Writer Compares OITNB to ‘Slave Narratives,’ Sort of Has a Point

Bogado frames her criticism of OITNB — a show her smitten friends and colleagues have insisted Bogado is “wrong” about, as if someone’s personal taste can be objectively incorrect — with the idea that it’s cultural impact is that of a modern “slave narrative,” a genre of nonfiction or fiction that was really popular among white abolitionists in the antebellum North:

Slave narratives became most fashionable among abolitionist circles in the mid-nineteenth century. These narratives remain deeply powerful, yet each one is framed by a white introduction, which authenticates the black experience. The white practice of verifying the lives of black fugitives who were skillfully plotting their own liberation has changed in circumstance and in medium—but the role of white people at its center has not. Today, its latest manifestation is playing out in the Netflix hit series, Orange Is the New Black.

This isn’t necessarily a criticism of the show’s construction (though in a way, it is an indictment of the stereotypes OITNB relies on to sketch so many of its characters) — Bogado is really criticizing the way people talk about OITNB, as if by the simple act of watching it they’re broadening their perspective on race and class in America. Oh, well, Orange Is the New Black is a very important show. It shows the other side, you know? Really gives one a new perspective. You can almost hear the endless cocktail party chatter about how “important” or “diverse” the show is, and it’s this attitude that Bogado seems to take most umbrage with. If OITNB is supposed to somehow present multi-dimensional characters of color and give a real, credible voice to the marginalized women currently at the mercy of our thoroughly fucked criminal justice system, newsflash: it fails. Pretty miserably, too, according to Bogado:

With very little exception, I saw wildly racist tropes: black women who, aside from fanaticizing about fried chicken, are called monkeys and Crazy Eyes; a Boricua mother who connives with her daughter for the sexual attentions of a white prison guard; an Asian woman who never speaks; and a crazy Latina woman who tucks away in a bathroom stall to photograph her vagina (the pornographic image is indiscriminately paraded throughout an entire episode).

This, it turns out, is what some of my friends and colleagues are gorging themselves on. I reject that it’s a guilty pleasure. If we’re addicted to Orange Is the New Black, then we’re strung out on the drug of spectacle—jonesing for hateful, racist images created by a white imagination for profit and fame.

With the exception of Laverne, Bogado hasn’t found one truly redeeming characterization in the entire series. She does, however, admit that the show has given many actors of color steady work, even if they’re all working on what is essentially a instant-watch slave narrative for self-satisfied white people.

What’s most interesting about Bogado’s criticism is the link she builds between OITNB enthusiasts and abolitionists hungry for slave narratives. With very few exceptions, slave narratives like Olaudah Equiano’s The Interesting Narrative or Frederick Douglass’s autobiography were written mostly by men (a very notable example is Harriet Wilson’s semi-recently discovered Our Nig). They all rely on the same basic structure — a slave begins the narrative a slave, then by some twist of fate finds him or herself free, and, consequently, remade.

Slave narratives are basically conversion narratives, a form of American self-styling that’s as old as the earliest European footprints on beaches in the Western Hemisphere. Everyone (every transplanted European) writing in colonial America wrote a conversion narrative, and everyone who wrote a conversion narrative wrestled with the same idea of refashioning the self to fit the new world. It’s a remarkably consistent and prolific genre, and an especially appropriate way for freed slaves to fashion new identities for themselves. More relevant to Bogado’s criticism, though, is that slave narratives aren’t a one-way interaction. Sure, white abolitionists in the North eager to storm the moral high ground might gobble up slave narratives while resisting any true characterization of “the other,” but such narratives were also an attempt by former slaves to establish an identity within the predominant culture. Just like the Puritan conversion narrative, the slave narrative functioned, in part, as a testament to the larger community: I am indeed like one of you.

If OITNB fails to fully characterize people of color, it does so because Piper seems unnecessary now. If this series is indeed a slave narrative, with “slave” in this case meaning any prisoner who finds herself at the mercy of a gleefully dehumanizing and corrupt penal system, then framing it with Piper’s experience seems old fashioned. The genre has advanced well beyond polite introductions by college-educated white people who are oh so impressed by the plight of their non-white fellow people; people of color can tell their own stories. Piper, then, isn’t a lens that helps us see the other prisoners more clearly, rather, she’s an impediment, an outdated glasses prescription that keeps white audiences from really seeing Litchfield.

White Is the New White [The Nation]

Image via Getty, Jesse Grant