Orange is the New Black, Season 1: The gasp, cringe, and note-worthy

As we embark on this new season of Orange is the New Black this Friday, June 6th–binge watching every episode while eating crispy crunchy things–I wanted to take a moment and reflect on noteworthy moments that made us gasp, cringe, and cheer, sometimes all at once.  I also wanted to briefly touch on why those moments made me gasp, cringe, and cheer–reminding us that, even, in our binge watching stupor, we are our best selves when we take the time to digest what we’re being fed on television and attempt to understand the real-life structural forces that it proposes to depict.

  • Sophia loses access to hormones – Ep. 3 – “If she wanted to keep her girlish figure, she should’ve stayed out of jail” says Natalie Figueroa, the warden’s assistant.  Losing access to hormones because the prison experienced “budget cuts,” she has to devise a way to get them back and she does. Through flashbacks, we find out that Sophia is in prison because of committing credit card fraud to pay for gender reassignment surgeries. The fact that Sophia was a firefighter and her insurance probably didn’t cover her reassignment really sucks.  And I wish we knew more about transgender people in prison and their options for comprehensive medical care and treatment.
  • Is Miss Claudette in jail for violating child labor laws or murder? – Ep. 4 – We find out that Miss Claudette murdered a man in retaliation for his rape and assault of one of the young girls under her charge–under her charge within some kind of child labor ring.  While she commits the act of vigilantism in defense of one of her girls, vigilantism isn’t okay and I’m not certain I’m comfortable with the whole child labor ring thing either.  Whose getting paid off them working?  And had Claudette not murdered that man, what justice would he have met otherwise since those girls are likely undocumented and working in some kind of child labor ring…
  • Guards having sex with inmates – Ep. 6, Ep. 8, Ep. 11 – It’s an abuse of power for a guard to have sexual contact with an inmate.  Even if it is consensual, the imbalance of power makes it wildly inappropriate.  I cringe at the Dayanara and Bennett love story cause it’s all the way out of line.
  • Red refuses to smuggle drugs into the prison for Mendez – Ep. 7 – You go girl.  She knew many of her fellow inmates had drug dependencies and she tells Mendez she ain’t about that life.  We all hate Mendez, but what we should really be suspect of are the correctional institutions themselves.  Check out this NYT piece about violence and drug use in a halfway house in Jersey by Sam Dolnick.
  • Healy throws Chapman into SHU for “lesbianing” with Vause – Ep. 9 – Healy crosses the line when throwing Piper in solitary confinement since she hadn’t actually broken any rules regarding sex with other inmates… yet.  He also breaks protocol when calling Larry, Piper’s fiancee, to tell him that she was involved with Vause.  His homophobia is specific though.  He specifically has a problem with this nice, white, pretty, college educated woman being attracted to women.
  • Healy’s homophobic behavior, particularly his anti-white-nice-middle-class-girl-lesbian behavior nearly gets Piper killed – Ep. 13 – Piper, in self defense, “kills” (knocks the hell out of) Pennsatucky while Healy turns a blind eye. That’s a hell of a punishment for being gay.
  • All of these women are in prison – Ep. 1 thru 13 Prison populations continue to swell with women (and most rapidly women of color).  As of 2010, there were 2.2 million people behind bars in United States.  As of late 2009, the Bureau of Justice Statistics reported that there were 113, 462 women in prison. Doesn’t seem like a lot but when you consider that the female population in prison went from 15,000 in 1980 to 113,00 in 2009, it is a hell of a lot.  Like the show, women in prison are often substance users, and/or have been victims of trauma, manipulation, coercion, and physical abuse.  So, yes, by all means, enjoy this show about women in prison, I do. But don’t slip up and start thinking prison must be “fun,” “interesting,” or “down right entertaining.”

When it comes to prison, I’m more apt to side with Angela Davis and other anti-prison-industrial-complex scholars and activists.  Here’s a reading list to get you started about the “Prison Industrial Complex” and its effects on our society:

Reading List

Michelle Alexander, 2010. The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (just read the introduction… your brain will explode a little bit)

Angela Davis,1998. “Masked Racism: Reflections on the Prison Industrial Complex” on Colorlines.com
— 2003. Are Prisons Obsolete?
— 2005. Abolition Democracy: Beyond Empire, Prisons, and Torture

Loic Wacquant, 2009. Prisons of Poverty

World Health Organization, 2009,  “Women’s Health in Prison: Correcting gender inequality in prison health.

