I found that Fanon’s, Fields’s, Hegel’s, and Beauvoir’s theories elucidate and further explain the material in 13th. Both Fanon’s and Fields’s idea that we should not simply examine the origins of the problem but also the society that continuously creates the dynamics continued today helps explain some of the evolving institutions in the documentary. For instance, after the abolishment of slavery, racism was perpetuated by way of Jim Crow laws. Jim Crow laws targeted at African Americans enforced racial segregation and placed restrictions on job prospects. In effect, black people could not participate fully in society like whites. After the civil rights movement and changing societal ideals rendered that illegal, it evolved into mass incarceration. Though disguised under a different name, the underlying intent is the same; the incarcerations aim at racial minorities. Restrictions placed on “criminals” also limits participation in society, whether by harming employment, housing, and education prospects, which is analogous to the days of Jim Crow. Furthermore, Nixon announced the war on crime, arguing “there can be no progress without respect for law.. Total war against the evils we see in society…” - there was a shift of viewing drugs as a crime rather than a health issue. The war on drugs became the mechanism by which minorities were thrown into prison. All of these institutions respectively recreated race as a hierarchy at different times in history. Essentially, we see a lot of the patterns repeating themselves over time, manifesting in a different form. The awareness of two people or groups, such as the whites and the minorities, the need for recognition, the struggle to obtain it, and the resulting societal structures repetitively play out in history.
Also, this documentary reminded me a lot about Wacquant’s article about hyperincarceration with relation to class, race, and geography and how concepts from Fields’s essay help explain it; social forces have generated ideologies that have driven people to incarcerate other Americans as an instrument of ethnoracial control. It’s a type of external domination that creates and furthers inequality by hiding the people who suffer most under capitalism and drawing attention away from the wealthy in the meantime. Economically, prisons are also a gigantic industry; lawmakers support it because of lobbying while the corporations force inmates to do cheap work for them. Though it’s not anything new, I’m still really shocked at how corrupt the political system can be and how the ulterior motives of aggressive incarceration are to hide the public’s attention from social problems so that they can “control” the minorities. The case of George Zimmerman and Stand Your Ground Law serves as a further example of the theory of the society that recreates the racist social dynamics. Also, it is skewed against certain populations anyways because wealth shapes the outcomes of who gets bailed out of jail; the rich and potentially guilty can escape, but the “poor and innocent” cannot. Home imprisonments also become a source of profit generation, creating devices that incarcerate people in their own communities. In line with Fanon’s thinking, this kind of racist structure captures social, cultural, political, and mental issues. Incarceration in itself must not only have devastating effects on the prisoner’s mental health and internalizes an inferior view of themselves but also damages familial relations and the family structure as well. I also think the psychological damage of prisons is interesting; it must create some sort of self-consciousness that is separate from regular self-consciousness. The prison is a world apart from the normal society and allows the incarcerated to examine themselves through different eyes. After being imprisoned for such a long time, it changes how one views the world and him/her self, and the person in the documentary was never able to fully recover, committing suicide.
Additionally, an artwork that came to my mind while watching this documentary was David Hammons’s Injustice Case, 1970. Hammons created Injustice Case in response to the Bobby Seale Trial. Essentially, Chicago 8 defender and Black Panther leader Bobby Seale was gagged and chained to his chair during his trial in full view of the jury, charged with conspiracy of causing riots at the 1968 Democratic National Convention. Many wondered if he received a fair trial as he rattled his chains and tried to speak through the gag.
Hammons had stated, "...I feel it my moral obligation as a black artist to try to graphically document what I feel socially." Hammons himself is black, and black bodies are rendered voiceless in the American social system. The idea of his piece responding with the flattening of the 3 dimensional body is interesting as well. A flattened person is here defined in terms of race and the set of associations and characteristics that mark them socially; identity is only skin-deep and one body can be substituted for another in the way that they are treated in the system. In contrast with newspaper drawings of Bobby Seale as a bound dangerous criminal, Hammons depiction is that of a vulnerable victim, indexical of the reoccurring effects of the system, whether through slavery, Jim Crow laws, or other forms of oppression through the years. Field’s ideology can be used to think about the concept of a “criminal” which Seale would be considered. The ideology of a “criminal” is a social invention targeted at the subordinated members of society under the control of the master. This idea transforms someone who has broken a law to a despicable criminal even before the trial and wipes out any hope of a second chance. Kind of like Beauvoir’s myth of the woman, the myth of the criminal allows people to treat the criminals as inferior beings, which they are conditioned and shaped by, and socially constructs them as social inferiors. This is a colonization of sorts that changes the essence of the “criminals” and solidifies their occupations in society. This oppression often goes unnoticed because of the myth that the incarcerated have nothing important to say, which means they often are unable to go to trial, like in the documentary, or even if they do, this occurrence of what happened to Bobby Seale is symbolic of their constructed position in society. It is very easy to be oblivious to the systemic violence of America’s justice system due to many (unconscious) factors that perpetuate it.
Moreover, the foreground and background of the work contribute to the tension and raise important questions of: is the body behind the flag showing what is behind the facade of American democracy or behind the white American dream? Or is the body in front of the flag, showing that African Americans are also part of the American system and should be publicly acknowledged, rather than hidden away? It appears as though bars extend through the image, reminiscent of jail bars and shedding light upon the treatment of black bodies through the justice system. I thought this piece fits in with the documentary because of how it addresses the issue of identity and argues that African Americans are hidden behind American society and that they ought to be brought to the forefront to be a part of it.
Another thing it reminded me of was those Aunt Jemima pancake marketing campaigns. Aunt Jemima, this idea of a happy slave that takes care of the master’s house, was really originally introduced as a minstrel show character during the Jim Crow era and drawn from black stereotypes. This kind of representation only draws legibility from history of imagery in line with perpetuating inequality in society. I think it is fascinating to think about how representations affect people’s unconscious perceptions of themselves and place in society and the kind of the social relationships it continuously creates in this way. Aunt Jemima is a product and reaffirmation of how Jim Crow laws create certain races as second class status. Another example is that from the documentary, the Birth of a Nation inspired a wave of KKK terrorism; more specifically the theatrical effect of the burning of the cross inspired the real-life counterpart and reenactment of this, which is honestly terrifying. Fanon’s idea that these embedded messages and psychological damage from these projections prevent people from developing a sense of identity and also creating a sense of inferiority. Therefore we see this repetitive narration of domination and submission. From these subtle/blatant racial depictions, we can see that racism is pervasive in the collective unconscious. According to Fanon, black simply wants to be recognized as human. Not as black man, but man. Like in Black Skin White Masks, we as a country need to recognize what we are doing to these communities and that we are complicit in racial problems, and need to fight the continuous iterations of pushing back against black equality whether through slavery or jim crow or imprisonment. In order to transcend the racial categories and be cured, we need to be able to see ourselves as the broken object in order to rehumanize everyone as people.
