“When They See Us”:  A 30-Year-Old Horror Story for Our Times

I was a little over a year old in 1989, and while my childhood was just beginning, the childhoods of five innocent black boys were being abruptly ended.  That year, on April 19, Antron McCray, Kevin Richardson, Yusef Salaam, Raymond Santana and Korey Wise (all between the ages of 14 and 16 years old) were wrongfully accused of, and arrested for, the brutal rape and beating of a woman in Central Park.  Made out to be monsters, and treated like animals, these kids -- kids who look like me, and my son, and my brothers -- were infamously dubbed the “Central Park Five.”  Thirty years later, we’ve been given a chance to revisit this debacle of a case by Ava DuVernay, writer and director of Netflix’s new four-part limited series, When They See Us.