Documentary Analysis Of The Documentary 'Black Lives Matter'

Sandra Gonzalez

21 October 2017

Professor Tonymon

Documentary Analysis: 13th

Black Lives Matter. On one side, blacks are protesting racial inequality, white supremacy, and police brutality here in the United States; and on the other, Republicans have labeled this movement as a hate group against whites and as a form of domestic terrorism. This is not the central subject matter of the documentary 13th, but it is tied into it. 13th is, in short, about the failings of our justice system. It analyzes the criminalization of black people in the United States and how various legal processes, like segregation, Jim Crow, and later, the war on drugs, evolved to wage a war against the freedoms of people of color-- creating a system of slavery that still,

Prison has become a multi-billion dollar industry, leading to the privatization of prisons through partnerships between ALEC, and the Corrections Corporation of America (CCA). When a state contracts CCA to run their “correctional facilities”, they must keep prisons filled. This is done, once again, by criminalizing minor offenses, raising bail, and lengthening sentences. The bail system, in particular, keeps many people that otherwise wouldn’t be in jail behind bars, because bail is set to numbers as high as $10,000. Regardless of crime and culpability, those who are too poor to get out, stay in jail, while the wealthy walk free. As the system works, wealth, not culpability, shapes

While watching this film, I became aware of the subconscious ways in which racist message are transmitted to and absorbed by society. 13th shows how the misrepresentation and overrepresentation of African Americans and Hispanic/Latinos as criminals in the news and media, often shown in handcuffs and inside packed jail cells, has only normalized this era of mass incarceration. The media portrayal of black men as “animals in cages”, “beasts”, and “super predators” plays off of a primordial fear of black men as criminals, an image that is often accepted and adopted by African American communities themselves. As a result, a black man in these historically black, inner-city communities not only faces the threat of jail, but also the threat of death-- very often, as we have seen recently, at the hands of white