As a white female, it is my responsibility to educate myself on black history, culture and racial prejudices that black people experience every day as I cannot experience these myself. I thought a good place to start was to watch the docuseries When They See Us on Netflix. My mother had recommended it to me as she had watched it a while ago and she mentioned how there was a follow-up programme to it, which was an interview with the ‘Exonerated Five’ that this docuseries was based on, with Oprah Winfrey.
What is it about?
When They See Us is a docuseries about how five teenage boys of black and Hispanic ethnicities, originally called the ‘Central Park Five’, were charged with the rape of a woman who was jogging through Central Park in New York in 1989 after they were coerced into saying that they were responsible. The series was directed by Ava DuVernay, who was also the producer of The 13th, a documentary about the 13th Amendment in the United States of America.
The docuseries focuses on how Kevin Richardson, Antron McCray, Usef Salaam, Raymond Santana Jr and Korey Wise, all aged between 14 and 16 at the time, were all coerced into confessing to a rape that they didn’t commit because they were promised by the NYPD that if they confessed to what happened, they could go home. Several of the boys did not have a parent or guardian present, which is required if suspects are minors and none of them had lawyers to advise them. The boys were coerced into telling law enforcement about the other boys and what they did to be able to go home, as promised by the police. The boys were ‘confessing’ with the words put in their mouths by the police and telling stories of the other boys that they did not even know as they were led to believe that this would stop them having to stay at the police station.
Emotional Catharsis
DuVernay truly takes the audience on an emotional rollercoaster through this series as although the events of 1989 are acted, it really feels like we are watching the real lives of what happened to these young boys. Through the court cases, we are taken through the emotions of these boys, feel hope for them as their stories obviously don’t match up to what actually happened and we feel hopeful that they will evade the charges put on them, despite knowing that they won’t. The court cases are especially emotional as the position of the audience is that we can see how obviously innocent these boys are, but the way they confessed was manipulated so well by the police investigators that there was no way their cases would make the jury come to an innocent verdict.
The series is definitely a difficult watch to see the injustice thrown upon these boys and know how helpless they were. Seeing them incarcerated is awful, especially seeing what Korey Wise went through as he had to go to a men’s prison due to being sixteen, unlike the rest of the boys who were sent to juvenile prison.
Lessons learnt
Something that this docuseries does really well is get across to all audiences the injustice of what happened to these boys because they were in the wrong place at the wrong time and also because of their race. All these boys did was go and hang out with their friends in the middle of the park, yet because they were in the same place that the rape occurred and the police just wanted to convict someone, they were thrown into this case with no leg to stand on.
DuVernay illustrates to us what it is like to be a black person challenged by the law and how the law doesn’t treat white people and black people the same; the phrase “innocent until proven guilty” scarcely features when you are a person of colour. At the time, it was easy for the police to find some black boys that were in the place at the time and charge them to get a conviction rather than find the actual person that committed the rape.
Overall
The saddest part about this docuseries is that despite this series being based on events that happened over thirty years ago, situations like this are still happening today, making this docuseries still frighteningly relevant. Men and women of colour are still being imprisoned or killed as a result of police brutality when being completely innocent and not showing any potential threat to police officers who have killed or arrested them.
I would give this series 10/10 and strongly recommend it to everyone but especially people who are white as I think the series powerfully encapsulates the experiences of black people with the law and the injustices they still have to go through.
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