13th: A Documentary Complement to Black Panther

“The way that we appeal to voters’ sense of fear and anxiety in our nation runs through black bodies.” Khalil Gibran Muhammad‘s powerful words, from an interview partway through the film, serve as a running theme of Ava DuVernay’s 2016 documentary 13th. In an era where politicians once again seem to be capitalizing on citizens’ fears rather than their hopes, it is a particularly timely production, tracing the thread of slavery from the emancipatory 13th Amendment in 1865 through to what Michelle Alexander in a recent book has called The New Jim Crow.

The documentary separates the thread into several strands, each representing a different phase of US history since the passage of the 13th Amendment. The first phase capitalized on the “except as punishment for crime” clause in the new amendment, with newly freed blacks arrested for minor offenses – loitering, vagrancy – and essentially re-enslaved as convict labor leased out by the prison system to local businesses and landowners. In this way, state governments moved into the role previously occupied by slaveowners.

As convict leasing helped rebuild the economy and infrastructure of the South, states and municipalities also found ways to reestablish the social hierarchy they viewed as most appropriate. Using Jim Crow laws, they formally codified segregation and introduced literacy tests and poll taxes to disenfranchise black citizens. Not until the civil rights movement of the mid-20th century and the 1965 Voting Rights Act did Jim Crow laws recede. Unfortunately, remnants of that era remain. Although it is not featured in the film, the Voting Rights Act is under attack, and voting is harder than buying a gun in some states.

Given the number of (white) people who have died in mass shootings in recent years, the relative difficulty of voting articulates how little we value true democracy. Apparently, the possibility of voter fraud by people who don’t look like the majority – something that occurs with such a vanishingly small probability as to be irrelevant to actual election outcomes – is scarier than potentially losing our children to the bullets from a mass shooter’s gun – something that happens so regularly that every child in the US now practices for it.

The most important strand in 13th, though, is the overrepresentation of blacks in the US prison system. The documentary opens with Barack Obama stating that the US has 5% of the world’s population but 25% of its prison population, and a later graphic shows that only one in seventeen white men will serve time, while fully one third of black men will. DuVernay makes good use of song lyrics throughout, flashing them on screen during transitions to highlight the pervasiveness of incarceration in black culture.

Public policy, in the form of the so-called “war on drugs” and the later 1994 Crime Bill, inculcated mass incarceration, and its impact on the black community was greater partially because, as the film points out, black leaders had been systematically undermined during and directly after the civil rights movement, leaving a dearth of leadership. John Ehrlichman, an advisor to Richard Nixon, admitted that the “war on drugs” was actually formulated as a political strategy to help legitimize law enforcement terrorization of both hippies and blacks while vilifying both groups “night after night on the evening news.” Rather than treating drug use as a health issue, the Nixon administration chose to treat it as a crime issue, a choice with consequences that have reverberated strongly through white communities with the recent opioid epidemic.

Reagan continued the war on drugs, and the role of Charles Rangel in Nancy Reagan’s “Just Say No” campaign is used by some (white) commentators interviewed to suggest that blame should be biracial. The inclusion of these pundits and a few others like them is a false nod to objectivity, and the film would have been stronger without them. Giving more screen time to passionate, black intellectuals would have been more powerful than watching self-important white men sound silly, something we experience every day, no matter where we live.

While some of the film’s strongest material comes at the beginning, linking the use of media in the early 1900s to an upsurge in membership in the KKK, the bulk of its vitriol is disgorged toward the end, when it details the 1994 Crime Bill and the stand-your-ground laws written behind the scenes by the shadowy American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC). Mandatory minimums and three strikes rules hit black areas particularly hard, hollowing out families, and stand-your-ground laws have turned being “other” in unexpected places into a capital offense. Several experts interviewed express their chagrin that even blacks are buying into the negative labels applied to them as a group, disseminating a cycle of distrust in black communities.

Distrust can be attenuated with knowledge, though. Consequently, watching 13th should be part of every American history course. Not only will it help those of us who aren’t black or brown appreciate why Black Panther is so important, it will also help us understand what kinds of conversations we should be having with our elected officials if we really believe equality and freedom are core American values.

* It is worth noting that some reviewers have taken issue with how certain statistics were reported and displayed as graphics. (For instance, here.) However, none of the quibbles change the overall narrative that blacks are overrepresented and have been since they were putatively freed by the 13th Amendment.

**The picture accompanying this post is of Angela Davis, who is featured in the film. She is an activist who refused to be cowed and used her intellect to win her freedom.

***Many thanks to Dr. Jennifer Scroggins, who made sure I saw this!