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Ava DuVernay’s documentary 13th takes its name from the 13th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution: “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.”
That subordinate clause, DuVernay argues - “except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted” - has become the loophole through while the American political system has erected its most recent edifice to control and oppress African-Americans in particular (but also communities of color in general): the mass incarceration system. The US has 5% of the world’s population and 25% of its prisoners.
DuVernay places mass incarceration in the context of a series of systems of oppression: slavery itself, convict leasing, Jim Crow, mass incarceration. Systems of oppression, the documentary notes, don’t disappear; they mutate to fit with the mores of the times. Once it became socially unacceptable for politicians to be openly racist, they stopped talking about white supremacy and began talking about law and order, instead. Law and order like in the good old days. The good old days when black people knew their place remains unspoken, but implied.
I suspect that the general outlines of this argument won’t be new to a lot of you: mass incarceration has moved into the national conversation in recent years, because of Black Lives Matter and documentaries like 13th. But it’s still worth seeing 13th because it puts its argument forward so forcefully, and even if the general idea is familiar, it fills in new details.
For instance, one of the questions it poses is - why didn’t the black community oppose mass incarceration? Because, 13th argues, an entire generation of black leadership had been destroyed: Martin Luther King Jr. assassinated, Malcolm X assassinated, the leaders of the Black Panthers murdered by the police, Assata Shakur spirited out of the country to Cuba…
Resistance was ineffective because the people who would have led that resistance were mostly dead, and people who might have stepped up were therefore gunshy. And, also, the cultural and political narrative had become so fixated on crime - both parties were competing to be the toughest on crime - and on the image of young black men as criminals, better-organized resistance might have slowed the process, but it probably could not have stopped it.
And if it had, as DuVernay notes, systems of oppression are flexible. Mass incarceration would have morphed - may morph now, when it finally seems to have begun its process of decline - into some other force of control.
That subordinate clause, DuVernay argues - “except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted” - has become the loophole through while the American political system has erected its most recent edifice to control and oppress African-Americans in particular (but also communities of color in general): the mass incarceration system. The US has 5% of the world’s population and 25% of its prisoners.
DuVernay places mass incarceration in the context of a series of systems of oppression: slavery itself, convict leasing, Jim Crow, mass incarceration. Systems of oppression, the documentary notes, don’t disappear; they mutate to fit with the mores of the times. Once it became socially unacceptable for politicians to be openly racist, they stopped talking about white supremacy and began talking about law and order, instead. Law and order like in the good old days. The good old days when black people knew their place remains unspoken, but implied.
I suspect that the general outlines of this argument won’t be new to a lot of you: mass incarceration has moved into the national conversation in recent years, because of Black Lives Matter and documentaries like 13th. But it’s still worth seeing 13th because it puts its argument forward so forcefully, and even if the general idea is familiar, it fills in new details.
For instance, one of the questions it poses is - why didn’t the black community oppose mass incarceration? Because, 13th argues, an entire generation of black leadership had been destroyed: Martin Luther King Jr. assassinated, Malcolm X assassinated, the leaders of the Black Panthers murdered by the police, Assata Shakur spirited out of the country to Cuba…
Resistance was ineffective because the people who would have led that resistance were mostly dead, and people who might have stepped up were therefore gunshy. And, also, the cultural and political narrative had become so fixated on crime - both parties were competing to be the toughest on crime - and on the image of young black men as criminals, better-organized resistance might have slowed the process, but it probably could not have stopped it.
And if it had, as DuVernay notes, systems of oppression are flexible. Mass incarceration would have morphed - may morph now, when it finally seems to have begun its process of decline - into some other force of control.
