Quotes from 13th film
Griffith’s Birth of a Nation portraying blacks as predators, particularly of white women, but also as a threat to the general public. The 13th Amendment abolished “slavery involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted.” Blacks were therefore systematically dehumanized in order to justify the use of state force against them DuVernay shows a fear of criminal black elements coming into prominence following the end of slavery, with films like D.W. Trump’s rhetoric about LatinXs and immigrants harkens back to the language used immediately following the end of slavery. It’s a call for both skepticism and caution against anyone hoping to bring those days back. It’s a chilling reminder that while wishing for a bygone era, we also wish for a time when people of color were legally denied equal rights, and a time when that denial was enforced by violence.
Over these parallel scenes, we hear audio and see footage from various rallies where Trump supporters are screaming at black protesters, interspersed with audio of Trump telling his audience, “I love the good old days-you know what they used to do to guys like that when they were in a place like this? They’d be carried out on a stretcher, folks.” In one instance, with surgical precision, she cuts back and forth between footage of a large, angry group of white men violently shoving a black man off the sidewalk in the Jim Crow-era, and footage of a large, angry group of white (mostly) men violently shoving a black woman out of a Trump campaign rally. She uses a searing montage of footage overlaid with audio from Trump’s campaign rallies to draw pointed parallels between his rhetoric and the racial hatred that animated the Jim Crow era.
#Quotes from 13th film movie#
One of the most powerful-and now in retrospect, most prescient-moments in the movie is DuVernay’s treatment of Trump’s presidential run. These systems are still relevant today-all we have to do is look at how many of these same systems have been turned against immigrant and LatinX communities under Donald Trump. His remarks highlight DuVernay’s remarkable illumination of the systems at work that drove the prison population through the roof and that devastated black communities: cultural systems of fear, dehumanization, and criminalization of black people following the end of slavery economic systems that allow states and corporations to profit from incarceration political systems that double down on the incentives to keep (predominantly black) people incarcerated and even the media and technology systems that allow some recourse to fight injustice in the public sphere. People say all the time, “I don’t understand how people could have tolerated slavery, how could they have made peace with that? How could people have gone to a lynching and participated in that? How did people make sense of this segregation, this 'white' and 'colored only' drinking-that’s so crazy-I just-if I was living at that time, I would have never tolerated anything like that!”īut here’s the thing, Stephenson says: We are tolerating it.
The final words of the film, spoken by Equal Justice Initiative Founder and Executive Director Bryan Stephenson, remind us of the following:
The movie traces the history of mass incarceration-and its lingering effects today-back to the 13th Amendment. That’s the question Ava DuVernay leaves us with at the end of her powerful documentary 13th, which is hotly tipped to win an Oscar at the 89th Academy Awards on Sunday.
What would you do, faced with a system of oppression that pervades your everyday life?