Tag Archives: Orange Is the New Black

Prison and White People

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This first ran on Splice Today.
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After the first season of Orange Is the New Black, some writers like Yasmin Nair criticized the show for its focus on, and subtle bias towards, white women, especially towards star Piper Chapman (Taylor Schilling). The second season addresses these complaints head on. In episode eight, Piper gets a furlough to visit her dying grandmother, despite the fact that many other prisoners, mostly black, have been refused furloughs to see ill loved ones. Piper becomes the (understandable) target of much resentment, and after getting angrier and angrier, she stands up in the cafeteria, apologizes on behalf of white people everywhere, tells them that even though her grandmother is white, she still loves her, and encourages her tormentors to “shut the fuck up.” After which, Suzanne (Uzo Duba), on behalf of the other inmates and (presumably) the viewing audience, throws cake at this privileged, whiny little ass. End of moral.

But in the book on which the memoir is based, Piper didn’t actually get furlough. She asked to see her grandmother die, but the state said, “no.” Piper in real life certainly was middle-class, and privileged in many ways—not many ex-prisoners go on to write famous memoirs that get turned into hit TV series.  But the privilege presented on the show in episode eight, what she’s punished for, wasn’t actually a privilege she had. On the contrary, she was, in this matter, treated just like every other prisoner; with callous, bland disregard and petty authoritarian vindictiveness.

You could say that this doesn’t really matter; the dramatic point is that Piper is middle-class and white and is therefore better off than her cellmates. The incident in the cafeteria demonstrates that; why nitpick about details?

I think it’s worth nitpicking about details, though, because the moral here about Piper’s privilege is a little confused. Specifically, the show seems in many instances so eager to pull Piper down a peg, and to show that she’s privileged, that it can elide the fact that, white as she is, she’s in prison. Moreover, she’s in prison on a decade-old charge of having transported heroin. She committed a pretty low-level crime a while back, and so she’s taken away from her family and robbed of her freedom. She may be privileged in comparison to some of the people in prison with her, but compared to many viewers (and not just white ones) her life, as chronicled in the show, sucks.

This isn’t to say that race is irrelevant. But for the real Piper, racism did not allow her to go see her grandmother: racism prevented her from seeing her grandmother. Racism was used against her, not in the sense that she was discriminated against because she was white, but because the mechanisms and institutions built to police black people ended up policing her.

Racism against black people has been used as an excuse to target certain white people throughout the history of the U.S. White abolitionists who opposed slavery were subject to violence along with blacks in the Cincinnati riots of 1836. During Reconstruction, Northerners who supported black rights could be attacked and killed—The KKK killed white and black civil rights workers. Gone With the Wind gleefully recounts the murder of a Yankee official during Reconstruction who dared tell black people they could marry whites. For that matter, whites who did want to marry blacks, like Richard Loving, faced harassment and discrimination. Even beyond that, Ta-Nehisi Coates points out that politicians who’ve been associated with black causes, whether the Republican Party before the Civil War or the Democratic Party in more recent years, have been subject to racist attacks. As Coates says, “Abraham Lincoln’s light skin did not save him from a racist political attack, any more than it saved him from a racist assassination plot.”

Piper (in real life and in the TV show) wasn’t a civil rights worker or a political figure. But the fact remains that our prison system, the largest in the world, has been justified and sustained by a cultural commitment to policing people of color. As many historians have argued, the war on crime was inaugurated by politicians like Barry Goldwater and Richard Nixon, who argued that civil rights demonstrations and movements were leading to a breakdown of law and order, the solution for which was more cops and more prisons. The result was an ongoing rhetoric of race-baiting around crime and imprisonment, exemplified by George H.W. Bush’s notorious 1988 Willie Horton ad. That rhetoric in turn fueled a 700 percent growth in prison population between 1970 and 2005.

In 2010 blacks were incarcerated at a rate of 2207 per 100,000 people and Latinos at the rate of 966 per 100,000, as opposed to only 380 per 100,000 for whites.

Nonetheless, there are still a lot of white people in prison: white males were 32.9 percent of the prison population in 2008, as opposed to 35.4 percent black males.  And a large number of those whites were in prison for the same reason as blacks—because America, in an excess of racial panic, has built a massive drug war and a massive prison system in an effort to police and control black people. America’s prison system disproportionately affects black people, through sentencing disparities for crack and other systemic biases. But the drug war machinery sometimes, almost incidentally, catches white people in its gears as well. The white rate of incarceration in the U.S., at 380 per 100,000, is still in the top 20 incarceration rates worldwide, and is twice as high as rates in England and Wales.

