All right, we're back with award-winning director Ava
DuVernay.
So the documentary "13th," you talked about--
first of all, it came out like in 2016 originally, right?
Something like that, yeah.
Yeah, and now, everyone's talking about it again
and bringing it up, which is giving you
a whole new audience.
And as I said, it's so powerful, and so heartbreaking.
But in it, you talk about Republicans and Democrats
trying to outdo each other as to who is
going to be tougher on crime.
I was shocked.
You look at Bill Clinton.
And you look at the three strikes.
And you look at all the things that hurt so many black people
over the years.
It was surprising.
Yeah, I mean, the piece, overall, that part of it
deals with recent history, recent political history.
I think the thing that I hoped people would get out
of "13th," and the reason why I made it
as a brisk 100-minute American history lesson,
truly, it's really all the things that we've ever
been taught in school, less about Clinton, and policies,
and Bush, and all those guys, and more
about that the very foundation of our criminal justice system
is flawed, and that was created to subjugate and oppress,
that the foundations of the police
departments in this country are born out of slave catchers,
right?
Law enforcement at that time that were sent out
to subjugate black people.
And so that's what hopefully "13th" just shows you,
that we're on a continuum.
People ask what to do now.
The first thing is to know what's
already been done so that we can build on the gains.
We can build on the losses.
And we can be a little bit more strategic about how
we're moving forward.
So that's the real point of "13th,"
to talk about not just mass incarceration
and police brutality, but to talk
about the idea of criminalization.
You talk about white privilege.
Embedded in white privilege is the sense of white people
aren't criminals.
That's one of the base lines, right?
That's what I want people to take from "13th."
And I'm so thrilled that folks are discovering it again.
Yeah, I mean, is.
It's a perfect-- it is a history lesson.
And when you see what 13th, is the amendment,
and how that really created this loophole, but also
just how dangerous, like you said,
was from that movie, "Birth of a Nation," how everyone you know
created this monster.
Anyway, it's really unbelievable.
And I just keeps saying you must watch that movie.
And if you think that you don't need to see it, you're wrong.
You need to see it.
How does what's happening now compare
to what's happened in the past?
Because you have done so many projects
on this exact behavior.
But what do you think the difference is?
Or is there?
Huge differences.
I mean, I believe you have Congressman Lewis on the show.
Is that right?
Yes.
Congressman Lewis, the strategies, the great bodily
risk and harm, the thinking that had
to go behind protests of the '60s that he participated in
are light years behind in terms of their danger, the jeopardy,
than folks who are protesting today.
And that's because of what he and his comrades did.
And so there's definitely been differences.
I mean, the fact that you and I are sitting here--
you and me sitting here on national TV talking about this?
That's a big deal, right?
And so there have been gains.
The important thing, I think, strategically,
as we move forward, anyone who believes
in justice and dignity, to really come together
to think of strategies that build
on what's happened in the past.
But we are in a better place.
We're in a place where we can be thinking
about you know technology, all kinds of ways
that we can kind of fight this.
And many of my colleagues have been thinking about ways
to activate this rage that we feel and just all of that group
think, I think, will hopefully lead us into a direction
where there's some actual action taken.
Yeah, there's got to be a plan and some place
to put all that rage, I agree.
We have to take a break, Ava.
This is amazing.
We'll be right back.
You're starting a new initiative.
What is the new initiative?
Well, I think one of the things that I've been--
I'll tell you a little bit about it.
Because I've been thinking a lot about my own rage,
my own emotions.
When I look at George Floyd's tape, I see my uncles--
not just in a general sense.
But he looks like people in my family,
literally the facial features.
So time that video plays on CNN or anything else,
I see people that I love on the ground begging for their life.
So there's a sense of those images, what
we're asking of each other, and the storytelling
around these instances, the stories that we're
telling each other.
That's what I've really been interested in interrogating.
We need to change what those stories are
and change the way that we tell them.
And so what we've come up with in a short amount of time
is an idea that we call LEAP.
It's the Law Enforcement Accountability Project.
And what it is we're asking for narrative change
and we're creating narrative change
around police abuse, misconduct, and murder of black people.
We're changing the lens of the story.
And it connects to something I told you
at the top of the show, which is, why do we
not know who is killing us?
How can officers-- and there are wonderful officers.
My cousin, whom I love deeply and grew up with,
is a police officer in Texas.
There are good officers.
But we have heard many good officers speaking up over
the past week saying this was wrong and this cannot be.
And so what we're trying to do through storytelling,
through LEAP, is say, we need to start
telling the stories about those who murder
and about those who are not being held accountable.
So this project looks at narrative storytelling
across all genres film, theater, dance, literature, poetry,
sculpture, music, to start to get us to think about the fact
that we have this big blindspot.
We allow officers who do harm to disappear.
They move to other departments in other cities.
They continue to get paid while they're
under administrative review.
They are free to go about their lives faceless and nameless.
And when we talk about police accountability and caring
for each other, we need you to be able to name those names
and know who those people are.
So that's a lot of what the project focuses on.
That's great.
Well, you are an amazing woman.
I thank you for everything.
I thank you for "13th," which, again, everyone must watch.
It's available on Netflix.
For more information on Ava's new initiative
go to our website.
Ava DuVernay, you are incredible.
Thank you so much.
Thank you for having me on.
And I'll say, for people who don't have Netflix,
we've put it free on YouTube, as well.
So no excuse not to learn.
Thank you.
No excuse!
Free on YouTube, "13th."
Thank you so much.
Thanks for your time, Ava.
Thank you.