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Warning: For those of you who do things like have lives and stuff and haven’t gotten around to watching the latest season of this Netflix show, spoilers ahead.


Last Friday, Netflix dropped the latest season of Orange is The New Black, the critically-acclaimed dramedy of life in a minimum-security prison centered around Piper “I Didn’t Know I Couldn’t Do That” Chapman and her rag-tag group of incarcerated friends; all of whom seem doomed to a life of eternal malaise that the central character somehow is just not possessed with.

Before I get into discussing this season, I should mention that I was really reluctant to watch it — not because I could have at all foreseen what I would be put through in the ensuing 13 episodes, but because I have never found a protagonist as infuriating as Piper Chapman. Jenji Kohan seems singularly capable of crafting the most insufferable Oblivious White Woman (TM) characters of all time; by the end of her previous show Weeds, I was ready to drop-kick Nancy Botwin off the Brooklyn Bridge.


Unfortunately, I am uniquely terrible at taking any advice — including my own — and proceeded to watch wave of insulting narrative after insulting narrative packaged under the happy-go-lucky theme of “prison life is complicated, guys!”

Let’s kick off with the protagonist. Over the course of 13 hours, Piper “I was told by Apple Care” Chapman starts a white supremacy group and gets three to five years added onto another inmate's sentence all because she wanted to have a monopoly on the prison panty industry — and we’re supposed to be feel bad for her because she got branded by other inmates for her bullshit. My fucks to give on her quality of life ran out somewhere around her being directly responsible for a race-based stop and frisk policy in the prison facility, so don’t cry for me, Argentina.

If only the nonsense stopped there.

Never in my uterus-toting life did I think I would see a fully-fleshed story arc in which we are expected to find any level of understanding for a rapist — much less one that was predicated with a sentiment of “I didn’t know that taking you to an isolated area, pulling your prison bottoms down, and forcibly entering you without consent as a guard was rape, my bad.” You would think maybe, just maybe, this would serve as some greater commentary about the normalization of men thinking consent is implied or optional. Instead we’re given a lesson on the importance of rape victims to let go and forgive…”for themselves,” not for the benefit of the rapist.


*record scratch*

That storyline concluded, by the way, with the victim attempting to remain friends with her rapist, only to be told that he was actively resisting yet again having his nonconsensual way with her. All in all, an amazing way to do advocacy for the very serious problem of rape in prison, wouldn’t you say? If a prison officer violates you in one of the worst ways possible, just get your Elsa on and let it go! Hopefully he’ll feel really really bad about it.


All of what I’ve detailed, however, pales in comparison to the abominable clusterfuck that is the last two episodes, where Poussey was choked to death while being restrained at a peaceful protest; her lifeless body left on the cafeteria floor for what seems like days, in scenes clearly drawing from the painful tragedies of Eric Garner and Michael Brown.

Except…except…the guard that murdered Poussey didn’t mean to do it! It was an accidental murder! And he feels really bad about it! It was a consequence of the system that makes even good guys bad guys, don’t you get it? The end result, of course being, that Black viewers are forced to relive a facsimile of tragic real-life events under the most infantilizing and insulting context possible. Why not score it with some lighthearted music while you’re on a roll of insisting on leveraging Black pain and heartache for entertainment. Radicalized violence distilled three time over, and for what purpose exactly? To tell us that prisons make mistakes?


I’ve racked my head over and over to try glean some sense of what in the immensely triggering fuck Jenji Kohan and her team of overwhelmingly White writers were thinking while crafting this traumatizing episode. Because diluting such a grave circumstance (which, turning intentional murders into well-intentioned accidents is exactly that) and adding comedic elements to it while forcing Black viewers to relive the agony of those days — that we protested, suffered, grieved and cried over — would be a callousness and disregard that no well-intentioned human being would put a major fanbase of their's through.

But as I sat there, shaking, forcing myself to finish the episode while the warden of the prison defended the misguided actions of the guard that MURDERED a Black woman, while two Latina characters made light of the whole situation while in the bathroom, I still couldn’t see what point was served. The trauma porn that we were put through did nothing to highlight how Eric Garner and Mike Brown’s families never saw justice served. Defending the prison officer and contextualizing him as an affable well-intentioned kid who lost his way doesn't call out the severity of Black people being murdered without consequence or concern. Nor does it highlight some noble lesson for White consumers to learn. It simply commoditizes our heartbreak and our suffering, and normalizes this pain for mass consumption.


Black grief isn’t a trope you can pull for shock value. Our pain and oppression is real, and it can’t just be plucked for convenience; especially in a context that is absolutely absent of any sort of introspection and analysis. Acknowledging that Black people die isn’t sufficient; humanizing their murderers is loathsome. It is contemptible that Jenji Kohan and her team seemingly framed the season around the concept that empathy is paramount for progression, no matter how terrible the transgression; putting an onus on the constantly victimized and battered to be understanding at the detriment of their well-being.

If it was Jenji Kohan's objective to distance Black consumers from her show, she succeeded here. I won’t be watching Orange is the New Black Again.