Expansion Is Oppression

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The documentary, The 13th, explores the roots and expansion of the American prison system, particularly in how it relates to the oppression of black Americans.

Director and creator of the documentary, Ava DuVernay, engages the viewer in a historical timeline that allows the full weight of the crisis of mass incarceration to be analyzed as the work develops.

The film sets up how the expansion of the prison system is an explicitly racial project because of how, historically, the American prison system has been used to replace outlawed forms of oppression, keeping the black community systematically disenfranchised. This was done successfully so, as one is currently five times as likely to be incarcerated while black then white.

SYSTEMIC RACISM

From the War on Drugs and subsequent mass incarceration replacing Jim Crow, and the notion of criminality being associated with the black male and black empowerment, the prison system’s expansion has shown itself to be a tool of systemic racism.

To begin with, the documentary analyzes past systems of oppression toward black Americans from the viewpoint of how they relate to mass incarceration today. As a result, the truths of the past are made relevant for conversations on the expanding prison system and the black oppression that accompanies it.

The historical timeline narrative of the film allows the viewer to build knowledge as the film goes on to ultimately be able to understand how the expanding prison system is an undeniably racial project.

13th AMENDMENT

Historically starting with the end of the Civil War, the 13th explains how the 13th amendment didn’t end slavery as it was still legal if you committed a crime, thus white America used that exception to keep black Americans systematically disenfranchised.

An important point emphasized early in the film is the centrality of wanting to keep the system of cheap black labor that America was built on. This is the root of much of black disenfranchisement, smartly shown in this documentary as present at every point of the black oppression story after slavery.

With the 13th amendment, black Americans were targeted for “crimes” white could not be, like loitering and joblessness, in order to be able to enslave them and use their labor through the prison system.

CHEAP BLACK LABOR

The scam that America was built on

Again, by revealing this information through a historical timeline, the viewer can see how the drive for cheap black labor, from slavery onwards, is a mainstay feature of the prison system, as today unpaid/underpaid prison labor is still a utilized labor source. In addition, the timeline allows repeated rhetoric to be easily highlighted, like the long relationship between criminality and simply being black.

In the historical timeline, the documentary next shows Jim Crow Laws relegating black Americans to permanent second class status, but soon the Civil Rights movement comes and must deal with the continuing harsh association between “criminals” and the resisting black community.

As Michelle Alexander highlights, studies show over 90% of the time if you ask someone to picture a criminal, they picture a black person.

SELECTIVE CRIMINALIZATION

The film depicts a series of revered Civil Rights leaders in their mugshots, in court, and being depicted as “dangerous” in the media. This visual moment in the film makes the viewer confront that America once criminalized the people and movement that finally got the American constitution to fulfill its ideals and promises. As a result, the viewer confronts that how we deem who’s a “criminal” today, who we lock in a cage, should be subject to serious questioning, particularly as black and latinx folks are grossly overrepresented in the incarcerated population.

The Civil Rights movement, in an interesting way, was the first time being arrested as a black person was seen as heroic, as in the case of Rosa Parks or Angela Davis. However, Van Jones makes an important point here, that at the end of the day black leaders were being arrested, and less to this point murdered by the state, in mass and with consistency. This led to few leaders of that generation surviving. He repeats several times, “They (Americans) are so afraid of black dissent.”

UNDEMOCRATIC TARGETING

No black activist or leaders’ story exists without the full weight of the criminal justice system being weaponized against them. In this way, while arrests were seen as heroic for the first time, it was still an awful undemocratic show of targeting black activists and putting them in a cage.

The Black Power movement focused on changing that genocidal relationship between law enforcement and black America, resulting in its particularly harsh targeting by the U.S. criminal justice system (along with the FBI and CIA).

WEAPONIZING JUSTICE

While the Civil Rights movement was successful in ending Jim Crow laws as they stood, the dangerous association between criminal and black would become more and more weaponized over time as a new way to have a second-class citizenry. This was done by having the police state target and imprison black Americans in mass. First, there was a correlation between the Civil Rights movement and rising crime rates, and it was falsified to be causation. This, for some, substantiated the fear that if black Americans were given complete freedom they would respond with criminal acts.

Again, this theme of unsubstantiated fear of black resistance and empowerment groups shows itself, with Nixon taking advantage of it this time and targeting the undeservingly feared Black Power groups.

The association of criminality with the newly “freed” black community was so strongly associated that the use of the notion of crime started to be a stand in for race. For example, if Nixon said there was a War on Crime, he meant a war on black people.

WEAPONIZING DRUG USE

What constituted crime also became wider for black people with the era of Reagan’s War on Drugs that criminalized the sickness of addiction. In the documentary this segment on the War on Drugs is rooted in shocking quotes revealing true intentions that the black community already knew, like the quote from Nixon’s advisor who said, “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.” This expansionary moment in American prison history was built from a war on stripping sick, largely black, poor, and male, Americans away from their family, livelihood, and right to not be enslaved.

Some policies were obviously racist, like the harsher sentences for crack cocaine, sold more in black communities, than for powder cocaine that was used in whiter, more affluent areas. Ultimately, issues that are rooted in persistent racial poverty like addiction and drug dealing were dealt with by pouring millions into drug law enforcement and not in community relief or help.

SYSTEM IS RACIAL

If the viewer is convinced by the end of the documentary that the prison system was built on and continues to be a systemic form of persisting racism, then the expansion of the system that overwhelmingly incarcerates black and latinx communities is an explicitly racial project.

The building through history that DuVernay utilizes shows the viewer the persistent themes of criminalizing black folk for anything and everything and fearing black empowerment. The genocidal relationship between the black community and law enforcement replaced, in Michelle Alexander terms, the Jim Crow era of oppression.

Expanding our massly incarcerated population will only continue the over-criminalization of black America and as the 13th shows us we already have a history of over-criminalizing our black communities to make up for.

Bibliography:

Alexander, Michelle. 2012. The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness.  The New Press.

Davis, Angela Y. Are Prisons Obsolete?: an Open Media Book. Seven Stories Press, 2010.

Forman Jr, James. 2017. Locking up Our Own. Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Pfaff, John. 2017. Locked In. Basic Books.

Rios, Victor M. 2011. Punished: Policing the Lives of Black and Latino Boys. NYU Press.

Scheingold, Stuart. 1995. “The Politics of Street Crime and Criminal Justice.”

About the Article

An examination of the message conveyed by the film The 13th.

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