13th Page #11

And we are going

to enforce the law,

and Americans should remember that,

if we're going to have law and order.

I am...

the law and order candidate.

We thought... I mean,

they called the end of slavery "jubilee."

We thought we were done then.

And then you had 100 years

of Jim Crow, terror and lynching.

Dr. King, these guys come on the scene,

Ella Jo Baker, Fannie Lou Hamer,

we get the bills passed to vote,

and then they break out the handcuffs.

Label you felon,

you can't vote or get a job.

So, we don't know

what the next iteration of this will be,

but it will be. It will be.

And we will have to be vigilant.

I'mma prison cell

Six by nine

Livin' hell, stone wall

Metal bars for the gods in jail

My nickname, the can

The slammer, the big house

I'm the place many fear

'Cause there's no way out

The Bureau of Justice reported

That one in three young, black males

is expected to go to jail or prison

during his lifetime,

which is

an unbelievably shocking statistic.

Black men account

for roughly 6.5% of the US population.

They make up 40.2%

of the prison population.

We now have more African Americans

under criminal supervision

than all the slaves back in the 1850s.

The prison industrial complex, uh...

relies historically

on the inheritances of slavery.

The 13th Amendment says,

"No involuntary servitude except for those

who have been duly convicted of a crime."

So once you've been convicted of a crime,

you are in essence a slave of the state.

The stroke of a pen is not self-enforcing.

And so, while the 13th Amendment is hailed

as this great milestone for freedom,

and abolitionists celebrate,

and this is the end of a lifelong quest,

the reality is much more problematic.

Well, once that clause is inserted

in there, it becomes a tool.

It's there.

It's embedded in the structure.

And for those who seek to use

this criminality clause as a tool,

it can become a pretty powerful one,

because it's privileged.

It's in the constitution,

it's the supreme law of the land.

Throughout American history,

African Americans

have repeatedly been controlled

through systems of racial

and social control that appear to die,

but then are reborn in new form,

tailored to the needs and constraints

of the time.

You know, after the collapse of slavery,

a new system was born,

convict leasing,

which was a new form of slavery.

And once convict leasing faded away,

a new system was born,

a Jim Crow system,

that relegated African Americans

to a permanent second-class status.

And here we are,

decades after the collapse

of the old Jim Crow,

and a new system

has been born again in America.

A system of mass incarceration

that, once again,

strips millions of poor people,

overwhelmingly poor people of color,

of the very rights supposedly won

in the civil rights movement.

And so instead of talking about it,

we just tried to move on.

After the Civil Rights Act was passed

and after the civil rights laws,

we tried to play it off.

Because we didn't deal with it,

that narrative

of racial difference continued.

And it turned into this presumption

of dangerousness and guilt

that follows every black and brown person

wherever they are.

You need to get out

of the street immediately.

Get out of the way!

This is St. Louis County Police.

Stay off the roadway.

Ferguson was not simply

about Mike Brown.

It was also this pattern of mass

criminalization and mass incarceration.

Back off. Back off.

There was an average of three warrants

per household in Ferguson.

And so people rose up

because they understood

that they were also enemies of the state,

seen as enemies of the state.

The communities in which black people live

really become occupied territories,

and black people have become seen

as, um, enemy combatants, right,

who don't have any rights,

and who can be stopped and frisked

and, you know, arrested

and detained and questioned

and killed with impunity.

If we were to look at

the larger-scale riots that we know of

in, you know, our recent history,

from Rodney King,

to the Detroit riot in 1967,

the Newark riot in 1967,

Harlem riot in 1964,

Watts in 1965.

Every single one of those riots

was a result of police brutality.

That is the common thread.

- Fight back! Fight back!

- Fist up! Fist up!

It would be a mistake to say,

as many do in the current context,

that if you're against the police,

then you're against law and order.

These are hardworking civil servants

putting their lives on the line every day.

And that's true.

People who join the police do so,

you know, to do these sorts of things.

But if you dismiss black complaints

of mistreatment by police

as being completely rooted

in our modern context,

then you're missing the point completely.

There has never been

a period in our history

where the law and order branch

of the state has not operated against

the freedoms, the liberties,

the options, the choices

that have been available for

the black community, generally speaking.

And to ignore that racial heritage,

to ignore that historical context,

means that you can't have

an informed debate

about the current state

of blacks and police relationship today,

'cause this didn't just appear

out of nothing.

This is the product

of a centuries-long historical process.

And to not reckon with that

is to shut off solutions.

We may have lost the sheets

of the Ku Klux Klan,

but, clearly, when you see

black kids being shot down...

then, obviously,

we didn't cut out this cancer.

For many of us, you know,

whose families

lived through this,

who are extensions

of this kind of oppression,

we don't need to see pictures

to understand what's going on.

It's really to kind of, like,

speak to the masses

who have been ignoring this

for the majority of their life.

But I also think there's trouble

of just showing,

you know,

black bodies as dead bodies, too.

Too much of anything

becomes unhealthy, unuseful.

I think they need to be seen,

if the family is okay with it.

It wasn't until things were made visual

in the civil rights movement,

that we really saw, uh,

folks come out

and being shocked into movement.

You have to shock people

into paying attention.

But there's a kind of historical

trajectory that we can trace here, um,

through media and technology.

We went back to, um, the slavery era,

when people were writing autobiographies

or slave narratives.

Later in the 19th century,

when people began to use photographs

and they showed images.

There's a famous image

of slave Gordon and his back,

and you can see just this

kind of lattice of scar tissue

that is evidence of the whippings

that he received.

Or the images of lynchings,

which white people produced.

The murder of Emmett Till

was really thought of as being

one of the primary catalysts

for the civil rights movement.

The willingness of his mother

to have an open-casket funeral.

Hundreds and hundreds

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