I was 13, a mere year younger than Kevin Richardson and Raymond Santana, two of the boys who made up Central Park Five, when they were wrongfully convicted of beating and raping the white female jogger Trisha Meili in 1989.

I had just returned to the United States after living in my father’s country of Trinidad and Tobago for three years, and the televised melodramas that would cement my coming-of-age as a black woman — Anita Hill testifying at Clarence Thomas’s confirmation hearings, the videotape of Los Angeles police officers beating Rodney King, the O.J. Simpson Bronco chase — had yet to happen.