When They See Us

As a society, we tend to avoid reflection, to steer clear of any admission that we, either collectively or individually, ever did anything wrong, that we are devoid of blame, that we can, without any lingering guilt, wash our hands of the mistakes someone else made. And we do this because it helps us sleep better at night, because today’s problems, and the immediate concerns of tomorrow, our children, our jobs, our health, are too all-consuming to get lost in the consequences of any distant, yesteryear decisions made by people six degrees away from our present circumstance. But history, when written by the vulnerable rather than the defensive, has a way of telling us the truth we busied ourselves with ignoring at the time. So it was with the five wrongly convicted and demonized boys from the Central Park jogger case in 1989.

Watch the new mini-series by Ava DuVernay. It’ll shake you. And rightly so.