13th Stereotypes

In the documentary “13th” the movie discusses how imagery and stereotypes have been prevalent, especially throughout that time period, to incite fear about black men to justify how they are treating them like locking them up and harshly brutalizing them. Some examples of this is how they show mass incarcerations and police brutality toward black men, which is a really powerful use of imagery because it incites a sense of fear. Stereotypes play a huge role because as shown in the documentary throughout a lot of years and history black men have been depicted as violent and as criminals which is shown in the documentary in various scenes like the mugshots. So by showing these images, it capitalizes on the idea that black men are dangerous and …show more content…
So people were left wondering how to rebuild that economy. After the civil war, African Americans were arrested en masse, which was the nation's first prison boom, which means that you were basically a slave again because the 13th amendment loophole was that except for criminals, everyone else was free. So at that time African-Americans were getting arrested for really minor crimes (so that they had to provide labor to rebuild the economy of the south after the civil war) which all endorsed the mythology of black criminality claiming that they were violence against white women. After all this happened a lot of movies, drawings, and posters started to come out stereotyping them and from then on were just depicted as “evil” and “menacing”. In the documentary it states that “in every scene of the movies that a black person came out they were made to be like an animal like image and cannibalistic and animalistic” causing the image of the african american male to be ruined. So just because the white political elite and the business establishment needed black bodies working, forcing the view of black men as