13th Response Paper - Jenna Mc Carter PDF

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an essay I wrote about the documentary 13th...

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Looking at people of color as criminals has been something that has been happening for centuries, and it still is happening today. It is something I find absolutely repulsing, and interestingly enough I watched this film in my Argumentative writing class in high school. We had a segment on discrimination on people of color and it is something I could talk about for days. The 13th is an amazing film that relies on only facts. Everything said in this film is true which again is extremely fascinating but equally disgusting. They start this film with the end of slavery, in 1865. The Civil War was won by the Union and slavery ended, kind of. After slavery had ended there were tons of African Americans now free, and most of the people in the South, especially former slave owners where not happy about this. The 13th amendment was written and slavery was no longer legal, unless you were a criminal. The loop hole that they had created to keep “slavery” as an option was to say force labor upon people, unless they are a criminal. After the amendment had been written and had become an official part of the US Constitution, African Americans were being arrested left and right for small petty crimes that if performed by a white man they would not have been sent to prison. Now we were back at square one. Lynchings were happening all over, all the time. The movie Birth Of A Nation was put out and this made the stereotype of African Americans even worse. They were portrayed as killers, cannibals, rapists, etc. Every movie theater was showing this film and everyone needed to see it. Woodrow Wilson even had a private showing of the movie. After this film was released men and boys (such as Emmet Till) were being killed for the accusation of sexual assault/ sexual harassment, when usually that was not the case. The movie also portrayed the KKK as the good guys. The film showed the KKK killing the African Americans because they were doing bad, it showed them “cleaning the streets”. After the killings of the African American people became

out of hand they came up with a legal way to let them know that they were seen as less than the typical white man. This was called segregation, everything was labeled for either for the whites or the blacks, and the African Americans always got the short end of the stick. More and more movements were seen and being arrested was no longer a scary thing to the African Americans, it was seen as them making a difference. Finally the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act had admitted that they had taken away African Americans rights and that they were going to fix it. Even though this was happening the crime rates were rising which gave politicians the ability to connect the freedom of the African Americans and the rise in crime. This was the first time in decades that the crime rate had risen. More people were being arrested because they were fighting what was needed ( gay rights, black rights, and women’s rights ). Hundreds and thousands of people were also being sent to prison for drug abuse because now we were seeing drug use as a crime and not a health issue. The growth of our prison population was the fault of our own stingy stereotypes. Hippies were associated with drugs, blacks were associated with crime and they were arresting anyone they could. Nixon was bad with the war on drugs but Reagan was worse, he was determined that it was a problem when it really wasn’t. In the 80’s a new drug was introduced, crack, a smokeable cocaine, and it was taking over the black and hispanic communities. Dealers that were African American or Hispanic were put away for life when whites were left with a warning. Some people believe that the “war on drugs'' was more of a war on communities. When you would turn on the news at night they would show black people being paraded in handcuffs, they were represented as criminals more than statistically proven. During the election of Bush, Dukakis had said he wanted to let murderers out on the weekend. Willie Horton was the man that everyone was afraid of and when Dukakis said this everyone went for Bush. Willie was the exact representation of the stereotype black people had been given

back when the move Birth Of A Nation was released. Clinton wanted to be tough of crime, he wanted to add more police on the street. He had added the Federal Crime Bill, this expanded on the prison systems, let law enforcement do things that are now considered abusive. He also added longer sentences and almost 60 new capital punishment offenses. He increased the budget for prisons to put more people in prison. This was extremely harmful because now we see this military attitude all the way down small residential police stations. We show yourself as land of the free but we have hyper-incarceration which contradicts that statement. Clinton now admits that this bill was wrong, he believes he helped some problems but created way more. The question of why aren’t the people of color doing more to protest, and it is because they see what happened to their leaders in the past. They were put in prison, killed, and assassinated, for standing up and speaking against the law enforcement. ALEC is a private group filled with companies and politicians mostly republican. This shows that big corporations have a say in our laws which should not be the case. People started questioning ALEC when a teenage African American boy was shot by another civilian because he looked suspicious. This man was not charged with murder, he wasn’t charged with anything. He got off because of the Stand Your Ground Law in Florida. ALEC proposed many laws such as SB 1070 which allows police to stop anyone who they think looks like an immigrant. The laws they have proposed have been nothing but harmful the Federal Crime Bill which Clinton admits was wrong and now the SB 1070. Detention facilities are where we keep the immigrants, it is really just a prison for them. Due to this law being passed ALEC lost a bunch of huge corporations, they deny having a say in SB 1070 but you can see that they have a say in that law. The solution in ALEC’s eyes for the overflow of our prisons is to have people wear wrist and ankle bracelets with GPS on them instead of being in a cage. Which would bring the prison system into our homes. “You don’t

mind me making a dollar” is a direct quote from Jerry Watson. This quote is referring to ALEC wanting to bring the prison system into our homes and how he would financially benefit from it, but we wouldn’t mind because it would take people out of our prisons. The prison and justice system is severely flawed. You get less years in jail if you plead guilty to a crime you never committed. You are physically and mentally abused in the prisons, and it kills people. Our prisoners are kept in warehouses as if they’re animals, it is not a condition humans should be in. 1 in 3 African American men are statistically said to go to prison in their lifetime. There is not a day in our history where the law has not been against the African American people. Every protest leaves with police brutality, teenagers are being shot and killed because they look suspicious, and so much more. People need to be shocked into movement, once pictures and videos of what is and was going on were shown people wanted to do more. Having seen this film before and going in depth on some of these conflicts I have the same reaction, disgust. As I sit and I watch I feel sad for the African Americans of the USA, this is not how it should be. Everyone should be treated equally, and America needs to take responsibility for the damage we have done since we took the first person off of the shores of Africa. It is another instance, same as the Mark Charles video, where we need to be honest with our past and take responsibility. The prison systems and the justice systems are extremely flawed, and it is easy to say that we need to fix it, but we also need to realize that fixing our prison system and justice system would take many years. This is not something we can fix quickly. We would need to start from the beginning, with the Constitution, it would be extremely difficult but it is possible we just need to stop procrastinating it. If we really want to be the land of the free, we need to take initiative and fix what we started decades ago....