“Powerful, infuriating and at times overwhelming, Ava DuVernay’s documentary 13TH will get your blood boiling and tear ducts leaking.” Manohla Dargis with the New York Times.

Before you vote, before you don’t vote, before you decide who is right in a political controversy, before you glare at your neighbor, before you talk about Syria, before you talk about President Obama, before you join that organization, before you condemn that group of people, before you assume they are innocent, before you assume they are guilty, before you feel afraid, before you retweet, before you say black lives matter, before you say blue lives matter, before you say all lives matter, before you scowl at your grandpa, before you call your grandson, before you wear that shirt, before you drink that brew, before you compliment that person, before you dis that person, I plead you to inform yourself of more of our history and current events.

Why? Because the adage ignorance is bliss is largely fallacious.

Bliss may exist monetarily where ignorance is present, but when truth shows up on the front door in the form of a forgotten bill, an angry neighbor, or a boyfriend you ignorantly mis-communicated with, it will smack the bliss right off your face. When you ignorantly left your oven on, there is no bliss in coming home to a burnt down house, no matter how much bliss bubbled through you before you came home to ashes. There could very well have been a temporary state of bliss when you crank the radio, slam your car into reverse, screech backwards out of your driveway only to run over your kid. The bliss immediately becomes nothing worthy of consideration because the horror of this occurrence.

Ignorance isn’t bliss.

It is dangerous, lazy, and unwise.

Ignorance will continue, unless we can collectively seek knowledge, actively investigating statements, beliefs and worldviews refusing to call them fact until they’ve been investigated, fact-checked, questioned, and verified. The only way we can solve issues like racism, mass-incarceration, or human trafficking is by studying the historical causes, recognizing the roots of everything in its upbringing and history, and then turning what is learned into solutions, conversations, and positive advancements.

The movie “13th” does this very thing: investigating mass-incarceration’s roots, and depicting the evolution of legislative racism. It has elements of subjectiveness, as does anyone’s interpretation of history or facts, but attempts to give a much bigger picture of how the 13th amendment’s emancipation promises still haven’t entirely come to fruition for all Americans, with mass-incarceration being the most current iteration of systematized inequality.

Watch the director of Selma’s film to be educated and informed on what some of the roots of modern day racism are, and how that ties into mass-incarceration. Highly recommended.