On twitter, you might have seen this video floating around. It’s not just propaganda created to advocate against Donald Trump. It’s part of something much bigger, a Netflix exclusive documentary titled “13th”. I had the privilege of watching it in school, and I’m most flabbergasted by the fact that it’s not being talked about more, but not by the black community.
Essentially, the documentary reiterates what black people everywhere already know, but it showcases that to the rest of the public beautifully.
The documentary focuses around the 13th Amendment of the United States Constitution, where slavery was formally abolished. It goes on to claim that while the amendment ran miles for African Americans, one clause caused for the discrimination against them to still take place today:
In short, the film explained how even after the abolition of slavery, African Americans were portrayed as criminals in movies (the documentary using the 1915 movie A Birth Of A Nation as an example) and in media, and how that message translated into everyday life and politics. The exploitation of that one clause caused the stereotypes that African Americans still face today, and has caused for the systematic, judicial oppression and mass incarceration of people of color.
The “war on crime” and the “war on drugs” were really a war on African Americans. The policies that were pushed in the presidencies of Nixon, Reagan, and Clinton were a way to continue slavery in secret, hidden behind the 13th amendment.
The documentary states that not only do the policies inherently criminalize African Americans, they also are designed to generate money for companies that introduced the bills in the first place. This is where the organization ALEC comes in. ALEC stands for American Legislative Exchange Council, and it is “a nonprofit organization of conservative state legislators and private sector representatives that drafts and shares model state-level legislation for distribution among state governments in the United States”. In other words, it is where politicians and companies come together to write bills. The documentary explains how companies, such as the CCA, an organization that controls private prisons, manipulates the government by passing bills that are beneficial to them but are corrupt for the public. The organization was modeled to slowly but surely privatize and monetize the government, and it has already shown its effects.
Companies’ dependency on mass incarceration go so far that they are afraid to lose inmates because it makes them lose money. They deprive people of their civil rights for the benefit of themselves.
As evidence of this claim, the film talks about policies that mandate minimum sentencing and take away the judge’s ability to serve rightful justice on a case to case basis. Not only do these policies cause for injustice, they also scare people into not going to trial in the first place. The film states that 97% of African Americans will not have trials for their convictions because they are afraid of the possibility of getting the minimum sentence, even if they’re innocent. Instead, they take plea bargains, which basically say “Hey, you can go on trial and you might end up with this amount of years if you lose, or you can just take this drastically less amount with no trial at all”.
Plea bargains were developed along with minimum sentencing to ensure that marginalized people end up incarcerated no matter guilt or innocence because more inmates equal more money.
The film then goes on to explain the outrage of the Trayvon Martin case, justify the Black Lives Matter movement, and talk about the present presidential election. It proves that African Americans are still undergoing the same oppression as slavery, just in a less obvious form. Now, I can sit here and tell you every single detail of corruption that the documentary uncovers, but instead I really encourage you to watch it. The key points mentioned above aren’t even half of the disgusting truth unveiled by this revolutionary film. Watch the documentary and educate yourself on the true, dark history of African Americans that still plagues them today. Just remember that their history isn’t in the past, it’s still an ongoing, unjust reality.
