DOCUMENTARY: 13th

I am moved to share this excellent, heartbreaking, illuminating, and invaluable documentary again. This is something we all need to see, to know, to integrate, and to act upon. NOW. 400 years of violent oppression, dehumanization, and death must be stopped. The cancer of systemic racial injustice which has infected the whole of America from the very beginning must be ended. It's up to each and every one of us to do our part in the great universal struggle for racial, social, economic, and environmental justice. — Molly

13th is a 2016 American documentary film by director Ava DuVernay. The film explores the "intersection of race, justice, and mass incarceration in the United States;" it is titled after the Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, adopted in 1865, which abolished slavery throughout the United States and ended involuntary servitude except as a punishment for conviction of a crime.

DuVernay contends that slavery has been perpetuated since the end of the American Civil War through criminalizing behavior and enabling police to arrest poor freedmen and force them to work for the state under convict leasing; suppression of African Americans by disenfranchisement, lynchings, and Jim Crow; politicians declaring a war on drugs that weighs more heavily on minority communities and, by the late 20th century, mass incarceration of people of color in the United States. She examines the prison-industrial complex and the emerging detention-industrial complex, discussing how much money is being made by corporations from such incarcerations.

13th garnered acclaim from a number of film critics. It was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature at the 89th Academy Awards, and won the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Documentary or Nonfiction Special at the 69th Primetime Emmy Awards.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/13th_(film)