Final essay. 13th by Ava DuVernay. Brief Synopsis.

13th by Ava DuVernay
Name of Student
Institutional Affiliation
13th by Ava DuVernay
Brief Synopsis
13th by Ava DuVernay is a powerful documentary about the thirteenth amendment of the United States Constitution and how the words in within the amendment have been used to find loopholes that are used to legally enslave Americans, especially people of ethnic minorities. The thirteenth amendment abolished slavery in 1865 but within it are embedded the words: “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist in the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction,” (DuVernay, 2016). Of note in the statement is the ‘exception clause’ inserted which basically allows those incarcerated to be treated as slaves of the state. This ‘exception clause’ has formed a devastating loophole that has been exploited by politicians and corporations over the years to engineer a system that incarcerates people for the smallest of crimes leading to the culture of mass incarceration that we now see in the United States.
The documentary provides a historical background of racial discrimination spanning over a hundred and fifty years, from the great American Civil War to the modern times. It directly links these racial issues with the prison-industrial complex that has led to the increase of the rates of incarceration in the county. Importantly, the documentary links slavery with the corresponding rise in the number of African Americans that have been incarcerated since the abolition of slavery, a culture that has become to known as the “mythology of black criminality.” This notion and culture began immediately after the Civil war when African Americans were arrested in masses for minor offences so they could provide free labor as prisoners in the south. It continued into the modern era where prisons are contracted by huge corporations to provide cheap labor.
In a step by step narration, the movie goes back to the Him Crow era where African Americans were indiscriminately murdered, butchered and tortured under the assumption that any black person was highly likely to be a criminal. The end of the Jim Crow era saw the beginning of the Civil Right Movement that arose due to the empowerment of minority to fight for equal rights and desegregation of public facilities such as schools. This lead to the introduction of the Voting Rights Act that aimed to remove the legal barriers that had previously prevented African Americans from exercising their right to vote under the constitution (Bundles, 2015). One would think that this would be the end of racial discrimination and to some level slavery, but that was not to be. According to Ava DuVernay, and indirect form of racial control arose where words such as “law and order” and “war on crime” were used to start a fresh wave of open violence and discrimination against African Americans and Latinos.
The documentary exposes political strategies such as the “Southern Strategy” which was meant to appeal to white voters while decimating a significant chunk of the black communities. The war on drugs targeted minority communitie...