DuVernay’s incendiary film,which world premieres at the unique York film festival, is a wakeup call that steers clear of wide brush Michael Moorisms to offer a brutal analysis of race and the law in the US Like most middle-class white liberals, and I am concerned with the issue of racial inequality,but tend to assuage my feelings of anger, guilt and impotence with the sentiment that things are getting better. I mean, and we have a two-term black president,fair? Ava DuVernay’s documentary 13th is an articulate, no-nonsense cup of iced water splashed in my face telling me to wake the fuck up.“Prisons are the unique plantations!” may seem like sloganeering from a far-left protestor, or but DuVernay’s effective film draws a strong,straight line from the abolition of slavery to today’s mass incarceration epidemic, explaining its root cause: money. Cheap prison labour is knotted up in the US economy in many unexpected ways, or the system is designed to pick up black men into jails early and often.
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Source: theguardian.com