ipl-logo

Documentary Analysis Of The Documentary 'Black Lives Matter'

1499 Words6 Pages

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, …show more content…

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 …show more content…

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

Show More
Related
543 Words | 3 Pages

13th is a documentary directed and produced by Ava Duvernay. The documentary dives deep into America’s prison system and America’s history of racial inequalities. The documentary contained many forms of rhetoric, including, kairos, logos, ethos, pathos, and visual rhetoric. Using these methods of rhetoric helps director Ava Duvernay get her point across to the audience.  

Read More
559 Words | 3 Pages

The film 13th was documentary that explains mass incarceration, Jim Crow, and slavery as being the same forms. Through use of statistic, testimonies, and stories, the documentary portrays a message of what is and has been going on and has a call to action. The film starts off with explaining how there is a loophole a clause of the 13th amendment that makes it unconstitutional for anyone to be a slave except criminals, and ever since that loophole was discovered there was a mass of African Americans arrested. Although the film was able to show evidence for the parallels between slavery, Jim Crow laws, and mass incarceration, it did not provide solutions for this problem.

Read More
1000 Words | 4 Pages

Ava DuVernay suggests Slavery’s NOT Dead in 13th The recently released Netflix original documentary 13th identifies the issue of race in America and how the government instills fear in the nation in order to provide justice for the people by enforcing a ‘War on Crime.’ This tactic was Nixon’s way of incarcerating blacks during his presidency. Many of the elections beginning with President Truman’s era were a long list of former Presidents that used crime as a platform. Whoever was ‘tougher’ on crime would win the election.

Read More
277 Words | 2 Pages

"13th", a documentary directed by the filmmaker Ava DuVernay highlighted mass incarceration and its racial roots in society. One thing that every time period covered by the documentary had in common was the media and pop cultures shaping the portrayal of African Americans. Over time, the media and those in power have used television and more recently social media to paint African Americans as dangerous savages. Trayvon Martin murder, covered by the documentary, was a highly publicized event that highlighted some tactics the media uses to dehumanize African Americans. On many news outlets that covered the story, pictures were shown of Trayvon with his underwear out and holding up his middle fingers.

Read More
584 Words | 3 Pages

By analyzing the 13th Amendment, the film argues that although slavery was legally abolished, it persisted differently through the criminal justice system. The documentary exposes mass incarceration's root causes and dire consequences, particularly for Black Americans, and calls for change in the current system.

Read More
1805 Words | 8 Pages

The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander is known as one of the most important books of out time. This is a book that makes the reader appreciate the magnitude of the crisis faced by communities of color as a result of mass incarceration. As noted, this book is not for everyone. It’s for people who are interested in seeing the injustice that many people of color have to face in the United States. In this book, we will see many similarities about our criminal justice system and something that looks and feels like the era of Jim Crow, an era we supposedly left behind.

Read More
794 Words | 4 Pages

The documentary 13th was released on October 7, 2016 and it triggered a worldwide shock. As a documentary, it was adept enough to address several ongoing issues, especially regarding the maltreatment of African Americans, but the documentary was shaped around the theme that African Americans were never free, and continue to fight for that freedom. The content within the documentary varied from earlier times where slavery, segregation and, Jim Crow laws existed to the more implicit manner of racism that is presented through the massive imprisonment of African Americans, and unjustified use of the criminal justice system against them. The documentary revolves around three main themes: the overrepresentation of African Americans in the media,

Read More
737 Words | 3 Pages

Although it may be hard to watch, this is what made 13th successful: the creators wanted us to feel personally impacted by the things we were seeing to better understand the extremities of how racist deeds were implemented into American society, even before incarceration rates started to rise. By setting the background in thorough detail, 13th develops a dynamic between the comfort of the viewer and the harsh truth of racism’s impact on society, while also providing the necessary information needed to fully understand systemic

