imprisonment (pp. 3-20). Vintage Books.