Since the moment it enshrined slavery in its Constitution, American authoritarianism has been built upon racism. Piper may be privileged in some ways, but at least for a while that racist authoritarianism has gotten her by the blonde locks as surely as it’s got her cellmates. Once you’ve built your prison, you can put anyone in it. Which is just one way that racism has made America less free, especially for black people, but not for them alone.
 

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Why I Quit Watching Weeds

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I binge-watched several seasons of Weeds back there a while ago. The show got worse and worse and more and more improbable as it went along. Soccer-mom-turned-weed-dealer Nancy Botwin (Mary Louise-Parker) becomes stupider, more repulsive, and less believable as the plot spins along pointlessly yet eventfully, as serial plots will do. Eventually Nancy ends up moving out to Texas and the Mexican border, where she owns a little boutique as a front for hard drug dealers (hard drugs are bad, in case you didn’t know) who use the store as one end of a smuggling tunnel.

The problem is that running the store makes Nancy bored, despite the fact that she’s now wealthy and has enough money to take care of her family and could presumably take up a hobby like golf or sleeping with various guys (which the show presents as her main interest) or whatever.

But again, plot must keep plotting, so Nancy goes exploring where she shouldn’t (shades of Bluebeard) and ends up seeing, coming through the tunnel, not hard drugs, but…a woman.

Again, I watched this a while ago, and I’m not watching it again, but as I remember the image of the (Latina) woman is shot in semi-slow motion, like a dream image. Nancy is transfixed with something (horror, presumably, though desire is a buried possibility) — and then the woman is gone, taken away, we know not where. Later, Nancy has a kind of moral epiphany related to the woman; she realizes that her work with the drug cartel is horrible and wrong, and that she (Nancy) is a bad person and needs to change. End of moral — and of the series, for me. That was the last episode I watched.

I wasn’t at the time entirely sure why Nancy’s slow-mo longing for the woman in the tunnel was so repulsive. But I’ve done more reading about sex-trafficking since, and that’s clarified the problem. In sex-trafficking narratives (of which this is one) women who cross borders are seen as helpless, debased victims, in the thrall of villains who ruthlessly exploit them. It’s a sensational story — and, as Laura Agostín and others have argued, it’s not necessarily especially anchored in reality. Instead, sex trafficking often serves as an exploitation narrative, providing exciting thrills for folks at home while giving useful cover for government anti-immigration raids.

In this context, it seems important to point out that Nancy never talks to the distant marginal woman. She doesn’t ask her if she’s in distress, or if she needs help. How exactly does she know that the woman doesn’t want to come into the United States? There are, after all, many folks who do want to immigrate from Mexico to the U.S.; it seems like a pretty big leap to assume that someone crossing the border is a kidnapping victim rather than an immigrant under her own power. Unless, of course, you assume all non-white women are automatically debased victims.

That does seem to be how Weeds sees this unnamed and unspeaking icon, whose function is to remain silent so that she can fit neatly into Nancy’s psychodrama. She is a mute object lesson; we don’t care about who she is, but only about how Nancy feels about who she is. The dispossessed, victimized other is valuable as an exercise in empathetic response for the middle-class white woman — to show how privileged and awful she is, and teach her to do better.

Kohan went on to make Orange Is the New Black, of course, a show in which non-white women do, mercifully, get to talk. Still, Kohan hasn’t changed that much. I’ve written a bunch about why I don’t like OITNB, but I think this incident from Weeds sums up the trouble economically. That trouble is carelessness — both in the sense that Kohan has not taken the time to learn about the Very Important Issues she addresses, and in the sense that she doesn’t seem to actually care about them, except as they fit into her sit-com engine of alternating cutesiness and moral epiphanies. Her glibness is so overwhelming it is virtually indistinguishable from cynicism, and her empathy so conveniently self-serving it might as well be solipsism. She is a master of empathysploitation, a longstanding genre whose popularity, it seems, never fades.
 

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Orange Is the New Black: Index for the Haters, and Response to Critics

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So I had a post on Orange Is the New Black become a viral hate read over at the Atlantic this week. In celebration (?) and as a low key way to post without posting on the fourth, I thought I’d provide an index of my writing on the show for those who are curious. The articles are arranged chronologically in the order they were published.
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At Public Books, Orange Is the New Caged, on how the first season picks up on tropes of femininity and lesbianism from the 1950 women-in-prison film Caged. (This is part of a roundtable at Public Books; lots of other good essays on the series by other folks there too if you want to browse around.)

At Splice Today, The Crassness of Orange Is the New Black, on how the first season adds sex and deviance to the memoir.

At the Atlantic, “A Lewd Reminder of How Tame Oranges Is the New Black Really Is”, in which I compare the first season to the 1974 film Caged Heat, and talk about political and sexual fantasies.

