Ava DuVernay on the legacy of slavery: ‘The sad truth is that some minds will not be changed’
“It might help all of us to once in a
while... to go to South Africa or Germany. Because inherent in the very
cultural fabric there, you have a sense of the past and of reckoning with it...
we don’t do that here, so we can’t even have a real conversation about it.
Because we have not been taught to talk to each other, and we have not been
taught to remember.”
Donald Trump makes his
first appearance in Ava DuVernay’s Oscar-nominated documentary 13th around the
halfway mark, as he posts his notorious full-page ad in the New York Times
calling for the death penalty for the Central Park Five in 1989. But he comes back with a bang at
the end of the film, which was released in October 2016, at a time when Trump
was widely thought to have blown his presidential bid. “In the good old days,”
he roars to his all-white crowd, as DuVernay builds a montage of civil rights
workers being fire-hosed and black men being beaten in the streets, “they would
have carried ’em out on a stretcher!”
Cutting back and forth
from historical footage of lynchings, Emmett Till’s brutally beaten face and
1980s drug raids to images of punch-ups and racial taunting at Trump rallies,
DuVernay links our dire present to America’s racist past. It vividly
demonstrates that history can go backwards as well as forwards. “That is a
big statement,” she says, “but I’d also say that there’s
something possible here in terms of empathy that is beautiful and that
might not have been there before. All of a sudden you have all this marching –
huge airport demonstrations, the Women’s March – and it’s an activation for a
whole lot of people who weren’t affected by this before, because none of it
touched their lives, they’d never felt any kind of oppression or threat to
their humanity.”
DuVernay is always on
the lookout for hope, even in times as dark as ours. Serious as she is about
her subject, in person she exudes endless warmth and good humour. Her
documentary takes a single clause in the 13th amendment to the US constitution
– the one that freed the slaves – and detects therein a template for all future
oppression of America’s black and brown peoples. The amendment’s first section
reads: “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for
crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the
United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.”
That bulky midsection became the basis for
the new slavery of post-reconstruction Jim Crow laws. Slavery was at heart an
economic, labour-centric phenomenon, so, once it was abolished, the midsection
offered a get-out clause that was eagerly embraced by mostly southern states in
need of cheap labour. It’s simple: shift the laws to make more criminals, then make
them work for free as prisoners. Slavery resurrected under another name. As
prison reform activist and ex-con Glenn E Martin tells DuVernay: “Every time
you give me liberty, the handcuffs come out right after.” If this sounds
arcane, note that Victoria’s Secret was only recently shamed out of using
prison labour to make its products.
The film really gains steam during the
post-civil rights era, as it shows successive presidents – Nixon, Reagan,
Clinton – making seismic adjustments in crime and punishment (and in public perceptions)
that substantially affect African-American lives. J Edgar Hoover
criminalising black dissent, and even, in the case of people such as
Angela Davis, criminalising black intellectual thought; the shifting of legal
goalposts in Reagan’s war on drugs through to California’s three-strikes law
and Clinton’s 1994 federal crime bill, which together quadrupled the
national prison population and started a massive privatised prison-building
programme (raising the need for more prisoners to make more profit). And from Trayvon
Martin and Eric Garner to Ferguson and Trump, DuVernay weaves a web
that, as she says, “crosses entire generations and affects entire
communities”. At its core is, as one of her many witnesses calls it, “a
prison-industrial complex that eats black and Latino people for breakfast,
lunch and dinner”.
“Inherent in this 13th
amendment that is supposed to propagate freedom,” DuVernay says, “there is a
shackle. Both within the amendment and in the way it’s structured, and the way
it’s been used, there is a big story about black people in this country, and
the durable systems that have been labelled as one thing but actually do
another, and that’s what the 13th is about.”
And DuVernay is well
placed to tell it. Her own life intersects with a volatile era in race
relations in Los Angeles. Born in Compton and raised under the post-Watts
riots, all-white rule of Daryl Gates’s LAPD, she was 20 years old and studying
film at UCLA when the 1992 Rodney King uprising took place, and working as a
CBS Evening News intern during the OJ Trial – “going through the OJ jurors’
garbage cans”, she chuckles.
“I grew up in Compton,
with a very heavy police presence, a lot of arrests around me, a lot of police
aggression, a lot of issues of crime and punishment and justice. Any kind of
sense of justice or dignity I have was formed in that period. We grew up with
Daryl Gates’s LAPD, we lived under the “Ghetto Bird” –
the chopper always circling overhead, shining lights in our house. Really
formative times, with lots of militant activism and consciousness-raising.”
DuVernay attended
UCLA, then a beacon for young black filmmakers because of the LA Rebellion film movement that had flourished on campus in
the 70s and 80s, producing directors such as Haile Gerima, Charles Burnett and
Julie Dash. “I wrote for the black
student newspaper, was in the African Student Union, and I started to learn
about black liberation theory – that the freedom of black peoples around the
world has been a great threat to the systems that profit from us. And then
becoming a filmmaker and tackling those issues through more intimate stories
like Middle of Nowhere, my film about a woman whose husband is incarcerated,
and then Queen Sugar, my TV series that has a formerly incarcerated father at
its centre. Incarceration and its results are something I feel passionately
about.”
Does she think 13th will help Americans
face up to the legacy of slavery? “The sad truth,” she says with despondency,
“is that some minds just will not be changed. It might help all of us to once
in a while get outside of the United States itself, like go to South Africa or
Germany. Because inherent in the very cultural fabric there, you have a sense
of the past and of reckoning with it, saying, ‘This happened, and we will bear
witness and we will learn from it, we will speak it and say that it happened
and we will remember it.’ And we don’t do that here, so we can’t even have a
real conversation about it. Because we have not been taught to talk to each
other, and we have not been taught to remember.”
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2017/feb/06/ava-duvernay-legacy-slavery-selma-oscars-13th-trump-era-america-racist-past-awardSumit Guha - Glimpsed in the Archive and Known no More: One Indian Slave’s Tale
