
13th
- TV-MA
- Year:
- 2016
- 100 min
- 28,580 Views
So let's look at the statistics.
to 5% of the world's population...
but 25% of the world's prisoners.
Think about that.
of the world's population
having 25% of the world's prisoners?
One out of four?
One out of four human beings
with their hands on bars, shackled,
in the world are locked up here,
in the land of the free.
We had a prison population of 300,000
in 1972.
Today, we have a prison population
of 2.3 million.
The United States now has the highest rate
of incarceration in the world.
So, you see, now suddenly
they're in an awakening that,
"Oh, perhaps we need to downsize
our prison system.
It's gotten too expensive.
It's gotten out of hand."
Um, but the very folks
who often express so much concern,
uh, about the cost
and the expanse of the system
are often very unwilling
to talk in any serious way
about remedying the harm
that has been done.
History is not just
stuff that happens by accident.
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
The 13th Amendment to the Constitution
makes it unconstitutional
for someone to be held as a slave.
In other words, it grants freedom...
to all Americans.
There are exceptions, including criminals.
There's a clause, a loophole.
If you have that
in the structure,
in this constitutional language,
then it's there to be used as a tool
for whichever purposes
one wants to use it.
One of the things
to bear in mind is that
it was an economic system.
And the demise of slavery
at the end of the Civil War
left the Southern economy in tatters.
Uh, and so this presented a big question.
There are four million people
who were formerly property,
and they were formerly
kind of the integral part
of the economic production system
in the South.
And now those people are free.
And so what do you do with these people?
How do you rebuild your economy?
The 13th Amendment loophole
was immediately exploited.
After the Civil War,
African Americans were arrested en masse.
It was our nation's first prison boom.
You were basically a slave again.
The 13th Amendment says that
"Except for criminals,
everybody else is free."
Well, now if you're criminalized,
that doesn't apply to you.
They were arrested
like loitering or vagrancy.
And they had to provide labor
to rebuild the economy
of the South after the Civil War.
What you got after that
was a rapid transition
to a kind of mythology
of black criminality.
Go back and, you know, read the rhetoric
that people used then.
They would say that the Negro
was out of control,
that there's a threat of violence
to white women.
So the same sort of image
that we had of Uncle Remus
and these genial, kind of, black figures
was replaced by this rapacious,
uh, menacing, Negro male evil
that had to be banished.
Birth of a Nation was
just a profoundly important
cultural event.
It's the first major blockbuster film,
hailed for both its artistic achievement
and for its political commentary.
And when it was released,
it had this rapturous response.
You know, there were lines everywhere
that it was being shown.
Birth of a Nation confirmed the story
that many whites wanted to tell
about the Civil War and its aftermath.
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"13th" Scripts.com. STANDS4 LLC, 2021. Web. 28 Feb. 2021. <https://www.scripts.com/script/13th_1553>.