13th Documentary and the Fight for Racial Equality

Ava DuVernay’s documentary “13th” represents the racial inequality that persisted in the United States as well as dehumanization and mass incarceration of blacks through social constructionism. 13th explores the history of modern-day segregation in the criminal justice system. The documentary is based on the 13th amendment of the United States of America which makes it unconstitutional to confine anyone as a slave. In other words, it guarantees freedom to all Americans. But there was an exception that deprived the freedom of the criminals. The clause allowed criminals to be treated as a slave. Slavery was a part of the economic system and the demise of slavery after the civil war crippled the southern economy. There were 4 million people formerly considered as property and they were a major part of the economic production system in the south, and now when these people are free what do you do to rebuild your economy? What do you do with these people? The 13th amendment loophole was immediately exploited. After the civil war, there was a boom in prison population. African Americans were arrested in huge numbers. They were arrested for extremely minor cases like loitering and vagrancy. Jails provided for the labour to rebuild the economy. White supremacists and business corporations needed black people working. The mythology of black criminality came into existence.

In the book ‘Social Construction of Reality’ by Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann, they say, “Reification is the apprehension of human phenomena as if they were things, that is, in non-human or supra-human terms” (Pg106) . In simple terms reification discusses how the social world is treated like objects. This can be observed when Woodrow Wilson, the sitting President of the United States of America had a private screening of ‘Birth of the Nation’ at White house and the consequences that brought with the growing fame to the movie. The movie reduced black people as a demeaned animal like image, cannibalistic, animalistic image of African American Male. They projected blacks as beasts that needed to be tamed. ‘Birth of the Nation’ was the accurate representation of how the society would function later on. ‘Birth of the Nation’ was partly responsible in how the African Americans were treated. With the tremendous burst of popularity of the movie came another wave of terrorism where negroes were killed and tortured by mobs. People started to practice lynching against the blacks as they were under the impression that they had committed a crime. Thousands of Africans Americans were murdered by white supremacist hate groups like Ku Klux Klan. Africans Americans were forced to migrate to different parts of the United States of America as refugees of terror and not because they wanted better economic opportunities. When this type of open terrorism became unacceptable then segregation shifted to something more legal- Jim Crow. There were laws passed to downgrade the African Americans to a permanent second-class status. Discrimination for basic things where blacks weren’t allowed to go to restaurants, schools and not allowed to vote was bearing a burden that was injurious. There was a need for not only a civil rights movement but a human rights movement. Civil rights activists were deliberately portrayed as criminals by media. Civil activists and politicians were arrested and for the first time there was a shift in the notion- where getting arrested was a noble thing.

When the civil rights movement was gaining momentum and the legalisations like The Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act were passed, unfortunately the crime rates in the United States had increased. It became very easy for the politicians to say that the civil rights movement was contributing to the rising crime rates and, if we give the negroes the freedom then this is how we would be repaid, with crime. The prison population in 1970 was 357,292 while in 1980 it rose to 513,900. The sudden rise in the prison population gave rise to an era which was termed as ‘mass incarceration.’ When President Nixon was elected, he propagated that law and order was necessary and that we had fight against what he called ‘a total war.’ He used radical methods and infused huge amounts of money in the local police stations to combat against rising protests for women, gays and blacks. This call for law and order becomes an integral part to a later known tactic called the Southern Strategy. The Nixon administration official admitted that the war on drugs was a scheme to throw black people in jail. Even though President Nixon was the first one coin the term ‘war on drugs,’ President Ronald Reagan was the one who turned it to a literal one. According to popular opinion polls in that day said it was not, President Reagan was determined to put the fight against drugs onto the agenda and to define it as a problem. Under the Reagan administration the United States faced economic crises and there was in increase in poverty. Basically, the war on drugs was a pretext under which the police terrorised the blacks. By 1985 the prison population has reached 759,100. The so-called war on drugs was actually a war on communities of colour. Black people are generally over represented in the news as criminals. If one turned on the news at night, they would see policemen arresting number of black men. They are shown as criminals more times than accurate. These media channels instil fear among people and when you make people afraid, you can always justify putting people in behind bars.

In the central park jogger case, five innocent teens were arrested because they had allegedly raped and committed murder because of the public pressure. These children, four of them under 18 were put in adult prisons for six to eleven years before DNA testing proved that they were innocent. We introduce the black as robbers, murders, rapists and drug dealers. People in society assume that blacks are born as criminals. In ‘Biological Determinism,’ R. C. Lewontin states, “The ideology of biological determinism has been built over the last two hundred years as a solution to this socio-political paradox.” Yet there are people who believe that African Americans are inheritably dangerous to the society. The white presumes that they by birth have the right to be superior and that blacks were merely a vassal or a servant biologically. They fail to believe that it was an evil ploy to make blacks their slaves. In ‘The Unadjusted Girl’ (1923) William I. Thomas, an early critic of theories on racial differences developed the concept of the 'definition of the situation” which stated that people not only respond to the objective features of a situation or person but also the meaning that situation or person has for them. Thus, we can create false images or stereotypes that become real in their consequences. Stereotypes are unreliable generalization all the members of a group that do not recognize individual differences within the group. In an experiment where people were shown images of few citizens of the United States of America and asked who might be a convicted felon, most of them replied that the African Americans might be convicted of major crimes. In fact, none of the images shown to them were of any criminals. The people who were interviewed had a preconceived notion that the crimes would be committed by African Americans or that they were capable of doing so. The stereotypes about ‘black’ have been going on over decades and it has been implanted in them subconsciously.

Virtually no white person can imagine the tremendous pain and suffering the blacks had to go through. Berger and Luckmann in ‘Social Construction of Reality’ state that subjective reality is a socially constructed reality . Through the process of socialization people are made a part of the society. For example, in the United States, the public were deliberately educated over decades that black people are a menace to the society. The status of a man becomes real through communication and social definitions. One of the biggest struggles of African Americans in the United States would be their attempt to be understood as full, complicated human beings. African Americans have been subjected to disenfranchisement, lynching and Jim Crow. The modern day prison is no less than slavery in this prison industrial complex.