Growing up in a predominantly white small town as a white person meant that I didn’t experience racism ever. I never truly understood just how much discrimination minorities experienced on a day-to-day basis. I also never understood how much our judicial system discriminated against minorities, especially people of color. But one day, while perusing Netflix, I came across the documentary “13th” and I was intrigued from the very beginning.
This documentary is an especially unique one, in that it focuses on the history of slavery and post-Civil War racist legislation that led to the mass incarceration of black men beginning in the 1970s. Most of us know that black people in the United States were not exactly free after the Civil War, with Jim Crow laws and public lynchings becoming more and more prevalent, especially in the south. And as a result of this, Black Americans were labeled as second-class citizens. Fast-forward to the 1970s when the “War on Crime” created mandatory lengthy sentencing for even low-level crimes. The “War on Crime” was meant to represent those involved in the civil rights movement of the 60s and was used, especially by Nixon, as a way to criminalize those individuals, which was predominantly Black Americans. One of Nixon advisors even admitted that they were fighting against Black Americans, stating,
“The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course, we did,” (13th, 2016).
Once Reagan came into the scene, the sense of “chaos in our urban cities” was used by his campaign and by the Republican party to help appeal to working-class White Americans (13th, 2016). The “War on Drugs” was used against those in urban areas, which were predominantly Black Americans. The War on Crime and Drugs was truly the beginning of mass incarceration and the prison-industrial complex
To make it easier to see the big picture, here are some statistics. In 1970, the U.S. Prison population was 357,292, and by 1980 it had grown to 513,900. Now, 200,000 doesn’t seem like much, but compared to the beginning of the 20th century, that jump is exponential. And by the end of the 20th century, the U.S. prison population had grown to 2,015,300. If that doesn’t scream mass incarceration, then I don’t know what does (13th, 2016).
In all, 13th directed by Ava DuVernay is a masterpiece that expertly depicts and explains the reasons behind the mass incarceration of black men. I urge everyone, especially white people, to watch this documentary, as it is truly eye-opening.
HCXO