Just finished watching a series on Netflix, "When They See Us", consisting of 4 episodes; these were all directed by Ava DuVernay, who also directed 13th and Selma. It was made for Netflix, and it follows the story of five 14 to 16-year-old Harlem teenagers of colour called the "Central Park Five" who were arrested for raping and molesting a 28-year-old white female jogger in New York Central Park in 1989. The story was built around their lives and what happened on the day of the incident. The fact that the boys were arrested by a biased police force with a white female lead, Ms Linda Fairstein, who was then the sex crimes chief in the Manhattan district attorney's office, and she was determined to get them. She said, "Every young Black male who was in the park last night is a suspect in the rape of that woman." That throws innocent until proven guilty out the window. The police were biased and out to make an arrest from the very beginning and pressured to arrest the Black kids. Hence, there was a police sweep, the children were arrested without any adult supervision, and when the parents came, they were threatened as well. From the beginning, you could see that the New York Police had thought that they had their guys and were cooking the whole story to fix it. Their rights were abused, and as minors, they were cold, hungry and threatened. The director has produced films and series on civil rights, pushing the issue to the forefront of our social consciousness. There are parts of the film that one might have missed, but they seem obvious in the present context. The racial element of the attack and the fact that Donald Trump, who was not president then but a real estate mogul at that time, had advertisements calling for tougher policing and the return of the death penalty just 2 weeks after their arrest, even before their trial. The advertisement did not name the five teenagers directly, but it was clearly written in response to the Central Park jogger case and used highly emotional "law and order" language. People could have seen that as a sign of things to come. These boys all served jail time between 6 and 13 years, with no DNA evidence to match it. A serial rapist later confessed to the crime, and his DNA did match. In 2014, following a lengthy legal battle, the Central Park 5 received a $41 million compensation settlement.
The story is a sad one and shows institutional racism and the reason why there are more Black people in jail than whites and the system that perpetuates it. It is also unfortunate that whites don't believe what blacks have been telling them all the time until they see it on film. Ms Linda Fairstein, played by Ms Felicity Huffman, was very active in ensuring the boys were punished. The film shows the danger of a system deeply entrenched in corruption, with processes and procedures in place to protect its perpetrators. Ms Linda Fairstein is a successful author and, till very recently, still claimed that all the boys committed the rape despite there being no DNA evidence to prove this or confirm her story. She is a successful author who has written several bestsellers, but after the Netflix film came out, her publisher, Dutton, publicly dropped her. The film demonstrates what Black people have been complaining about and what whites and some successful Blacks (especially Republican Blacks) have failed to acknowledge.
Whether people are racist or not is a judgement call, but the signs and their actions in some instances clearly can be interpreted as being such. This is one of the films that make us search for our souls; from it, we can see things in a different context.
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