I felt some type of way when I left the screening, to put it lightly. These issues are complex and the situations that create them are hard to swallow at best, so facing them head on isn’t exactly what most people would call fun. Regardless, these conversations need to be had. Similar to Ava Duvernay’s When They See Us (which is also on Netflix), American Son is about an incident between the police and a young black man named Jamal, and the circumstances surrounding it, told from the perspective of his parents. His mother, Kendra (Washington), attempts to get assistance in locating her son from a low-level police officer named Larkin (Jeremy Jordan), to almost no avail. When her estranged husband, Scott (Pasquale), finally arrives, he’s met with an outpouring of information from Larkin, mainly because he mistook him for a superior of his that he had yet to meet, but also because he’s white, and male, and in law enforcement. (Scott is in the FBI.)
The questions that Larkin was asking Kendra about her son (Does he have priors? A street name? Gold teeth?) were downright disrespectful, and that was only the beginning of the film. These aren’t the kind of questions I’d imagine a Caucasian mother getting asked in the same scenario. That perception of Jamal, as a stereotype -- a thug -- based solely on his supposed appearance is not only indicative of what it’s like to be black in these situations, but also of what it’s like to be the parent of a black child. We got a look at this type of trauma in When They See Us, but in American Son makes that experience is the full focus. Washington delivers a gut-wrenching and honest performance that truly captures the horrific anxiety and anguish caused by the very real fear of what could happen to her child simply because of the color of his skin.
During the post-screening talk back -- which functioned like a town hall and was moderated by Jocelyn Smith -- there was a panel that not only included Leon, Washington and Pasquale, but also activists DeAnna Hoskins (president and CEO of @JustLeadersUSA) and Rashid Shabazz (chief marketing and storytelling officer at Color of Change).