Shows No One Should Miss - 13th

Warning
This guide and all of my reviews contain occasional bits of rude language,
and opinions some people might find offensive but for which I won’t apologise.
                    Don’t read any further unless you are open-minded.
Also, hard as I try not to give away too much, I can't guarantee there are no spoilers. 

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13th – Documentary – 2016 – USA Kandoo Films – Netflix 100 Mins   

Necessary & Very Watchable

The 13^th of the title is a reference to the 13^th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution which put an end to slavery in 1865 and, with a few strokes of the same pen, allowed the unpaid labour of slaves to be replaced with the unpaid labour of criminals.

Okay, if “they” could not own slaves to get free labour the answer in 1865 was to just lock up dark people by accusing them of crimes and getting free labour that way.
If this cynical amendment served a transparently racist purpose in 1865 what great purpose is it serving 150 years later and why hasn’t it ever been fixed?

Any white American person who genuinely believes that black or brown Americans are NOT genetically defective must wonder at some point in their life how such a disproportionate number of black or brown people are STILL locked up for crime in America. The question remaining, if there is one, is whether this doco is still interesting in any other way – the answer is, heck yeah! This doco provides a lot of answers – which is to say a lot of “aha!“ moments.

It's just an accident that all this free labour is "coloured".

Anyone interested in history, or economics, or psychology or systems theory or what makes the world tick or blah and blah and blah will also find a lot of “WTF!” moments too in this doco, which is to say it should leave any sane person shaking their head in disbelief.

The U.S. democratic “system” is so much better than ours on so many levels (though not all)… and yet the whole situation there is still so shot.
If USians are no more intrinsically evil than anyone else, what’s the go?

The U.S. prison statistics are appalling – much more appalling than I realised. Of course, now it’s even easier to see how the whole, horrid business of race in America can be tracked over time through references in popular culture that have a far more sinister meaning than I realised. For example, I knew blackface was designed to dehumanise Blacks and make white trash feel relatively privileged and warm and fuzzy while being screwed, but this doco adds a whole new layer of “reason” to the screwing. It also warns we in Oz have far more to fear here from the continued evolution of neo-liberal economics, privatisation and the prison industrial complex economic model than I realised. (What this doco doesn't set out to do is show that the prison thing is also a very real problem for Indigenous Australians.)

Conspicuous on-screen are the examples of Trump’s coded-but-blatantly racist statements using pronouns like “they” and “them” during his Presidential campaign. (For me it was interesting to trace campaign “code” since the civil rights era – this complements my own separate search for clues about how the right has hijacked debate generally, in the West.)

Ironically, as the American economy is sinking into its inevitable cyclical downturn, the companies that imprison criminals and the companies that supply them are not the only modern profit takers who benefit from the 13^th amendment. With what might soon be nearly 2.5 million people in U.S. prisons, the prison industrial complex is now competing with the exploitative third world sweatshops that are stealing well-paid American jobs.

It would take a massive structural adjustment to fix this problem – but first the country’s political leaders would have to be up to the job of admitting it is all built on racism designed to solve an economic problem. Seeing the problem "exaggerated" by its sheer scale in the U.S. helps drive home the fact we too will have "structural" resistance to change in the near future.

It’s good to be reminded occasionally, just when I feel a little despairing about Australia’s future, that at least I can be grateful I wasn’t born there… Okay, ceteris paribus I’m also “lucky” I’m white, but if I had to be not white, I think I’d rather take my chances here. . . but not by that much...

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Investigating further;

As explained in my first posts, I tend to filter the world through an economics lens. Recently I revisited the late Joe Bageant’s book Deer Hunting With Jesus which (along with his book Rainbow Pie) provided some insight into the thinking of whites most likely to vote Trump in the U.S.

   

Providing another contemporary view on how economic change is affecting most people in Western Economies today was a book called The Precariat by Guy Standing (2013) who was talking mainly about the disappearance of the middle class and job certainty in a post neo-liberal world.
I’ve recently acquired The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander which was mentioned in the documentary 13^th, and while I haven’t finished it, it’s proving every bit as interesting as 13^th promised it would be.

My biggest concern is that our obsession with privatisation has led to the erosion of government accountability – in theory the basis of democracy. This is really evident in the U.S. prison system which is quite extreme in its levels of punishment (refer again to Alexander’s The New Jim Crow).

These themes are expanded and explored in TV series which go beyond the usual cops and robbers tropes – shows like Killjoys where the “world” is run by royal families and corporation warrants; OITNB (of course); and the insanity of the plea-bargaining process at the heart of the US justice system as so brilliantly mocked in later seasons of The Good Wife.