Peeking Behind The Curtain: An Analysis of 13th
13th, directed by Ava DuVernay explores the hidden history of systemic racism in American society. The critically acclaimed documentary uses interviews with world-renowned educators, activists, and historians like Angela Davis, Van Jones, and Corey Booker all sharing their professional insight and perspective on our country’s long history of the demonization and exploitation of black people. DuVernay divides the film into digestible sections and adequately utilizes powerful visuals and score, paired with footage from over the past 70 years to shed light on the background of how the treatment and depiction of black people led to our exploitation in the post-civil war era. One effective message in the film is that even though the 13th Amendment of our constitution abolishes slavery, white America found new ways to marginalize black people.
13th brings in a variety of credible sources to discuss their professional insight to back up their claims. Writer and Director Ava DuVernay has a long history of making films that touch on the history and effects of racism in our country. From her directing and writing work on the groundbreaking biopic, Selma which details the late Dr. Martin Luther King Jr and his participation in the 1965 Voting March earned a Best Picture nomination at the 2014 Academy Awards. Along with DuVernay behind the camera, she also brought in an all-star cast of historians, lawyers, and educators like Angela Davis, a key member of the civil rights movement and now a professor at UC Santa Cruz, along with Cory Booker, U.S Senator for the state of New Jersey, and Van Jones, the Emmy award-winning author, lawyer and political commentator. Who all of which come together to discuss their insight on the plight of the black American. The film goes over significant pieces of legislation and policies that are shown to exploit people of color, such as the infamous 1994 Crime Bill that built more prison cells, established more aggressive policing, and was a key contributor to the mass incarcerations of the 1990s that devastated black communities. As well as practices like Redlining in the American housing policy that “graded” neighborhoods based on their racial makeup and marked neighborhoods with minority occupants in red to categorized them as “high risks” for mortgage lenders to disincentivize them from renting to people who lived in those areas.
The film imbued me with fear at times and was especially challenging to explore themes of police brutality and slavery. The film used pictures and clips of men and children getting, shot by police, battered in riots, and even lynched. Viewing and listening to the accounts from the witnesses and even family members of slain black people filled me with a deep visceral feeling of fear and despair that something could one day happen to me. One story that really stuck out to me was the tragedy of Emmett Till, a 14-year-old black boy who was kidnapped and brutally murdered by a group of white men for allegedly wolf-whistling at a white woman. What pained me most was to hear that the murderers were not charged with any punishment for their crimes because an all-white jury believed that the state didn’t have enough evidence to correctly identify Till’s body, despite the fact that the murderers were positively identified as Till’s killers. On top of that, the film highlighted the historically racist and stereotypical depiction of black people in the media. The film showed clips dating all the way back to the early ages of cinema in the 1950s where there would be white men in black face depicting us as dangerous and barbaric, as they would run around, hunched back chasing and groping white women. It felt dehumanizing to see white people portray black people to look like inferior beings, and it got me to reflect that some people still have that idea of black people because of how our current news media portrays us today. For instance, if you look at channels like Fox News you hear the rhetoric that Black Lives Matter is a terrorist organization, and looking back at last summer’s protests over justice for George Floyd were called riots and thought as a ploy for people to rob and loot. It fears me to think about how in the wake of the death of a man who was unjustly murdered by the police people justified it, calling George Floyd a druggie and a criminal completely content with the idea that it was the officer’s duty to kill him. It scares me to think about how we still uphold these staunchly racist stereotypes today.
After watching 13th, I felt more connected to my people. I felt that I gained more knowledge on the history of systemic racism and obtained a heightened sense of awareness for injustice. My first time watching the film I was going into my senior year of high school, and looking back I see that I had this naive consciousness of ignorant bliss. I was young and not truly aware of what was going on around me socially. In school, we only ever touched on a few of the abundance horrors throughout our nation’s history with black people, slavery, and other injustices. But, it wasn’t until after I saw this film that my eyes were opened to see how deeply connected slavery, the 13th Amendment, the prison industrial complex, and other socioeconomic factors and barriers were put into place to keep people that look like me down. Since rewatching the film for this project, I have done extensive reflection and now see that it planted a seed for the ability to look back at the history of this country and think about how America treats the people who don’t look like our founding fathers. In my years since watching this film, I have graduated high school, completed a semester of college, and grown so much as a black man. And to look back at the place where I was before I viewed this film, I think about how its topics brought together all the instances of police brutality, statistics that show why black people make up a majority of our prison population despite making up only 13% of the population and, showed me why my majority-black populated hometown looks different from our wealthy, white-majority neighbor. But most importantly, due to everything I’ve learned I now feel motivated to educate others and tear down the stereotypes that have placed upon me.
