Season
2 of Orange is the New Black offers
up plenty of twists, revelations, and conflicts to keep fans busy, but it also
provides some nice narrative food for thought.
Today, I want to examine two characters and how race and culture are at
play to create different results in similar scenarios. (Again, a disclaimer: I’ll be getting into season 2 stuff,
especially flashback info from episodes 2 and 3.)
We
found out last season that Suzanne (a.k.a. Crazy Eyes) is the daughter of two
well-to-do-looking white parents, with the obvious implication that she was
adopted. Similarly, Taystee has a line
in season 1 about having been a ward of the state until adolescence. The new episodes give us more information
about both of their backgrounds, paying special attention to their experience
with adoption or lack thereof.
Taystee’s
story is sad but undeniably familiar. It’s
unclear how old she was when she was first put up for adoption, but at some
point she clearly aged out of a desirably adoptable age. The smart, spirited girl grows up in group
homes, being passed over for those younger, lighter-skinned, straighter-haired,
and less forceful. Her yearning for a “forever
family” makes her a prime target for Vee, an opportunistic drug dealer. Like Fagin before her, Vee preys on cast-off
children, grooming them to work for her and offering them the parental figure
they’re missing in their lives.
Superficially,
Suzanne’s situation appears far better than Taystee’s. She’s adopted into a well-off, loving family
at a young age, raised in suburban comfort.
However, Suzanne’s upbringing has left scars as well. Her well-intentioned mother loves her dearly
and fights tooth and nail for her happiness and inclusion, but Suzanne remains
an outsider in her own community. She
grows up among white people (probably exclusively, or nearly so,) where no one
quite understands her. Even something as
simple as her hair – when she’s young, her parents leave it large and wild,
presumably because they don’t really know what to do with a black girl’s
hair. It’s not until her baby sister is
born that it’s first styled, a treat from a black nurse who manages Suzanne
with an ease her own mother never achieves.
So, in
a way, Suzanne is looking for family, too.
Taystee makes friends in prison easily; there’s a common vernacular and
cultural bond, and she fits in seamlessly.
Meanwhile, Suzanne struggles to find her place. In Litchfield, prisoners live according to a “tribal”
system in which they mainly associate with members of their own race. Granted, we don’t know much about what her
adult pre-prison life was like, but it seems Suzanne has had limited time
socializing with other black people. I
wonder if she was excited when she first discovered a black community at
Litchfield, if she finally felt like she belonged somewhere.
But
here, too, Suzanne is out of place. With
her Standard American English diction, privileged background, and love of
Shakespeare and figure skating, she doesn’t have the shared experience that
binds together many of the black inmates, and they tolerate her without really
accepting her. (Note: Suzanne’s clear but unspecified mental health
issues definitely have something to do with it as well – the others tend to
treat her more like a “special” mascot than anything else.) When Vee returns to Litchfield, it’s no
wonder she quickly recognizes Suzanne as an easy mark.
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