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Documentary Summary: The 13th Documentary

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The 13th Documentary
We can see that this documentary has been made for society to recognize that we live in a country where slavery still exists. It talks about the fact of how the United States has the highest incarceration rate in the world, where Blacks make approximately 40% in prison, even though they make around 12% of the U.S. population. They were seen as "super predators" and still seem as criminals. Injustices are still made among the black community because many of them who go to prison are innocent. Whites are less likely to go to prison for the same crimes that Blacks commit.
I learned that African Americans were portrayed in movies as monsters or rapists, and dangerous to the white population, especially women. Blacks were
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Researched Argument Essay Having accurate representation matters. Unfortunately, that is a concept that the media industry has not quite grasped. The portrayal of African Americans in the media, whether it be plays, television, news, movies, or social media has always been negative since the birth of slavery in the United States of America. Playing on the negative stereotypes of African Americans, white Americans have gone on to believe their false impressions of Africans Americans and this has hindered African Americans from gaining social change and respectability.

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Michelle Alexander explains how our society uses Mass Incarceration to control those in the African American community starting with the War on Drugs. She discusses how slavery and Jim crow were used to control the African American community, and when those ideas became stale government officials were searching for a new way to control the community. Thus, Mass Incarceration became the new caste system. This book has opened my eyes in various aspects. I have a better understand of the justice system after reading this book that I have had from watching the news and other media outlets.

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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

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The film 13th is a documentary that explains how the prison systems are another form of slavery and is built to effect colored individuals and colored communities. The film identifies and explained a loop hole in the 13th amendment, which banned slavery. The loop in the amendment is that slavery and involuntary servitude is illegal unless a person is convicted of a crime. This clause in the amendment led to the first prison boom in America and mass incarceration. This film opened my eyes to underlying aspects of things that I have had previous knowledge about.

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Keywords that are most important to the documentary are, War on Drugs, incarceration, drug involvement/abuse, and racism. All of these words are loosely or heavily connected to each other. The words drug involvement/abuse highlight the purpose of the film, and the reasons for the War on Drugs and numerous laws created to fight drug abuse that cause death and destroy abiding citizens of communities. Furthermore, the War on Drugs simply labels the struggle against drug use and the governmental involvement to enforce anti-drug laws. The word incarceration and racism also link together to explain how as a result of the War on Drugs, the U.S. is one of the top countries with the highest imprisonment rate and more African-Americans or low-class minorities are convicted of drug crimes than any other ethnicity or social class.

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The “13th” is a documentary about the American system of incarceration and the economic forces behind racism in America especially in people of color. One of the claims that the author mentioned is that today incarceration is an extension of slavery. It is also mentioned that most of the time in society we are defined by race. In the documentary, we can see how African Americans are sentenced for many years since they are too poor to pay their fines or sometimes most of these people plead guilty to get out of jail fast. However, African Americans are separated from their families and also treated inhumanly in prisons just because they are of a particular race.

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In every country, criminals are punished differently such that some are sentenced to prison, others the public becomes the judge and the jury while for the case of the United States we usually have a trial to prove that they are not guilty and if they are indeed guilty then they will be just sentenced them to jail. In the article “How to Dismantle the “New Jim Crow”? it states how the number of inmates have increased since the late 1960’s. In some cases, the prisons are filled with minority race within the community for example; the African American, Latinos, and many more that’s why they call it the new Jim Crow. With this kind of treatment of the minority, some people have different reasons as to why the minority race is the one that is mostly

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The film 13th directed by Ava DuVernay targets an intended audience of the Media and the three branches of the United States government with an emphasis that mass incarceration is an extension of slavery. It is intended to inform viewers about the criminalization of African Americans and the United States prison boom. 13th uses rhetorical devices in its claim to persuade the viewers by using exemplum in the opening seconds of the film. President Barack Obama presents statistics, saying “the United States is home to 5% of the world’s population but is home to 25% of the world’s prisoners.” Also the film uses a hyperbole in talking about the movie Birth of a Nation produced in 1915 which portrays a black man as a violent savage who will kill white women.

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13th Documentary Analysis Ava DuVernay’s documentary mentions that the United States makes up five percent of the world’s population yet is home to twenty five percent of the world’s prisoners. One out of four prisoners in the world are locked up in the U.S. The United States now has the highest rate of incarceration in the world. The thirteenth amendment of the constitution makes it unconstitutional for someone to be held as a slave.

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The disturbing truth emerges that our history is so filled with racism, that it has caused Disney to have a lack of emphasis on racial issues in films such as

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As Coleman (2011) points out in her book "Horror Noire," early American horror films from the 1890s to the mid-20th century often portrayed black characters as racially caricatured and dehumanized figures, perpetuating harmful stereotypes (p. 17). For instance, black characters were often depicted as exotic, savage, and dangerous, serving as the monstrous "Other" in contrast to the white protagonist (Coleman, 2011, p. 17). Analysis of the themes and motifs of racism in American horror films, using "Horror Noire" as a primary

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13th Within the documentary 13th, it caused me to wonder if the justice system, gives everyone in America a similar “free” experience. In the documentary it tells that the 13th amendment (meant to free slaves) except for the fact that in court/places of law, these rules do not necessarily apply (according to the movie). The documentary goes on to support their claims showing how PoC (People of Color) are mistreated within our society, claiming that many certain laws were ones intended to put a disproportionate amount of blacks unjustly into prison. I however disagreed with many of their cries of “racism”, seeing many of the changes to the law system as not based around race whatsoever. An example of this is the would be the sentence time for

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Blacks worked long shifts on huge plantation farms, and their clothing were not as fancy as the white people, in the movie. The clothes African Americans wore had very poor quality, while white people in the movie had fancy clothing. African American men were portrayed as sexual predators towards white women, and the

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Every immigrant group has been stereotyped in Hollywood since the 19th Century. But in the case of ignorance towards black people, white people have created prejudice that has made the stereotypes last untill now. Gone with the wind, a 1939 Epic Civil War drama, shows slaves as well-treated, cheerful, and loyal to their masters. Slaves are portrayed as normal employees, and these are rewarded with presents if they’ve been appropriately loyal. This movie portrays slavery unrealistically and childlike.

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Similarly, the documentary 13th humanizes criminals by evoking emotions that allow viewers to experience the emotions of African American prisoners. In Act V, characters such as Claudius and Laertes are humanized by comparing their actions to the crimes of criminals. Likewise, in 13th, African American prisoners are observed as ordinary people who are wrongfully punished due to their race. The podcast achieves the goal of humanization by allowing prisoners to speak about their time in jail and how they have changed. In the podcast, Edgar Evans, who acts as Claudius speaks about his relation to the character of Claudius.

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