The Movie 13th Essay

I had intended on going to the vigil Wednesday night (2/8) but much to my dismay, there was no vigil (or I missed it). So instead of attending a diversity event for this paper, I watched a documentary on Netflix called 13th. This film discusses the issue of racism in the United States criminal justice system; specifically relating to how the 13th amendment transformed the view of African Americans from slaves to criminals.
I thought the film was very thought-provoking and had strong concepts. Whoever named the movie 13th deserves a raise because that is the best title ever imagined. During the movie they follow the timeline of events in history starting in the slave era. They mention how white people intentionally used their rhetoric in literature to turn communities against black people. Whites made them out to look like rapists and a threat to white women. The film Birth of a Nation strengthened this ideology by making the blacks look like cannibals and mongrels. The documentary went on to talk about Jim Crow laws and the KKK. One quote that really stuck out to me was by the beloved MLK Jr, “justice too long delayed is justice denied.” I believe this really sums up the entire movement and is even still apparent today.
They had to come up with ways to intentionally think of unintentional ways of giving the public a bad image of the black community. They did so by giving crack cocaine a higher penalty than powder because “black people mainly used crack and the war on drugs is so apparent.” TV shows would show the public images of black people being arrested for crack and keeping the rich, white folks who did powder on the sidelines (don’t get me started, I wrote an entire paper on this issue). With a 100:1 ratio, poor people were being targeted for their drug