Systemic racism films we need to watch
It has been a terrible, traumatic and terrifying week for America. An outcry, and an uprising, erupted across that country in response to the killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis police officers, and police forces across the United States reacted with violence and excessive force, driven on by President Donald Trump’s aggressive rhetoric and threats of military action.
This anger and rage at police violence and systemic racism is not just a week old, or a few years old, or a decade or even 50 years old. It is centuries in the making.
To understand and meaningfully contribute to this movement, many white Americans will simply have to listen to black Americans and educate themselves about the inequality baked into that society, about the racist social and economic policies that have oppressed many black Americans, even as leaders preach about a postracial society. Now is the time for all of us to learn.
Ava DuVernay’s powerful Oscar-nominated 2016 Netflix documentary 13th is a fast, furious and information-packed film about race, the justice system, and the effects of mass incarceration.
The title refers to the 13th amendment of the American constitution, which abolishes slavery, except, of course, for criminals, who are stripped of their human rights upon entering and exiting the system. Much of the film hinges around the arguments of writer Michelle Alexander, author of The New Jim Crow, that the criminal justice system is an extension of slavery and the Jim Crow laws as a racialised system of control.
13th touches on the civil rights movement, the war on drugs, Hollywood, redlining, and the prison industrial complex. And though it communicates a vast breadth of information, DuVernay presents it clearly and in a way that it is absolutely electrifying and infuriating.
Also available on Netflix is When They See Us, DuVernay’s award-winning miniseries about the Central Park Five, a group of unjustly convicted black teenagers.
Alexander also appears in Eugene Jarecki’s 2012 documentary The House I Live In (DocPlay, iTunes), which makes the same argument as 13th, but is more specifically focused on the war on drugs.
Jarecki’s film illustrates the racist historical context for criminalising drug use, due to white fears about other ethnic groups gaining economic power. He also demonstrates the destructive cycles of poverty and criminality that oppressed minorities become locked in once they are convicted of a drug charge, and the brutality of mandatory minimum sentencing laws.
Haitian film-maker Raoul Peck brought an unfinished manuscript of critic and novelist James Baldwin to life with his 2016 Oscar-nominated documentary I Am Not Your Negro (DocPlay, iTunes).
The book was intended to be about the interconnected lives of civil rights activists and friends of Baldwin’s – Martin Luther King Jr, Malcolm X and Medgar Evers, all three assassinated in their prime, during the height of their activism.
Narrated by Samuel L Jackson, Peck enlivens the text with archival footage and photographs, and clips of the charismatic Baldwin’s television appearances. It’s an investigation of the norm of whiteness in our culture, and a bold reminder we’ll never reconcile the existential crisis of America without reckoning with issues of race and inequality.
Finally, Spike Lee intimately grapples with the simmering and deeply rooted issues that cause civil unrest in his seminal protest film Do The Right Thing (iTunes).