Honors students are invited to watch and discuss Ava DuVernay’s Netflix series When They See Us over the course of two sessions. The screening is organized by Annika Thiem of the University of Tuebingen, currently scholar-in-residence at the University of Maryland’s Honors College.

When They See Us is a fictionalized account of a true crime case from 1989, when five boys of color—Korey Wise, Yusef Salaam, Antron McCray, Kevin Richardson, and Raymond Santana—were wrongly accused and convicted for a crime they did not commit.

Released in 2019—thirty years after the original case—the series uses this true crime case from 1989 to dramatize how police brutality, mass incarceration, and structural racism in the US criminal justice system are still prevalent issues today. In addition, the show negotiates issues of “epistemic injustice” (Fricker 2007) and particularly dramatizes the perils of “testimonial injustice” (Fricker 2007) in connection to racism in criminal investigations.

Discussions about the series will focus on questions such as (but not limited to):

• How can the series be situated in the Black Lives Matter movement?
• How does it depict structural racism in the US justice system both in the past and in the present?
• What is the relevance of this true crime case from the late 1980s for today’s public debates?
• What other forms of injustice does the series negotiate?

Session one on November 14 will feature “Part One” and “Part Two” (screening time: 2h 15 min); session two on November 21 will finish up the series with “Part Three” and “Part Four” (screening time: 2h 30 min). You are invited to come to one or both screenings.