Enhanced by Zemanta

Dear Marvel: Make Female Super Hero Movies, plural

The superhero Parthenon is overwhelmingly white and male.  It is not a surprise then that the comic book movie era Hollywood is currently in repeats this trend.  Kevin Feige, Marvel Studio’s president, promises us (kinda) a Captain Marvel movie by 2016.  And all I have to say to that is… Thanks… And I mean that in the least enthusiastic way possible while still kind of being interested.
Read more

A Reply to “Olivia Pope and the Scandal of Representation” by Brandon Maxwell

A good friend of mine brought to my attention an interesting piece by Brandon Maxwell published by  the Feminist Wire last week considering the cultural politics of Kerry Washington’s portrayal of Olivia Pope on the hit drama Scandal.   I thought I might offer a short response to Maxwell, because while it was a Black feminist reading, there seems to be something more at stake than his particular application can offer.  I want to focus my attention on a point that Maxwell’s critique hinges upon and then offer some questions that might be more interesting.

Maxwell constructs an argument around the idea that Olivia Pope is portrayed as “the great white hope,” but is unable to adequately fill those shoes specifically because of her Black female body. This is exactly the kind of argument which causes old-school, 20th century black feminist critique of controlling images to stall.

Read more

An Open Letter to Brother West

Dear Brother West,

Regarding your comments about President Obama’s non-deservingness to take his presidential oath on Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s Bible, I am going to have to disagree.  Not because I think he “deserved” to take the oath on Dr. King’s Bible, but because it really isn’t our place to judge another wo/man’s worth.  Additionally, though I am a Black American woman committed to peace and justice, I don’t feel ownership over the “legacy” of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., it doesn’t feel “personal” to me.  Making it so personal would be to place a man on a pedestal erected–culturally, linguistically, and socially–by other men.  If I’ve learned anything in my short time on this earth, it’s that all “great men,” are human and like the rest of us deeply flawed.  I have absolutely no doubt that your concern over protecting the dignity and legacy of such a great man comes from an honest place, as you say, you are of that tradition; however, at what point do we take a step too close to the threshold of idolatry?  Dr. King isn’t in that Bible.  He isn’t the Bible.  It’s just one that he happened to use.

Read more

The Mystification of Poverty: Or the IMF and World Bank’s Poverty Monster

September 24th, 2011

Dear IMF and World Bank,

I saw this on the side of the World Bank yesterday and I had to take a picture of it and pose a few questions to you.  Why is it little girls’ responsibility to fight the “poverty monster”?  And you do realize that poverty isn’t a monster, right?  It’s real.


Why are you mystifying the processes of economic exploitation and colonialism–the things that produce poverty in the first place–through the production of this type of imagery?  And why do women have to do everything?  Are men going to take up some responsibilities now that women and girls are going to school?  Where’s that campaign?

Am I suggesting that little girls shouldn’t have access to education?  No, I’m not.  I’m just asking if you really think that more Westernized education does anything for them other than make them better resources from which to extract labor and capital in this global economy where the wealthiest 1% tell us where, how, and what to do to make them more money.

Poverty is not a hairy four eyed monster and no amount of reading can cause it to end if the people who help to perpetuate it, like yourselves, don’t stop making it out to be this thing that we can just end with through the “power of our minds.”

I’m not Jean Grey or Professor Charles Xavier, and neither are little girls in Sudan.

We can’t make people do things with the power of our minds.  As many people of color who are continually discriminated against in the workforce (and in comic books) can attest, it doesn’t always matter if you graduate from college (or have super powers), you can still be unemployed, disempowered, and completely disillusioned in the current global economy.  A systemic shift in the way that capital and labor are distributed needs to be the way to end poverty because little girls of color, they aren’t superheros.  They can’t make it rain…

Only Storm can do that… and she’s not real.

One Love,
“Doctor” Lane

P.S. A poverty monster? Who came up with that?  Bad idea.