Race, Class, and Punishment

Teaching Strategies Part 1: Overview for Teaching the Film 13th

“There is no 13^th Amendment.” -Sean Means, Fellow, Yale National Initiative seminar on Race, Class and Punishment, 2018

Sean, a fellow Fellow of mine in the seminar that produced this curricular unit, was talking about buy-in from all sides, all stakeholders. When the 13^th amendment was drafted, it was drafted as such:

“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."²

We cannot tell from simply the text whether its writers had specifically in mind the continued enslavement of peoples once convicted of a crime, or a warning not to commit crimes to America’s citizens, but it’s clear that the perceived end of slavery was not an all-out abolition. In fact, it states quite clearly that there still certainly will be slavery or involuntary servitude for those convicted of a crime. It’s as weighty a part of the amendment as the other. There was not buy-in from all stakeholders. There were those that saw it as a maneuverable amendment, manipulable toward keeping slavery in place, if by another name. This is explored in detail in Ava Duvernay’s film 13^th, produced by and available on Netflix. 

The film traces the history of American slavery in all its forms, from literal human bondage to modern incarceration where inmates continue to labor for low or no pay, focusing also on interviews with modern scholars, educators, activists, politicians and others both corroborating and refuting the films claims, exploring many viewpoints but mostly that of its main thrust: that slavery never ended. Immediately after the passing of the 13^th amendment, according to the film, the loophole was exploited to gain the labor back that was lost due to abolition after the Civil War. The southern economy had always been dependent upon free labor and thereby needed to be rebuilt. This led to a national push towards painting blacks as criminals, so that they’d be arrested, incarcerated, and would therefore lose their right to the 13^th amendment and would be in effect slaves once again.³ 

The white nationalists – specifically politicians like president Woodrow Wilson and filmmaker D.W. Griffith, through their making and proliferating the racist (and at the time wildly successful and popular) propaganda film Birth of a Nation – played upon that growing national perception of black criminality. Blacks were largely perceived, and intentionally so, as rapists and murderers, dangerous and wild, uncontrollable, like animals. This led to rampant terrorism. Blacks were harassed, beaten, lynched in the South. This led to a mass exodus of blacks from the South westward and northward into large cities where open terrorism shifted to a more legal condition, known as segregation.⁴

If emancipation was the first major movement towards black social equity and Reconstruction the second, Jim Crow segregation led to the third and arguably most effective: the American Civil Rights movement. Civil Rights leaders are spotlighted, quoted, and even interviewed in the film. Angela Davis reflects upon her experience being arrested as a Public Enemy and winning her court case. Other Civil Rights leaders were not so fortunate and ended up fleeing the country at best, being murdered in their homes at worst, as was the case for Black Panther leader Fred Hampton. Thereby, the film argues, Civil Rights leaders were systematically disposed of by political leaders like Richard Nixon and J. Edgar Hoover as public enemies. This loss of leadership in the Black political campaign for equality opened a flood gate of sorts which allowed Nixon, and after him Reagan and continuing on to Clinton, to slowly and quite surely build a national prison system so large and so powerful, that it, as one interviewee puts it “eats Black and Latino people for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.”⁵

At the same time the Civil Rights movement amped up, however, so did drug use and crime, and Nixon and those after him were able to parlay that into popularity for policies cracking down on said crime, perceived by the populous to coincide with being black in America. This is the beginning of the War on Drugs, which is further explored in the next section on Locking Up Our Own. This is when drug addiction and proliferation diverged from being a public health issue to a criminal justice issue, and it has never really come back from that. This continued with Reagan’s literal war on drugs, sending more and more heavily armed and armored police into ghettos to sweep up black people even on suspicion. The film fast forwards to Bill Clinton and his campaigning for president on the promise to be tough on crime. Eventually we see a federal crime bill of $30 billion passed in 1994, which was heavily loaded towards law enforcement and incarceration.

It is important to consider that this film makes a good case example of opposing viewpoints. Grover Norquist is interviewed several times attempting to discredit certain things that other interviewees say about the process and growth of mass incarceration. Newt Gingrich is also interviewed, although this is a unique third perspective (also offered in the film by congressman Charles Rangel) of a person who once believed one way, and has since seen things differently. Gingrich corroborates much of the film’s testimony, admitting specifically and one point: “virtually no one who is white understands the challenge of being black in America.”⁶ This poignant admission from the conservative encapsulates the films pathos. The condition of mass incarceration, or modern slavery as the film would assert, is very heavily felt by the interviewees and imbues the viewer with such emotion, perhaps even anger. More on these perspective and argument considerations are found below in the “Classroom Activities” section. The film is meant in no small way to inspire action, and Ava did her homework. Interviewees worth scrutiny and even research by students include:

Van Jones: CNN anchor, political commentator and founder of Dream Corps, which works to improve opportunities and close prisons. He’s a graduate of Yale, an attorney and author.⁷

Angela Davis: Civil Rights leader, scholar, activist, author and teacher, Davis has historically advocated for gender and race equity, and is a prominent part of the film as both an interviewee and subject.⁸

Dr. Khalil Gibran Muhammed: An educator, scholar, writer and historian, Muhammed is executive director of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture.⁹

Michelle Alexander: A civil rights attorney, scholar and writer, Alexander is a leading modern voice for civil rights and incarceration advocacy through her work and book, The New Jim Crow.¹⁰

Dr. Henry Louis Gates, Jr.: Award winning filmmaker, writer, journalist, critic and scholar, Dr. Gates is a prolific historian and a Harvard professor.¹¹

These folks are, to boot, inspiring African-American role models and worth spotlighting in this or any lesson on contemporary American history.

Through extensive and engaging interviews with these and others, the film ultimately concludes that prisons are big business in America, and therefore must be kept full. From prison builders, to monitoring-technology firms, to prisoner services like communication and insurance, to things we may not even consider like exactly how big the business is of supplying America’s millions of prisoners with food, it is very important to all these contractors for their product – the American prison inmate – to remain common. And is it the continuing American condition of slavery that keeps these prisons full, through laws, policies and procedures that make the exact right crimes the exact right impetus to land the exact right people in jail. One out of three men of color are associated with the American criminal justice system, and it’s no accident. It’s not new. “The difference now,” Van Jones attests, “is somebody can hold up [a phone]. . .put it on youtube, and the whole world has to deal with it. That’s what’s new: it’s not the protest, it’s not the brutality, it’s the fact that we can force a conversation about it.”¹²

The system and process that led to the current state of mass incarceration is explored in more detail, with further examples in the book Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America by James Forman, Jr., explored in the next section.