Right here at HU, Orange Is the New Black: Episode 7 Hate Blogging, in which I blog my way through a second season episode.

At Splice Today, Prison and White People, in which I talk about why focusing on Piper’s white privilege misses out on the way that institutional racism is not her friend.

And finally, the hate read at the Atlantic, Orange Is the New Black’s Irresponsible Portrayal of Men, in which I argue that the show’s relationship to male prisoners is problematic.

There were a number of online responses to the piece, most of them not really all that useful from my perspective. A couple of the more interesting ones were by Alyssa Rosenberg and Madeleine Davies. This piece by Sonny Bunch is probably the best though; mean-spirited and clever.
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What the hell; might as well respond briefly. Alyssa’s piece argues that it would be more strategic for me to criticize some show other than Orange Is the New Black. Her reasons are somewhat unclear; as far as I can tell, the argument is partially that OITNB is relatively good, and partially that it has a relatively small audience, so I’d be better criticizing NCIS, or whatever. To the first point, I’d say that whether the show is good or not is part of the question at issue; just because Alyssa thinks it is isn’t a reason for me to toss over my own opinion and write about something else. For the second…you don’t influence people based on what show you talk about, in any direct way. You influence people based on the reaction to what you, yourself, are writing. And as far as being strategic and getting my message out…this was one of the most popular things I’ve ever written (for better or worse.)

Alyssa concludes by saying, “If we want a culture that tells a wider variety of stories, we need to work on moving culture at the mainstream, rather than simply at the margins,” but that seems to assume that my criticism is going to move NCIS or OITNB in some direct way. I really doubt that that’s the way these things work, particularly. You move people through criticism the way you move people with any art; sporadically, confusedly, maybe if you’re lucky but generally not, depending on a lot of factors. The idea that you move the mainstream by talking about a mainstream show and move the margins by talking about a marginal show strikes me as really simplistic (not least because, for example, Alyssa probably wouldn’t even have written her post if I had been writing about something other than OITNB.)

Caroline Small on facebook also pointed out that culture often moves not by moving the mainstream, but by changing the margins, which then shifts the center. Which I think certainly can be the case, at least.

Sonny Bunch in his response to my piece sneers at the whole idea of thinking about representation in art, arguing that doing so isn’t criticism. He says that:

There’s also the obvious point to be made that this isn’t “criticism” in the traditional sense: there’s little discussion of craft or storytelling, no sense of how the authors of the program help us understand the world they’ve created. It’s a simple collection of grievances that can be summarized thusly: “Why aren’t you telling the story I think needs to be told and why have you portrayed a group I believe needs defending in an unflattering light?

What’s really funny about this is that it’s gloriously self-refuting, and utterly unaware of it. After all, Bunch isn’t looking at the craft of my essay; he’s not trying to figure out how my essay forms a coherent intellectual world. He’s just listing grievances, and asking, “why aren’t you writing the kind of criticism I want you to write?”

I’d argue (contra the somewhat confused Bunch) that Bunch’s criticism is entirely defensible as criticism, because engaging with the ideology and the preconceptions of the work you’re looking at is a legitimate critical project. The problem with Bunch’s view isn’t that he engages with my ideology and my preconceptions; the problem is that he’s not a very attentive reader, and so isn’t alert to the fact that I have quite a bit to say about craft, about storytelling, and about how the program creators help us understand the world they’ve created (hint; they do it in part through gender stereotypes.)
 
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Orange Is the New Black: Episode 7 Hate Blogging

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Okay; so I’ve been trying to make my way through OITNB, and it is making me miserable. I thought sharing my loathing with the world might possibly make the burden less, so this is my effort to do that.

Probably live-tweeting would be the cooler, more up to the minute thing all the cool kids are doing, but I’m old and fusty and I still like my blog. So I’ll be live-blogging my way through it in the comments, since that’s easier than continually updating the post. Feel free to chime in with comments as well if you want, presuming anyone’s reading.

Most Overrated Television Show…And Most Underrated, If Any Exist

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I’m watching Orange Is the New Black for an assignment, and being impressed again by how the new era of television drama seems to rely on basically overrating every single thing on the tube. With the exception of the Wire and the first season of Twin Peaks, I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a television drama that managed to get past sporadically entertaining and onto “good”.

Anyway, the most overrated thing I’ve seen is probably “Breaking Bad,” which is supposed to be one of the great artistic triumphs of our time but to me (in the first season at least) seemed mired in all too familiar television cliches and lazy dramatic devices. Outside of drama, there are shows I love — the Batman TV show for example, or Warner Bros cartoons, and so forth. But I don’t know that any of them are underrated exactly.
 
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