13th

13 Eye-Opening Quotes From The Documentary '13th'

We tolerate racism. History is not accidental.
Sade Andria Zabala
December 10, 2016
“Systems of oppression are durable, and they tend to reinvent themselves.”
— Glenn Martin, 13th
Tagged: Oppression, Slavery, racism, BLM
“Right now, we now have more African-Americans under criminal supervision than all the slaves back in 1850s.”
— New Jersey Senator Cory Booker, 13th
Tagged: Oppression, Slavery, racism, BLM
“We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black [people]. But by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt their communities.”
— Unknown Official of the Nixon Administration, 13th
Tagged: Oppression, racism, War on Drugs, Hippie, Marijuana, Drugs
“So many aspects of the old Jim Crow are suddenly legal again once you’ve been branded a felon. And so it seems that in America we haven’t so much ended racial caste, but simply redesigned it.”
— Michelle Alexander, 13th
Tagged: Oppression, racism, BLM
“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.”
— Bryan Stevenson, 13th
Tagged: Oppression, racism, BLM
“That's why when someone asks me about violence, I just find it incredible because what it means is that the person who's asking that question has absolutely no idea what black people have gone through, what black people have experienced in this country since the time the first black person was kidnapped from the shores of Africa.”
— Angela Davis, 13th
Tagged: Oppression, racism, BLM
“The United States is home to 5% of the world’s population, but 25% of the world’s prisoners. Think about that.”
— Barack Obama, 13th
Tagged: America, Prison
“People say all the time, ‘well, I don’t understand how people could have tolerated slavery?’ ‘How could they have made peace with that?’ ‘How could people have gone to a lynching and participated in that?’ ‘That’s so crazy, if I was living at that time I would never have tolerated anything like that.’

And the truth is we are living in this time, and we are tolerating it.”
— Bryan Stevenson, 13th
Tagged: Slavery, BLM, racism
“But if you dismiss black complaints of mistreatment by police as being completely rooted in our modern context, then you’re missing then 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 to 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.”
— Kevin Gannon, 13th
Tagged: Slavery, BLM, racism
“In many ways, the so-called war on drugs was a war on communities of color, a war on black communities, a war on latino communities.”
— Angela Davis, 13th
Tagged: Oppression, racism, Drugs, Latino, War on Drugs
“History is not just stuff that happens by accident. We are the products of history that our ancestors choose, if we’re white. If we are black, we are the products of the history that our ancestors mostly likely did not choose. Yet here we are all together, the products of that set of choices. And we have to understand that in order to escape from it.”
— Kevin Gannon, 13th
Tagged: Slavery, BLM, racism, History
“We were not brought here to be made citizens. We were brought here against our will. We were not brought here to enjoy the constitutional gifts that they speak so beautifully about.”
— Malcolm X, 13th
Tagged: Slavery, BLM, racism, History
“Dr. King, people forget, was not this beloved figure that everybody put on a pedestal. He was considered one of the most dangerous people in America by the head of the Federal Bureau of Investigations.”
— Van Jones, 13th
Tagged: Slavery, BLM, racism, History, MLK