Closing credits tell the story

The Show: 13th

The Moment: Closing credits

The closing credits of this documentary, directed by Ava DuVernay ( Selma), are accompanied by regular, everyday snapshots: mothers holding babies, fathers horsing around with toddlers, smiling children at birthday parties. Three women pose next to a giant sequoia; an older lady beams at the Grand Canyon. What is extraordinary is their ordinariness, because every person in them is black.

This doc is a calm, well-reasoned wail of anguish. Its title refers to the 13th amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which abolished slavery but included the fateful phrase “except as punishment for a crime.” DuVernay gives us a host of thinkers from Angela Davis to Newt Gingrich who make a strong case that a campaign of mistrust and abuse of African-Americans began immediately after abolition; that it persists in the criminal justice system; and that mass incarceration and programs such as stop-and-frisk have become socially acceptable substitutes for slavery and lynching.

The statistics are harrowing: in 1970, there were 358,000 Americans in prison; in 2014, 2.3 million — a disproportionate number of them black. The images are worse: chain gangs, hanged bodies, unarmed young men shot dead in the streets.

DuVernay’s subjects contend that these images have power and must be shown. But she also knows they’re hideously familiar. That’s why the closing credit photos are such a brilliant stroke. In the U.S. circa now, the truly startling images are those of happy black people living ordinary lives. The documentary 13th is streaming on Netflix. Johanna Schneller is a media connoisseur who zeroes in on popculture moments. She usually appears Monday through Thursday.