13th is a newly released 2016 American documentary, written and directed Ava DuVernay who is the director of Selma. 13th was made known of after it was announced as the opening film for the 2016 New York Film Festival, DuVernay’s documentary was released on Netflix on October 7th, 2016. 13th focuses on the 13th Amendment which declares "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 Thirteenth Amendment grants freedom to all Americans. 13th not only targets how the Thirteenth Amendment was created and its purpose, but also spotlights how the Thirteenth Amendment has evolved since 1865. DuVernay shares how, though we as African-Americans are free by law and cannot be enslaved, we are still enslaved through mass incarceration and police brutality. If you have not had the chance to see it or for some reason you do not have a Netflix account togo watch this wonderful master piece here is the official trailer to get you even more enticed to watch it!
By now in your life time I would hope you know and understand what happened to our ancestors, so with that being said I am going to skip over the whole lecture on how slavery was not over for people of the Africa-American race until after the Nixon era.
"The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying,We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.” - John Ehrlichman, Nixon White House Adviser
DuVernay began's to focus on the War On Drugs, made African-Americans seem like superpredators. We were made to seem as if were animals and beasts. While covering the War On Drugs the media began to put fear into white supremacist and some African-Americans heads that we as Africa-Americans were much more than superpredators. DuVernay brings so much light to things that were in the dark for me, and even a few of my friends that watched the documentary with me. Slavery "Ended" in 1865, we're now in 2016 in history is trying to repeat itself.
Are we as a people knowledgable as a people? Do we honestly know what is really going on in the world that we live in? We must educate ourselves as a people to understand what is really going on. If you are not woke by now America, you have over slept.....
