Ava Duvernay 13th Essay

Race and mass incarceration. It is a harsh topic for many, but Ava DuVernay’s documentary 13th provides all of the background information needed for that conversation. On the other hand, the Selma director’s film manages to capture the depth and insidiousness of more than a century of cultural, societal and economic oppression along racial lines and then condenses it into a brisk 100-minute movie. Furthermore, unlike many films that surface the same conclusion, DuVernay pinpoints the injustice of America’s institutional racism back to the amendment that abolished slavery and “freed” all men and women. Lodged into the body of the law by a means of two commas, is more than a third of the 13th amendment's words: “except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted.” From DuVernay’s viewpoint, this was a “loophole,” one incited historically to prolong the economic system of the institution that the amendment was made to destroy, and currently used to bolster up a prison industrial complex that only
It compellingly ties the myth of black criminality pushed forward in D.W. Griffith’s The Birth of the Nation with what was see evidenced in TV show like Cops and in the media portrayal of police shootings. It conveys the corporations that directly benefit from the mass incarceration of black men—companies with like CCA, Aramark, and Corizon—as having more in common with southern plantation owners of the 1800’s than any of us would care to admit. Additionally, it surfaces the institutions such as ALEC which were created to undermine the regular american and benefit lobbyists, corporations, and politicians. But perhaps what was even more powerful was the film’s forgotten tragedies― one we don’t know, but should ― like that of Kalief Browder, whose unjust three-year imprisonment at Rikers Island led to his suicide at