When I was told about this series, I was immediately told that I would be upset. That I wouldn’t be able to make it through the first twenty minutes without being overcome with sadness, anger, rage and all those emotions that come along with works like this. With all that presumed emotion to deal with, I’ll admit, it took me an extra few days to sit down and finally watch what most of the world had already seen and were currently discussing. I didn’t know what to expect and part of me didn’t want to watch at all. But my socially conscious side had to know what had everyone buzzing, besides it being an Ava Duvarney joint. And honestly, after I’d finished the first episode, I didn’t know how to feel. I wasn’t overcome with anger, but I was overcome more with the sense of, ‘here we go again,’ and not in a snide, I-don’t-want-to-be-bothered sense, but more in the I’m-tired-as-hell-of-this-shit-that-we-can’t-do-nothing-about kinda way . the sense of weariness that comes along with hearing about these cases time and time again, where justice is never adequately served for us but yet, we’re just forced to deal with it. How many more Emmitt Till’s and Kalief Browder’s had to happen? As I continued to watch, it occurred to me, that most of us are content to watch our injustices played out before us as entertainment and leave it at that. 

Certainly, ‘When They See Us’ brings many prominent issues to the foreground; but unfortunately, these are the same issues that have been plaguing our communities since colonialism hit the shores of America and land was stolen to form our great nation.  We evolved from a country that legally allowed the brutal, inhumane, generational enslavement  of African lives, based on the myth of inherent African inferiority, to a country that has had to acquiesce somewhat over the years, for image’s sake, into a society of covert racism and bigotry that is now currently manifested in  an unjust legal system and a misdistribution of resources away from minority communities. Resources such as adequate housing, food, jobs, education and healthcare, to name the immediate few that come to mind. These lack of resources then result in ‘urban jungles’ where it is then okay for society to point the finger at the’ animals’ who reside there, who in reality, are victims of circumstance.

‘When They See Us’ is just the latest example of how we are unjustly treated in this society. Too many times, we are not given fair consideration from the jump. We live in a country where we’re suspects even when the evidence says it doesn’t make sense. We live in a country where our black youth are portrayed as savages in the media daily, while our President and our politicians are the known criminals who should be leading the line into jail. We live in a country where our lives can be wrongfully taken, either by wrongful imprisonment or by unlawful acts of violence, and we’re expected to watch, wide-eyed in traumatized real-time, and move the hell on, like none of it ever happened, continuously hoping to be accepted and valued in the same manner as others.

Sadly, cases such as the Central Park 5 happen more often than we want to believe to continue sleeping comfortably at night. Some statistics site up to 4.1% of wrongful imprisonment in death penalty cases. There is currently not enough data on other crimes to determine the percent of wrongful incarceration. The Innocence Project is an organization that helps to exonerate individuals who’ve been wrongfully convicted, and are also attempting to reshape the judicial system altogether. Since their inception over 30 years ago, they have helped to exonerate 365 people. While that number alone is enough to make your stomach turn, the National Registry of Exonerations has over 2,450 listed to date, with the average amount of time served, being nine years. It seems that justice does indeed tend to take a political turn, often at the expense of someone’s life. And true to American form, that life is most often black or brown. Blacks and minorities make up the bulk of wrongful incarcerations, with numbers ranging anywhere from 62%-73%, depending on the type of crime. These statistics, along with others, continue to tell of the grim struggles we face in trying to get something so fundamentally essential as justice here in America.  

So my questions act as posits to the future. We know the stories. Now what? How do we prevent these circumstances from happening to any other family? How do we protect our kids? How do we balance the scales of a country that was built to thrive off imbalance? We appreciate the efforts of organizations like the Innocence Project who have helped so many and are fighting to equalize an unjust system. But are their efforts alone enough? What else could we be doing? We constantly yell ‘Black lives matter’ and ‘no justice, no peace’ to deaf ears and cold hearts. When do we stop trying to change a system that isn’t interested in changing? Though I don’t know the meaning behind the title, to me, ‘When They See Us’ even hangs in the air like an incomplete, sad and hopeful declaration of wanting to be seen, acknowledged and accepted. If history has shown us nothing else, it’s that you won’t be seen until you make yourself known. So to me, a powerfully telling, complete work would be ‘When They See Us is When We Make Them.’ I just might have some ideas for that one. 

-Indigo Fire