Netflix’s Making A Murderer has been called its “most significant show ever.” I agree. I recently posted this to my Facebook page:
Before watching Netflix’s ‘Making a Murderer’ I already held a deep distrust of the police and the US justice system. After watching it, that has turned into damn near hatred. The injustice that was done to Steven Avery and Brendan Dassey is egregious and infuriating. Anyone who claims to value justice needs to watch this show to see just how severely corruption permeates “our” so-called system of justice.
Others have also been posting their thoughts on social media, mainstream media has been commenting, and many thousands are signing petitions to try to help in righting this wrong. There has even been formed a Facebook group called Free Steven Avery. Throughout all of this there has been a significant and important awakening to the criminal actions that lawmakers and law enforcers are able to get away with.
While scrolling through the Free Steven Avery page, I noticed something interesting, and hopefully encouraging. An entire sector of society is having their eyes opened as the veil is lifted for a peek into the system. This sector is for the first time being forced to ask themselves if the system leaves us in a place where we can trust the judicial process and the resulting verdicts or not.
Steven Avery and Brendan Dassey are white. Virtually all of the members of Free Steven Avery are white. Everyone I have seen posting on social media has been white. There is a growing realization that regardless of race, anyone can be chewed up and spit out by the system.
Minorities have been well aware of this problem for decades – even centuries. Blacks especially have long held a severe distrust of the judicial system. The Rodney King riots, and the reactions to police murders in Ferguson and Baltimore were a response to injustices that have plagued those communities for far too long.
When I was first learning how to drive, I was taught that if I was ever pulled over by a cop I was to keep my hands on the steering wheel so that the cop wouldn’t have to fear me. Black children learning how to drive are taught the same, but instead of their hands on the steering wheel they are taught to reach their hands out of the window. That such fear can permeate a community is disheartening and shows a sliver of the nefarious nature of the current policing and judicial systems.
The Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement arose with the goal of bringing these issues to the forefront. Unfortunately, BLM has largely served to widen the divide between the white and black communities (thanks mostly to the mainstream media, and the subsequent counter and diametrically opposed movement, All Lives Matter).
There’s hope that this series can help to open all eyes to a very real problem and unite us all in fixing it. Making a Murderer has captured the attention of many whom had previously looked the other way regarding judicial and police corruption. It will hopefully help to bring all communities together in unity to finally understand that the United States is increasingly becoming totalitarian in nature. It will hopefully help the white community to see what the minority communities have long lived with as a part of their lives. That the existing systems are not serving us nor providing the ends for which they are intended. That the struggle is not between our communities, but rather between us and them. Them being those that wield state power, and us being everyone who lives under their rule.
This article “Making a Murderer: How a Netflix Show Is Opening People’s Eyes to the Heinous Realities of the Police and Justice System” is free and open source. You have permission to republish this article under a Creative Commons license with attribution to Jared Wall and emancipatedhuman.com.
