Despite the protests and the killing of George Floyd being the latest news to come up in regards to the Black Lives Matter movement and the systemic racism that plagues the US, the stories of Black people being targeted by police is nothing new. Spike Lee recently made that abundantly clear with his video tying together the events of Floyd’s death with a scene from his 1989 film, “Do The Right Thing.” And now, “Selma” filmmaker Ava DuVernay recently opened up about the racism she faced as a child and how she grew up knowing the things that people are just now starting to realize.
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Speaking to Oprah Winfrey, as part of the OWN special “Where Do We Go From Here?” (via Deadline), DuVernay relayed her own personal experiences with racism in the police force and how her community dealt with the fact that the very people that were meant to protect and serve were a bigger problem than the issues that she faced growing up in Los Angeles.
She started by detailing an issue she experienced as a young girl, where her father was racially profiled and the cops swarmed her house to arrest her father because he “fit the description” of a wanted man.
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“Police came into our backyard and—we grew up in the south cities of Los Angeles—police came in and I remember coming out of the house and seeing my father, my proud, beautiful father on the ground in our own backyard wrestled to the ground by police,” DuVernay said.
The filmmaker added that the incident came about because her at-home father “fit the description of someone who was running in through the neighborhood.”
She continued, “And so, seeing that was traumatizing me as a young person. But it fit in with all of the police aggression that I grew up with living in Compton and Long Beach and Lynwood here in L.A.”
DuVernay said that her experiences with the police led to her not trusting the officers to handle issues in a fair manner. She continued explaining that, growing up, Black people in her community dealt with issues without calling the cops because of a fear of what might happen.
“As I grew up, we did not call the police if there was an issue,” DuVernay explained. “We called each other and we dealt with it. Because calling the police is the sure way for something to go wrong more often than not for a lot of Black people in this country.”
The filmmaker not only talked about her own experiences but also about what is currently going on in the protests that have been ongoing for the past week or so. You can watch the full special below:
