By Ja’Loni Amor OwensÂ
On the morning of July 16, the nominations for the 71st annual Emmy Awards were announced. Ava DuVernay’s limited series When They See Us, which recounts the wrongful convictions and incarceration of the five young men of color the NYPD arrested in the 1989 Central Park jogger case, earned a whopping 19 nominations. These nominations include one for outstanding lead actor in a limited series or movie for Jharrel Jerome and two for outstanding lead actress in a limited series or movie nominations for Niecy Nash and Aunjanue Ellis. While the celebration of this recognition of Black talent is not exactly uncalled for (I mean, did you see Jharrel Jerome’s performance) I’ve found myself unable to celebrate with such a heavy heart.
In the background of the celebration of sixteen nominations for DuVernay’s limited series, news broke that the United States Department of Justice will not file charges against the NYPD officer seen holding the late Eric Garner in a deadly chokehold. Emerald Garner, the daughter of the late Eric Garner and the sister of the late Erica Garner, issued a passionate call to action in response to the news that no charges would be brought against her father’s killer. In this call to action, Emerald Garner asserts, “We want justice and we want it today…My sister died fighting for justice. You won’t kill me.†July 17, 2019 marks five years since Eric Garner was killed in Staten Island, New York City and on this date organizers took to Foley Square to demand justice in rejection of the Department of Justice’s decision.
While the 2019 Emmy nominations and the 5 year anniversary of Garner’s death inspire two very different feelings within the community, I can’t help but see When They See Us and the injustice of the Garner case as serving a similar purpose in putting a disturbing reality many of us are still unwilling to confront on full display. These two moments are linked not only by the NYPD’s long standing racism and inadequacy, but they’re also linked through their re-traumatization of our community. These two moments demonstrate that Black pain only gets widespread acknowledgement when it’s distant enough from outsiders’ daily lives to consume.
In the days after the footage of an NYPD officer killing Eric Garner first made its way to my timeline, I could hear “I Can’t Breathe†everywhere I went. Not just because the video instantly made me fear for my own father, but because that was the line that appeared in every single headline, and the line I heard over and over again on the news and on radio shows. Those times that I’d read and heard it from members of the press were much different than when I heard them escape Eric Garner’s mouth. These times, they were written as if they’d been the famous line of a Shakespearean tragedy and recited completely devoid of the grief and desperation flooding members of my community—you wouldn’t even recognize them as a man’s last words without context. The response to When They See Us feels very similar.
Those who pivoted to “Let’s get all of the facts first†when it was Michael Brown and to “Well, the gun looked too damn real†when it was Tamir Rice, are now writing status after status about Jharrel Jerome’s passionate performance—referencing the tears they shed at various points throughout their binging of the limited series. Because to this audience, When They See Us is the tragedy and the Central Park jogger case is another “hindsight is 20/20” moment.
When it came to the Eric Garner case, the same demographic said “Well, selling untaxed cigarettes is illegal.†When it came to Erica Garner leading the fight for justice for her father, they said, “She should be taking this time to grieve. This temper tantrum won’t bring her father back.†When Erica Garner passed and white people believed that the protests would stop, suddenly they changed their tune to “Tragedy after tragedy with this family. A father and his daughter.†Only in death, in the least inconvenient form that the Garners could be to their oppressors, is their family deserving of having their pain recognized as the tragedy that it is. Now that Emerald Garner has picked up the torch, white people have reverted back to slandering and degrading the Garner family all while offering glowing reviews of When They See Us and nominating the talent who revived the story of the Central Park 5 for some of the most prestigious awards in an actor’s career at an award ceremony that remains unabashedly white.
In confronting the harshness of this reality I am left wondering what then is When They See Us for me, an organizer toward racial justice? As I now have to spread my attention thin between the injustice of the Garner case and now Renuncia Ricky protests and the life-threatening racist attacks against women of color in Congress. I’m not sure that When They See Us is actually anything to me at all. Neither When They See Us nor the Eric Garner case offer examples of institutional accountability or hope that such can be achieved without complete demolition of the systems we live under and navigate through.
While seeing the officer who ultimately took Eric Garner’s life behind bars may have brought a sense of relief to the Garner family and to Black communities living in the area, there is absolutely nothing that our criminal justice system offers—not even in a limited series completely subject to Black creative control—that could adequately honor the lives and the organizing work of the Garner family or even reconcile with the targeting and incarceration of 5 Black and Latino boys incarcerated in the Central Park jogger case.
While this does not mean that the limited series should not have been made or that the story of the Exonerated Five should not have been revived by DuVernay, it certainly does beg the question of whether When They See Us is nominated because of how the labor of its cast and crew moved viewers or because the final product made viewers comfortable in not being moved at all by injustice in 1989 or in 2019.
Reading Suggestions:
“Long live the guilty: Why innocence is a dangerous and anti-Black myth,” Jess Krug, RaceBaitr (2019)
“Within a White Supremacist System, Eric Garner’s True Crime was being Fat,” Sherronda J. Brown, WearYourVoice Magazine (2019)
“While mourning Erica Garner, we must protect her from being used as a political tool,” Torraine Walker, RaceBaitr (2018)
Ja’Loni is an Afro-Puerto Rican community organizer and freelance essayist. At their alma mater, Hofstra University, they served as lead organizer of the Jefferson Has Gotta Go Campaign, which demanded the removal of the campus’ statue of Thomas Jefferson. She is currently pursuing a degree in public interest law at CUNY School of Law.
