A REPOST FROM 2015
Is this show, "Orange Is The New Black" doing better, racially speaking than it was a year ago?
Let me know?
I understand why the central character of Orange Is The New Black had be white and take up 90% of the screen time. The woman that wrote the main character was writing about herself. And, let's face it, the predominantly white audience is predominantly sympathetic to white characters.
And a white sympathetic character becoming compassionate toward black people, less well off is a well worn method of making the white character more and more saint like and, gradually, make the white audience believe in their own colorblindness through her.
But the thing I don't quite understand is the decision to make the crimes of the women in OITNB bigger (international drug boss, child trafficking, casual stranger murder) when we know that most women --and a lot of men too-- are in prison for penny-anty stupid, stuff like drug quantities that weight about as much as a bar of soap just as the article below describes.
Overall, the article below gives a pretty decent overview of which women are in prison for what.
For example, I already knew that 90% of women in jail for killing their partners were abused by those partners. However, I did not know just how large a percentage of women are in jail were sexually abused as children.
While I had noticed that many of the unarmed, black women killed by police were mentally ill, I hadn't extrapolated that to mean that a large percentage of female prisoners are mentally ill.
Actually, I guess the thing that I really didn't understand is that prison is where the mentally ill are being warehoused now. But I should have. I watched Ronald Wilson Reagan, Mr. 666 himself, make it happen.
I personally noticed in the world around me (then later I read) that the largely mentally-ill, homeless population tripled in the United States during Ronald Reagan's regime. And if the homeless population did indeed triple, it was because one of the ways Reagan "improved the economy" in the 1980s **for haves on the backs of the have-nots.** According to the articles I read, he removed federal funding from state run mental hospitals.
As a result of Reagan era "de-institutionalization", the mentally ill poured out into the streets and then there was this new thing called "the homeless."
I'm not sure what "the homeless" were called before the 1980s. There were a lot fewer of them, I do know that. You weren't seeing them absolutely everywhere. I don't think they had a collective name that everybody used. I think I only saw "the homeless" in children's books. Were they called "hobos?" I honestly can't remember.
In any case, now I know the ones that couldn't make it as "the homeless" wound up as "the jailed" -- if they didn't simply freeze to death huddled under some bridge when they, in their confusion, refused to go to a shelter. I read about that happening more than once in the northeast of this country.
While I don't like the fact that OITNB is whiter than it probably needs to be, even if keeping a white audience's attention is the goal, I really don't like the fact that it is less educational and less inspiring of compassion and empathy than it needs to be.
People like Natasha McKenna would be alive now if Ronald Wilson Reagan hadn't balanced the economy of the backs of the mentally ill. She'd have been in a mental hospital with doctors and nurses instead of an armed guard too stupid to do anything but taser her to death when she became upset, an effect of her schizophrenia.
Orange Is The New Black could be shedding more light on stories like McKenna's if the writers won't so dedicated to making jail look like the what the average American imagines it should look like, a place where international drug dealers, people peddlers, and murderers either get just a little bit more than they deserve. Not too much more. I mean, you don't want to make your audience too terribly uncomfortable about who winds up in America's prisons.
OINTB could be pushing the envelope and educating people a lot more than it is, and keep the laughs. But you have to be willing to see ordinary people who die for nothing as worth standing up for.
Read More:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/amos-irwin/how-orange-is-the-new-black-misrepresents-womens-federal-prison-and-why-it-matters_b_7547334.html
Is this show, "Orange Is The New Black" doing better, racially speaking than it was a year ago?
Let me know?
 |
| Dorothy Gaines Piper Kerman, creator of OITNB was in jail with her. |
FIRST, A MORE REALISTIC STORY OF WOMEN IN JAIL
In 1994, Dorothy Gaines was a nurse technician and PTA parent raising her younger sister and brother and three children alone in Mobile, Alabama after the death of her husband. Local drug dealers, desperate to reduce their own sentences, named her as an accomplice in their sale of crack cocaine. Their self-contradictory testimony was the only evidence against her, yet her court-appointed lawyer failed to cross-examine them or raise a defense. She was found guilty of conspiracy to distribute crack cocaine. Her 9-year-old son Phillip jumped in the judge's lap at sentencing and begged the judge not to take away his mother
I understand why the central character of Orange Is The New Black had be white and take up 90% of the screen time. The woman that wrote the main character was writing about herself. And, let's face it, the predominantly white audience is predominantly sympathetic to white characters.
And a white sympathetic character becoming compassionate toward black people, less well off is a well worn method of making the white character more and more saint like and, gradually, make the white audience believe in their own colorblindness through her.
But the thing I don't quite understand is the decision to make the crimes of the women in OITNB bigger (international drug boss, child trafficking, casual stranger murder) when we know that most women --and a lot of men too-- are in prison for penny-anty stupid, stuff like drug quantities that weight about as much as a bar of soap just as the article below describes.
Overall, the article below gives a pretty decent overview of which women are in prison for what.
For example, I already knew that 90% of women in jail for killing their partners were abused by those partners. However, I did not know just how large a percentage of women are in jail were sexually abused as children.
While I had noticed that many of the unarmed, black women killed by police were mentally ill, I hadn't extrapolated that to mean that a large percentage of female prisoners are mentally ill.
Actually, I guess the thing that I really didn't understand is that prison is where the mentally ill are being warehoused now. But I should have. I watched Ronald Wilson Reagan, Mr. 666 himself, make it happen.
I personally noticed in the world around me (then later I read) that the largely mentally-ill, homeless population tripled in the United States during Ronald Reagan's regime. And if the homeless population did indeed triple, it was because one of the ways Reagan "improved the economy" in the 1980s **for haves on the backs of the have-nots.** According to the articles I read, he removed federal funding from state run mental hospitals.
As a result of Reagan era "de-institutionalization", the mentally ill poured out into the streets and then there was this new thing called "the homeless."
I'm not sure what "the homeless" were called before the 1980s. There were a lot fewer of them, I do know that. You weren't seeing them absolutely everywhere. I don't think they had a collective name that everybody used. I think I only saw "the homeless" in children's books. Were they called "hobos?" I honestly can't remember.
In any case, now I know the ones that couldn't make it as "the homeless" wound up as "the jailed" -- if they didn't simply freeze to death huddled under some bridge when they, in their confusion, refused to go to a shelter. I read about that happening more than once in the northeast of this country.
While I don't like the fact that OITNB is whiter than it probably needs to be, even if keeping a white audience's attention is the goal, I really don't like the fact that it is less educational and less inspiring of compassion and empathy than it needs to be.
Orange Is The New Black could be shedding more light on stories like McKenna's if the writers won't so dedicated to making jail look like the what the average American imagines it should look like, a place where international drug dealers, people peddlers, and murderers either get just a little bit more than they deserve. Not too much more. I mean, you don't want to make your audience too terribly uncomfortable about who winds up in America's prisons.
OINTB could be pushing the envelope and educating people a lot more than it is, and keep the laughs. But you have to be willing to see ordinary people who die for nothing as worth standing up for.
Read More:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/amos-irwin/how-orange-is-the-new-black-misrepresents-womens-federal-prison-and-why-it-matters_b_7547334.html
No comments:
Post a Comment