The 13th Amendment

It has been said that as a Nation, America has ushered in a new 'Jim Crow' era. The new Jim Crow doesn't segregate bathrooms or force people of color to sit on the back of the bus, no; the new Jim Crow era was born from the history of complicated race relations within America and has been tailored to fit the contemporary moment. The new Jim Crow era is defined by the mass incarceration and criminalization of people of color within the United States. African American's have been systematically disenfranchised throughout history, when one system of repression ends it is reborn in a new form. Mass incarceration is an example of this cycle of the implementation of systems that are designed to subjugate and control African American people.
One in three Black men will be jailed in their lifetime, there are more people of color behind bars today than there were enslaved in 1850. Ava DuVernay's documentary 13th explores the vicious results of the thirteenth amendment, an amendment that abolished slavery but also supplied grounds for the exploitation and commodification of black bodies to continue throughout the decades. The amendment reads "Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude except for as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States." Proclaiming that slavery or servitude was acceptable punishment for a crime was a rhetorical loop hole that was strategically placed within the amendment and is inextricably linked to the mass incarceration of people of color today. The reality of the 13th amendment is inherently problematic, because it includes a criminality clause. Post abolition African Americans--particularly males, were painted as animalistic menaces. African American's post abolition were jailed and forced to work on chain gangs for simple indiscretions such as jay-walking or petty theft. However, the stereotype of African American males being inherently criminalistic in nature normalized this new form of slavery through the 'justice' system.
Mass incarceration didn't appear as a prominent issue until the late 1970's. President Nixon's campaign for law and order emphasized the necessity of being hard on crime and led to the militarization of the police force. President Reagan's war on drugs mixed with the newly militarized police force created a justice system that was cloaked as a strategy to pursue law and order but was actually a war on communities of color. Within the documentary, writer Jelani Cobb explains that there has never been a time when systems of law and order within America haven't operated against communities of color. Cobb goes on to express modes of humanization that have aided African American people in pushing back against slavery,segregation, and today's police brutality and mass incarceration. Cobb discussed how today's visceral imagery--the video of Eric Garner suffocating or twelve-year-old Tamir Rice being shot--functions as a modern slave narrative. Images and videos that attest to the atrocities people of color are subjected to force people to contend with the historical context that has caused the contemporary complicated moment we find ourselves in as a Nation.