Can’t tell you *precisely* what made me want to watch this movie earlier this week, but it’s definitely been on my radar since it came out last year and was among the Academy Award nominees. It did not disappoint.
THE BLURB
Filmmaker Ava DuVernay explores the history of racial inequality in the United States, focusing on the fact that the nation’s prisons are disproportionately filled with African-Americans. It is titled after the Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, which freed the slaves and prohibited slavery (unless as punishment for a crime).
WHAT WORKED
I really, really liked this documentary. I’m surprised, actually, that it *didn’t* win the Oscar for best documentary. I see that OJ: Made in America won instead; I guess I’ll have to watch that movie, too.
See…I grew up in rural Northern California with lumberjacks and tree-huggers. Both of those polar opposites, very caucasian it would be relevant to point out, seemed content that race was an issue that had been solved in the late 1960s with Martin Luther King. That’s what I was taught; it was over. We were equal, it had been legislated, and it was DONE. Any further discussion was pointless…
I was NOT taught that racial equality was a battle that would probably never be over, that these rights that had been won required constant vigilance from all of us as a nation, and that YES…America was still very racist. Riots in LA to me, a white kid living so far away up in NorCal were about how scary and dangerous it was to live in a big city. They were not about rampant poverty, police corruption…or how that situation was created by an exodus of freed slaves from southern communities to escape literal death, how those slaves were packed into small segregated communities, denied jobs, and then labeled “ghetto” and “dangerous.” I was not taught how former slave owners moved into the prison and law-enforcement businesses, and within YEARS of the Civil War ending were locking up the former slaves they didn’t lynch, and were putting them back to work in chain gangs in the same fields they’d been plowing before.
It was written right into the 13th constitutional amendment how these slave owners could keep their control over the black people they’d literally just fought a war to own…”Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.”
Jim Crow laws took care of a lot of what those wishing to keep this populace under firm control…until MLK and the Civil Rights bill. So, what happened next? The era of mass incarceration, and the narrative of the big, bad, scary “super-predator” black man. Prison populations have *sky-rocketed* since the signing of that Civil Rights bill, 500% since 1970, and the vast majority of that prison population is black, or other minorities…60%, in fact, despite their actual population in our country is far less. To put that specifically into perspective: 1 in 17 white men in our country are incarcerated. For black men…it’s 1 in 3. ONE IN THREE. THE FUCK??? Latinos fare only slightly better at 1 in 6. For Black women, it’s even worse…1 in 111 white women are currently in prison, for black women that’s 1 in 18.
I learned about these things in college…and that irks me. It’s so easy to turn a blind eye to these kinds of things or to dismiss the outcries of other populations or demographics because they’re far away and life is hard for everyone…but those numbers speak for themselves, guys. It is HARDER for some people than it is others. And fuck, when they speak their truth, we should fucking listen.
This is all to say that this movie took a topic I knew a tiny, little bit about, something I’d mostly heard in political speeches, or briefly referenced in university courses…and really put a fine point on it. There is a direct link between slavery in this country and the current rates at which we are locking away minorities. There are many factors that contribute to those numbers, some of it is outright racism, and others are much deeply embedded like systemic socioeconomic oppression…but the result is clear.
Consider this man to be educated. I’m listening.
WHAT DIDN’T WORK:
Not much. I can’t think of anything, to be honest. The graphics were great, the interviews, and the pacing.
This is a documentary everyone should see. If you know these things to be true, or even if you’re skeptical. Watch the stats as they roll past and paint a picture. Listen to the accounts and the analysis. And then let’s do something about it. Together.
9/10 – highly recommended