Read More
599 Words | 3 Pages

When one talks about underlying racism, if they ever talk about it, there is a consistent denial of its existence throughout American society. This ever present flaw is not a systematic issue where a person can point out the exact laws that persecute, rather, the government is a vehicle that executes the will of the people in charge of the system. Hence, I see the “13th” film as an exposition of how systematic oppression is not a system oppressing an ethnicity, but rather people using the government as a vehicle to unjustly place African-Americans in prison. Altogether I believe that this tragedy reinforces the notion that the United States will always neglect its cultural outsiders because of how devastating it is to see that “African Americans make up 6.5% of the American population but 40.2% of

Read More
1054 Words | 5 Pages

Unveiling Injustice: Analyzing "13th" and the Crisis of Mass Incarceration in America Ava DuVernay's documentary "13th" serves as a poignant exposé on the crisis of mass incarceration in the United States, particularly its disproportionate impact on African American communities. Through a critical lens, the film scrutinizes the historical context, systemic racism, and policies like the 13th Amendment, shedding light on the deep-rooted inequalities within the criminal justice system. This essay delves into the persuasive strategies employed in the documentary, the necessity of data-driven evaluation, and the scholarly discourse surrounding the issues it addresses. "13th" strategically employs emotional persuasion to evoke empathy and outrage

Read More
750 Words | 3 Pages

This summer I had the opportunity to watch the documentary 13th, on netflix, and read the book Just Mercy by Bryan Stephenson. Both were enlightened and when finished with both you walk away sense of awareness for some of the hardships that black people have faced both past and present. The film 13th was a documentary about the racial inequality in this country. It touches on the crack epidemic, and how it led to the rise of unjust arrest and the rise of incarceration in America. Quoting from the film, the prison population rose from 474,368 in 1980 to 2,042,479 in 2001.

Read More
896 Words | 4 Pages

13th is a documentary by Ava DuVernay and Spencer Averick on the intersection of race, the American justice system, and the incarceration rate in the United States. It was officially released in 2016, and is titled after the Thirteenth Amendment in the U.S., which led to the freedom of slaves and prohibited slavery. 13th touched on many aspects of the suppression of African Americans, the war on drugs, Jim Crow laws, and the race inequality in the American prison system. The documentary started off by stating that the United States has 5% of the world's population but 25% of the people in the world who are currently incarcerated. To many people today, the 13th amendment was a great deal because it freed slaves but what we fail to realize

Read More
924 Words | 4 Pages

The fourth chapter explores how the system of mass incarceration affects African American communities both during incarceration and after being released with the title of being a felon. The fifth chapter is where the author explains the title of the book, being the idea of how the “Age of Colorblindness” has created a world where the discrimination is harder to witness from the outside since it is under the disguise of the criminal justice system. This chapter also compares the potential for harm in the modern system to the harm that came from the Jim Crow laws. The sixth and final chapter explores the ideas of how the status quo in society makes it harder to dismantle the system of mass

Read More
1077 Words | 5 Pages

Ana DuVernay’s documentary, “13th” explores and brings light to how the 13th amendment makes it unconstitutional to be held a slave with the exception of being labeled as a criminal. The documentary explains that due to the language used in the 13th amendment, the rights that black people fought to have during the Civil War can be stripped away from them once labeled a criminal. The film states that 1 in every 17 white males are incarcerated during their lifetime, while 1 in every 3 black males are incarcerated during their lifetime. Statistics like these act as evidence for the racial injustice and inequity that is still found in our police and prison system today. Once labeled a criminal, your rights to vote, get a job, take out loans, etc.

Read More
628 Words | 3 Pages

According to Ava DuVernay who explored the history of racial inequality throughout the engaging documentary, “13th”, our country continues on to having challenges when it comes to the matter of race, assumption of crime, and discrimination between white men and black men. A large number of african americans have been denied

Read More

More about Documentary Analysis Of The Documentary 'Black Lives Matter'

Related Topics

Open Document