What 13th Reveals About the Development of the Black Identity and Experience

The Netflix documentary 13th has surged in popularity in the wake of the ongoing Black Lives Matter movement. In her 2016 film, Ava DuVernay explores the criminalization of African Americans and the rise of mass incarceration in the United States by presenting the historical and sociological analyses of a range of activists, academics, political figures, and public figures. Knowing that DuVernay’s past work—including the historical drama Selma and the true crime miniseries When They See Us—has not only earned critical acclaim but has also continued to provide insight on what it means to be Black in the U.S., I had to watch this documentary for myself. Here are three things I learned from watching 13th.

The Law Didn’t End Slavery.

The analysis of Constitutional Amendment XIII serves as the initial framework for the eponymous documentary. According to the Legal Information Institute of Cornell Law School, Section 1 of the amendment is as follows:

“Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.”

The key phrase that is dissected by scholars is “except as a punishment for crime.” Although slavery was technically declared unconstitutional with the 13th Amendment, resulting in the freedom of many African Americans, those who were criminalized were still not free. With the end of the Civil War and the end of slavery, the South encountered an economic downturn with the loss of free labor.

Jelani Cobb*, the Ira A. Lipman Professor of Journalism at the Columbia Journalism School, points out that “except as a punishment for crime” was a “loophole [that was] immediately exploited.” All they had to do to get back free labor was to arrest African Americans, and arrest them, they did. Michelle Alexander*, author of The New Jim Crow and alumna of Vanderbilt University, said that “after the Civil War, African Americans were arrested en masse” for petty crimes like “loitering or vagrancy,” making it “our nation’s first prison boom.”

“We are the products of the history that our ancestors chose, if we’re white. If we are black, we are products of the history that our ancestors most likely did not choose. Yet here we all are together, the products of that set of choices, and we have to understand that in order to escape from it.”

Kevin Gannon*

Black Criminality Is a Myth We Must Actively Debunk.

From the dehumanizing and Blackface-clad presentation of Black Americans in the silent film The Birth of a Nation to the antagonization of Black political movements during the Nixon era and even today, Black Americans have been unfairly viewed as perpetrators of drug abuse. 

This documentary spotlights how, in the beginnings of the war on drugs campaign in the 1970s, President Richard Nixon has projected implicit biases against the Black community. DuVernay features a recording of Nixon’s chief domestic advisor, John Ehrlichman, saying that the Nixon campaign “had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people.” With President Ronald Reagan to carry on the legacy of the war on drugs, there seemed to be the inherited sense of villainization of Blacks as well as the concurrent allocation of millions of dollars to prison and jail facilities.

Khalil Gibran Muhammad*, a professor of History, Race and Public Policy at Harvard Kennedy School, notes this about the era of mass incarceration in the hands of Reagan:

“What Reagan ultimately does is…takes the problem of economic inequality, of hypersegregation in America’s cities, and the problem of drug abuse, and criminalizes all of that in the form of the war on drugs.”

In other words, the 1970s was a crucial time for earmarking the fundamental attribution error of overassociating Black Americans with drug usage to strengthen the “Black criminality” myth without looking at the bigger—systemic—picture.

Why is this a myth? According to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the rate of drug usage between African Americans and White Americans is around the same, but “the imprisonment rate of African Americans for drug charges is almost 6 times that of [W]hites.” There must be a reason as to why there are racial disparities in incarceration even though the U.S. is supposedly centered around freedom and equality. 

Then what is the bigger picture? As Muhammad points out, economic inequality is a root cause of incarceration, thus being a necessary focus in the analysis of incarceration trends. According to the Pew Research Center, the imprisonment rate of Black Americans is nearly twice that of Hispanic Americans and approximately 5.6 times that of White Americans. Interestingly, per the Economic Policy Institute, African Americans have the highest poverty rate at 27.2 percent among racial/ethnic groups compared to Hispanics at 23.5 percent and [W]hites at 9.6 percent. This positive correlation between poverty and incarceration is a crossroads that we must actively and thoroughly examine, as Emma does in her piece about the criminalization of poverty.

Diversity in Perspective Is Important.

I have much to continue learning about the intersection of race, justice, and mass incarceration, but if I were to highlight something besides content that I learned from watching this documentary, it would be the diversity in perspective. 

There is an under-representation of women of color in the entertainment industry, and that is more the case with major roles like director, writer, and producer. With Emmy Award wins and Academy and Grammy Award nominations under her belt, and as the director and writer and producer of 13th, Ava DuVernay would be a statistical rarity according to the 2019 Hollywood Diversity Report by the College of Social Science at the University of California, Los Angeles: 12.6 percent of film directors are people of color and 12.6 percent of film directors are women; 7.8 percent of film writers are people of color and 12.6 percent of film writers are women—no data for film producers available. Regardless, the chances of DuVernay having “made it” as all of these roles is nothing to overlook.

Moreover, the ties between DuVernay’s identity and her work (and in the recognition of her work) demonstrate a renaissance in the celebration of diverse voices in not just the entertainment industry, but in media as a whole. 

As we continue to educate ourselves and dismantle our implicit biases in support of the Black Lives Matter movement, let us be mindful of the intersectionality of the Black identity and celebrate it respectfully.

*These scholars’ insights were from DuVernay’s 13th

Watch the Netflix special, 13th: A Conversation with Oprah Winfrey and Ava DuVernay