![]() DuVernay’s commitment to portraying the boys before they were ensnared by the case proves most excruciating. When They See Us offers a different pathway to illuminating the effects of these biases. “And maybe even in some ways the outcome ultimately of the case.” “I really want people to look at and question the role that the Daily News played in the way we viewed these particular people,” she told The New Yorker recently. By redacting and highlighting specific text and images from 10 days of the publication’s 1989 issues, Bell underscores the devastating effects of the outlet’s glaring bias against the young black and brown boys. The Daily News also published Trump’s full-page ad. The paper published some of the most egregious reporting on the case-details of the minors’ addresses and family histories, and inflammatory headlines such as “WOLF PACK’S PREY”-well before the case was even (wrongfully) adjudicated. No Humans Involved zeroes in on the New York Daily News coverage of the Central Park Five case. Referencing a term coined by the sociologist Helen Fein, Wynter wrote that the acronym, and its attendant category of “nonhuman,” rendered black men (and by extension, all black people) targets for systemic violence:įor the social effects to which this acronym, and its placing outside the “sanctified universe of obligation,” of the category of young Black males to which it refers, leads, whilst not overtly genocidal, are clearly having genocidal effects with the incarceration and elimination of young Black males by ostensibly normal and everyday means.īell’s Wynter-inspired series is composed of photo prints she made using an exacting process of lithography and screen-printing. In it, Wynter wrote at length about “NHI,” the unofficial acronym that Los Angeles law enforcement used to classify cases involving black men. No Humans Involved-After Sylvia Wynter takes its name from a seminal 1994 essay by the scholar and poet. Most immediately, a new project from the artist and journalist Alexandra Bell appears in this year’s Whitney Biennial. The series enters a broader landscape of artistic reckoning with the Central Park Five case, as well as with the country’s history of weaponizing language against black and brown people. The series re-creates the glee with which people seized upon words such as wildin’, common slang for any range of boisterous behavior, as evidence of the boys’ inherent criminality. In its early installments, When They See Us implicates New York media, and the ensuing frenzy of the public, in spurring along the boys’ wrongful verdicts. (Trump is referenced often, particularly in the second installment he is depicted as the most powerful of the boys’ zealous detractors, not the sole purveyor of racial animus.) In rendering their journeys, DuVernay pays careful attention to the terrifying power of language, especially the animalistic rhetoric with which prosecutors and journalists referred to the teens. ![]() In When They See Us, the Ava DuVernay–helmed miniseries now streaming on Netflix, the director lays out the all-too-common process by which the five black and Latino teens were convicted of a crime they did not commit. “If they had their way,” Salaam told CNN in 2012, 10 years after a man named Matias Reyes confessed to the crime and two years before the Central Park Five received a $41 million settlement from the City of New York, “we would have been hanging from one of those lovely trees here in Central Park.” The boys eventually became known as the “Central Park Five,” a pithy moniker picked up by local and national media outlets that served as much to undercut their humanity as it did to free up copy space. Trump, then a local real-estate mogul, purchased full-page ads in four New York publications calling for the return of the death penalty so that the boys could be executed. They were “ just baby boys.” But in the days following the rape of Trisha Meili, the teens-ages 14 to 16-transmogrified into a “ wolf pack.” They became “ savage.” Meili, who became known as the “Central Park jogger,” was often characterized as their “ prey.” The flurry of media attention reached a galling crescendo when Donald J. ![]() Before their arrest, the teens crested through their city with youthful ebullience. Their world was one of concrete and cookouts, basketball and barber shops. The boys, who were all arrested in 1989 after a 28-year-old white woman was brutally raped and abandoned in Central Park, called the sweltering metropolis their home. The New York City teenagers Yusef Salaam, Korey Wise, Kevin Richardson, Raymond Santana, and Antron McCray were not born in the wild.
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