We Do This 'Til We Free Us

Ava DuVernay's documentary traces one clause of the 13th Amendment, which abolished slavery except as punishment for a crime, from Reconstruction convict leasing through Jim Crow, the War on Drugs and the modern prison boom. Historians, activists and politicians make the case that mass incarceration is slavery's afterlife by another legal name.

Why it’s here: The punk move is the thesis itself: it reads the Constitution's own text as the loophole and then follows the money and the rhetoric, including footage of the politicians who built the machine, straight to the present. The pedagogy is in the method. It teaches a viewer to trace a single policy lever across 150 years instead of treating each era as a separate story, which is a transferable habit of mind. Worth knowing that some historians argue its straight line from slavery to prisons flattens a more tangled history, so watch it as a forceful argument rather than a settled account.

Starr Carter lives in a poor Black neighborhood and goes to a rich, mostly white prep school, and keeps those two lives apart until the night she watches a police officer shoot her friend Khalil. The film follows what happens when she is the only witness and has to decide whether to speak. Adapted from Angie Thomas's novel.

Why it’s here: The film puts a teenager in the position of choosing to testify against power, at real cost, and doesn't pretend it's easy. What's pedagogical is how clearly it shows the gap between the two worlds Starr lives in. It trims the book's interior voice, so read the book first when you can. Direct companion to the novel already in the catalog.