Film Response The film The 13th, written by Ava Duvernay , based on the Thirteenth Amendment and explores the intersection of race, justice and mass incarnation in the United States. The Thirteenth Amendment formally abolished slavery however, the film talks about the amendments exception clause. This states that slavery is illegal except as a punishment for a crime. Duvernays documentary gives us a compelling view on how the modern-day prison/labor system relates to slavery and is framed by the Black Live Matter movement. The thirteenth amendment states that unless you’re criminalized, you’re free. So if you’re put in jail that doesn’t apply to you. Slavery was abolished for everyone except criminals. Duvernay exhibits how slavery has been maintained in practices since the end of the American Civil War through actions such as criminalizing behavior and enabling police to arrest poor, freedmen. African Americans were arrested for things as simple as loitering and then while in prison, had to provide labor for the state. The 13th describes mass incarceration in the prison system as a negative reaction to the civil rights movements. The prison system continues to be racist and violent, however in ways that are continually evolving. Starting in the 1940’s, the amount statistics of the amount of prisoners rises slowly, but steeply. A rise in the numbers began during the Civil Rights movement and continues into todays society. The more we see the protest for rights increase, the harder the political system fights back. They do whatever they could to punish blacks, with means of imprisonment. The 13th effectively demonstrates that criminalization continues to rise and has been a constant feature of racism. Duvernay also examines the prison-industrial complex, showing how much money is being made by corporation from such incarnations. One of the facts that was stated in this movie was that 1 in 3 African Americans will go to jail in their lifetime, while 1 in 17 White Americans will go to jail. There is no reason for the numbers to have that big of a difference between African Americans and White Americans. This statistic clearly shows how unfair the criminal justice system is and how racism is still a continuing factor. With slavery being banned, white people took it into their own hands to find any other possible way to shame African Americans and make them lesser human beings. Blacks were seen as and called “super predators” which is just another way make African Americans seem as if they were inferior human beings or even animals. White people took advantage of African Americans by disenfranchisement, lynching’s and Jim Crow. This was also around the time politicians declared a war on drugs, which weighed more heavily on minority communities, leading to mass incarnation in the United States. They made it so blacks were defenseless across the South at the turn of the 20th century, excluding them from the political system, at the same time that lynching of blacks by white mobs reached a peak in these decades. Duvernay talks about how black people were said to be out of control by white people, and are a threat towards white women. We see an example of this with 14-year-old Emmett Till who was lynched in Mississippi, after a white women said she was offended by him in a grocery store. However, with recent information we have come to find out that this never happened and Emmett Till was innocent. This dehumanization allowed for the acceptance of laws and ideas. The documentary makes the case that those drug busts, Jim Crow laws and segregation are all variations of domination of blacks. Currently the orison complex is just a new version of the same old problem. An interviewee in the film says, “Demographic geography of this country was shaped but this era. They did not go there as immigrants looking for jobs, but as refugees.” This relates to topics we talked about in class and read in chapters six and seven in Raboteau, specifically the Great Migration. Factors that pushed them away included racial injustice and threat of violence(lynching) and depressed rural economy. The movie states that this was “not just a civil rights movement, but a human rights movement.” In chapter six of Raboteau King argued that “it was necessary for black people to protest against segregation to avoid cooperating with an evil system. If one passively accepted injustice, one enabled it to continue” (Raboteau). Although Martin Luther King took a much less violent approach, he still believed protests, marches, rallies and boycotts were necessary. You would think since white Americans were so terrible to African Americans, Dr. King would want to be violent back with them, however, he says, “nonviolence was the morally superior way to act” (Raboteau). The film The 13th uncovers a lot while also working its way to the current days of Black Lives Matter and the terrifying videos of the endless list of African-Americans being shot by police or folks who supposedly “stood their ground.” All in all, The 13th boldly asks the question if African-Americans were actually ever truly “free” in this country, and if slavery was truly ever abolished. We notice that when one method or racism fails, another one takes its place. We are freer, as this generation has it a lot easier than our ancestors who were enslaved, but the question of being as completely “free” is still a question that stands out. If not, we wonder if there will ever be a day where we see peace and all segregation and forms of racism dissolves. The final thing that I took away from this film is that change must come not from politicians and the government, but from the hearts of people as Americans, cause in the end we are the only ones who can create change.