“There are seventy-two crimes in the state of Virginia, which, if created by a black man… subject him to the punishment of death; while only two of these same crimes will subject a white man to like punishment”

~Frederick Douglass

This quote came up this week when I was working as a peer mentor in my college’s required first year class. After watching a performance of this speech and several others about civil rights, the students were put into groups and asked if they felt these concerns had been alleviated. I worked in a group with two students who are both bright and thoughtful individuals which was why I was surprised when we got to the above quote and they both felt it had been addressed in full.

In fairness to them, they were taking a pretty literal reading of the quote. One student asked me if we could look up the laws in Virginia to check if this was still true or not. I suggested that maybe they should think more abstractly, but then they became fixated on the death penalty. When we moved to the large group, the professor related the quote to the modern problem of giving stricter sentences to crack cocaine than powder. This law resulted in black Americans receiving longer prison sentences than white Americans. Another student brought up Stanford rapist Brock Turner and how she felt he received a lighter sentence because he was white. I brought up the documentary 13th.

13th is easily one of the most important films I saw this year. Before I came to college, I was vaguely aware of systematic racism and the United State’s prison epidemic. In the Midwest, however, it was not something schools really brought up except in conjunction with To Kill a Mockingbird my freshmen year of high school and in passing during the end of history classes when we had an entire week left of the semester to rush through the 70’s to the present. When I came to college, my awareness heightened. A visit to Eastern State Penitentiary where I saw the US mass incarceration rates was haunting. As was the documentary The House I Live In, and the book The New Jim Crow. These books exposed me to the War on Drugs and the Southern Strategy, both thinly veiled racist political strategies.

13th, however, taught me how far back it went. It is the best documentary I’ve seen in both its scope and the details it covers. It shows how the prison system has kept slavery alive and well in the United States. A New York Times article reports that “More African-American men are incarcerated, or on probation or parole, than were enslaved in 1850, and the United States, which accounts for 5% of the world’s population, counts nearly a quarter of the world's incarcerated people.” 13th exposes this ugly exception to the thirteenth amendment and addresses how The War on Drugs only furthered this problem. I cried when I watched the film as a sophomore. I also thought this needs to taught with The New Jim Crow in the required first year class.

I’m thankful that it is, as I know The New Jim Crow was the first encounter many Ursinus Students had with systematic racism in the United States. It’s a book of America’s ugly secrets that should be required reading for every American. 13th deepens this story and exposes its scope. Besides being stylistically beautiful, it is a film that tells the whole truth and does not accept anything less. In a world where history gets white washed, students, especially white students, need to see this film. Before we can achieve racial equality, every American needs to know that slavery never ended. We just gave it a different name.