Were you trying to create that?ĭuVernay: Yeah, absolutely.

What is a person? What is property? What is an enslaved person? Is he really free? What is a minor crime? Listening to it as I’m watching it, I’m hearing emphasis on the duality, on who gets to name things. Juleyka Lantigua-Williams: A lot of the film is about questioning definitions of things and questioning the way that things are labeled. The conversation has been edited for clarity and length. I talked with DuVernay about her words, about her intent, and about how she came to listen so well and hear so clearly. It pricks and prods throughout the documentary’s 100-minute run time. Is it a condemnation of past deeds or an accusation aimed at everyone who is complicit? Its effect doesn’t numb the viewer. Throughout the film’s continuous reveal, a single word flashes in giant white letters on a black background: CRIMINAL. The “southern strategy” is unmasked as a political calculation that decimated black neighborhoods but won the southern white vote. The academic and civil-rights advocate Michelle Alexander unpacks how the rhetorical war started by Richard Nixon and continued by Ronald Reagan escalated into a literal war, a “nearly genocidal” one. Premised as a historical survey that maps the genetic link between slavery and today’s prison-industrial complex, 13th explodes the “mythology of black criminality,” as The New Yorker’s Jelani Cobb at one point in the film refers to the successive and successful measures undertaken by political authorities to disempower African Americans over the past three centuries. At other times it wrestles with oxymorons that target black Americans: truth in sentencing, War on Drugs, tough on crime, law and order, minor crimes. Sometimes the film confronts words in seemingly contradictory pairs: person/ property, slave/ freed person, labor force/ prison workers. The 50 Best Podcasts of 2021 Laura Jane Standley and Eric McQuadeġ3th, out Friday on Netflix, compels viewers to sit upright, pay attention, and interrogate words in their most naked form as they’re analyzed and unpacked by DuVernay’s subjects, who include Angela Davis, Charles Rangel, and Henry Louis Gates.

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