what happened to poussey in orange is the new black
Major spoilers alee if y'all take non watched all ofOrange Is the New Blackness's 4th season.
At that place she was: Poussey, a lively and warmhearted blackness inmate of Litchfield, pinned to the ground under the weight of Officer Baxter Bayley's knee. It was the penultimate episode of season four and the Litchfield inmates were peacefully protesting the horrendous treatment they'd suffered at the hands of the guards for weeks. As Poussey begged for Bayley, known equally one of the younger and kinder officers, to get off of her 92-pound body, she was losing breath and I was losing mine along with her, reminded of Eric Garner's murder well-nigh two years earlier. In a flavor that was rife with racial tension, it's the offset moment where Black Lives Matter is starkly and devastatingly in focus, and it begs the questions: What, exactly, is this flavour trying to say about our political climate, specially when the perpetrator in Poussey'due south death is the "nice" guard?
In prior seasons of Orangish, nosotros have seen the corruption within Litchfield: Pornstache staged Tricia'south death to look similar a suicide after she overdosed on drugs that he supplied; Fig embezzled money from the Section of Corrections; Officeholder Coates raped Pennsatucky. Simply in the latest season, that corruption reaches new heights: Litchfield is now a for-profit business, an overcrowded prison staffed by volatile, untrained veterans hired for tax credits. It becomes a pressure-cooker environment that breeds racial tension and violence among inmates; the abuse from the top trickles down and changes everyone, fifty-fifty soft-spoken and drama-free Daya, who in the final shot of the flavor, is pointing a gun at the sadistic CO Humphrey. But "the organization" isn't to blame for Poussey'southward death, because the organisation is not an abstraction. Information technology'due south something created and sustained by people. Ultimately, it's the white men in accuse — even the likable ones like Warden Caputo and Bayley — who permit the system to survive.
The cracks in any kind of guild at Litchfield begin to show early in the season. At the elevation of episode two, Black Cindy and her new Muslim roommate, Alison Abdullah, disharmonism over space, and Blackness Cindy lobs religious insults Alison's way in response ("Scarfy," "Jihad"). Alison throws her own insults right back: "Your proper name own't Tovah," she says. "Black people've been naming their kids some crazy shit, just Tovah ain't on the list — unless the V is like a five or something." This kind of bigotry is naught new on Orangish, but the writers have intensified the hate as the women wrestle to found some kind of dominance in an overcrowded infinite. This is seen when the Latina inmates struggle to ring together despite not wanting to be seen as a monolith (recall Daya'due south "Dumb-in-a-can" annotate and Blanca's "Bicardi bitches" comeback). Only even though the Latinas brand up the majority of the prison population, it's ultimately the white male officers, led by the totalitarian captain of the guards, Piscatella, who control how much power these women really take — and non simply over each other, but over their ain bodies. The women, specifically the women of color, are stopped and frisked at random; when Blanca refuses to shower every bit civil disobedience (she'south actually dowsed herself in the likes of oyster juice), she is punished. Not only will she endure the finish-and-frisk, she will brand certain it as pleasant as possible for the guards.
This isn't something the white inmates suffer; in fact, information technology'south Piper who sets off the stop-and-frisk routine in the first place, cruelly taking advantage of her white privilege to constitute a lie in Piscatella'south ear. Piper has always been seen as a selfish character — her sending her lover Stella (Ruby Rose) to max last season for stealing money from her comes to mind. Only now, hell-bent on being seen every bit "gangsta" and intimidated by Maria, who'southward establishing a rival dirty panty business organisation, Piper's worse then ever. She tells Piscatella that the inmates of Spanish Harlem should not be seen in large groups considering of potential gang activity. It's a tactic eerily reminiscent of black codes in the South, post-Civil War, where one of the restrictions was that black people could not congregate in the absenteeism of white people. Piper's scheme gets years added to Maria'south sentence and the race wars escalate.
It doesn't assistance that Piper has inadvertently started a white supremacist grouping. She eventually feels remorse for it and laments the adult female she'southward get (she's been physically inverse by prison — there'south at present a swastika-turned-window branded into her arm). This progression seems like a crash grade for how racism begins. Now that Litchfield has become a corporation, the capitalism, mixed with the inmates' fear of being dominated past others, makes the prison fertile ground for detest crimes. The white inmates worry that their lives are not significant and that likewise much accent is placed on their black and Hispanic counterparts, causing them to chant "white lives matter" in one scene. Not but were the white male guards victimizing the inmates, the white female person inmates were victimizing their women of color counterparts — who, unlike them, are doubly oppressed by race and gender.
By this time, effectually halfway through the flavor, I was annoyed. These white women were not existence frisked at the aforementioned rate as the women of color. Two of them in particular, celebrity chef Judy King and Yoga Jones, were being housed in a split up, more spacious, cell away from everyone else, making seltzer and eating cookies.
All the same, the white men in this bear witness are ultimately to blame for the conditions of the prison. The veterans-turned-guards do non view the women as human beings but equally criminals, those who should non be shown any kind of decency. This is demonstrated when Humphrey forces Maritza to eat a live babe mouse while belongings a gun to her head, when he forces Crazy Eyes to fight a white inmate every bit a class of amusement (and the other white guards simply stand past), and when Officeholder Stratman makes Blanca stand on a table so that her knees will go. These white men are just concerned with maintaining the ability vested in their blueish uniforms. The inmates are used for sport and pitted confronting each other. And Warden Caputo, for all his talk about how the prisoners are people and should be treated equally such, is literally in bed with MCC.
My biggest issue with this otherwise brilliant and gut-wrenching flavour is how much these white male characters were humanized. Pennsatucky did not need to forgive her rapist, Coates, as a way to evidence her maturity and his humanity; to be honest, the flavour could've went on just fine without any of his screen time. I as well did not need a full backstory on Bayley and how much of an awkward and meandering kid he was. Nosotros already knew that he was gullible and a pushover from final season when Piper used him for her dirty panty business concern. If that'south supposed to absolve him of his office in Poussey's death, information technology doesn't.
Fifty-fifty though Officeholder Bayley was distracted, it was not necessary for him to place his entire weight on Poussey's back. Maybe the Orange Is the New Blackness writers — who are, disappointingly, almost all white —were trying to testify that nether extreme duress, anyone tin brand a mistake and that tin be fatal. But as I watched Officeholder Caputo position Officeholder Bayley every bit the victim and not even mention Poussey's proper name in a press briefing, I got tired and haunted by such "mistakes." These mistakes happen far as well frequently and it'southward usually a black person who dies, non a white person. Besides, white men are already offered then much humanity to begin with (call back, the cop who choked Eric Garner walked free) — they are not wanting for information technology on tv set.
Given our current cultural climate, it was hard to blot what I was watching — a world in which white men uphold their power, women of colour are constant victims, and unprecedented chaos becomes the new normal. As a adult female of color, there were many times throughout the episodes where I thought that I was experiencing trauma, as though I were the one being subjugated, mocked, and stereotyped. Because I knew that I could easily be that person. I could hands be the villain to a white man with an ax to grind. I could easily be Poussey, the victim of a terrible organisation and the men — good or bad, it doesn't matter — who rule it.
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Source: https://www.cosmopolitan.com/entertainment/tv/a60235/orange-is-the-new-black-season-4-black-lives-matter-essay/
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