These are Human Beings

(Credit: Kevin "Rashid" Johnson)

If you're a fan of Netflix's Orange is The New Black, then you know exactly what I'm talking about here.

With the release of season 4 this sentiment has been brought to the forefront of a show that not only pushes the boundaries of television, but of our entire concept of social justice in a country simultaneously more progressive than ever and yet also more oppressive in sheer numbers than at any other time in history.

But for me, the core of what OITNB has shown us over the course of this season is that, regardless of what you've done: you are still a person.

Maybe you sold crack. Maybe you robbed someone. Maybe you even killed someone. That doesn't mean you are no longer human. That doesn't mean you deserve the kind of treatment we're seeing in America, courtesy of the prison-industrial complex, bigotry, and apathy.

As seen through the eyes of prisoners, former prisoners, and investigative journalists, America has become a place where chain-gangs exists in greater numbers than ever before. A place where human-bodies are cash-cows, crowded into pens like livestock. A place where torture is not only condoned, it is encouraged. A place where prejudice and discrimination is business as usual. A place where double-speak, cognitive dissonance, and oppression are as common-place as strip malls and reality TV shows. A place where the mentally ill, LGBTQ communities, the poor, and PoC are not just systemically disenfranchised. They are the subaltern.

They are the voiceless, powerless, wholly denied even their humanity. They are commodities, monetized for the enrichment of an oligarchy of corporate interests demographically composed primarily of White, male, hetersexual, cis-gendered, "Christian," WASPs. They serve as scapegoats for the angst of a national zeitgeist of the faux-persecution complex of elites and ignorant Whites in the lower-class, tricked into betraying their common-cause of these communities by fantasies that they, too, could become one of the few and powerful in American life.

Sadly, they never will. And yet, they have no clue how well they've been duped.

Back to the overall point: through the lens of the women of Litchfield prison, we see that even some of the most seemingly unsympathetic characters are actually beautiful souls deserving of as much love and respect for their humanity as anyone else, even paragons like MLK and Gandhi.

In fact, the show throws the message right in our face at one point, so fast that you might've missed it if the subtext hadn't been there all season long anyways. It's when Frieda, during a flashback of Bayley's younger years, yells out as him and his buddies throw eggs at her and random passersby, "I'm a human being!"

And that's what this show is about. It's about reminding us that, no matter our faults, flaws, or even crimes, WE ARE HUMAN BEINGS.

Yet, that's what's been forgotten in real life, as we've seen in everything from the murders of unarmed Black folks by law-enforcement, to rampant gun violence in mass shootings, to homophobic bigotry against equal rights, to attempts to disenfranchise women the right to make their own healthcare decisions.

But we've seen it most especially, because of OITNB, in the prison-industrial complex. Where people, most of them incarcerated for incredibly harsh sentences for relatively minor offenses, are beaten, abused, raped, denied food, shelter, healthcare, and even life. They are used as slave labor, experimented on, and are comprised mostly of the marginalized among American life.

I encourage you, if you're reading this, to become familiar with the facts. Look, listen, learn, understand. These are people. We are people. If we abandon the humanity of ourselves and/or others, we are not only complicit in the evil wrought by that, but we are ultimately condemning our world to suffering that will destroy us.

Indeed, as the character Pennsatucky said to Boo this season, "suffering is a choice." Let's choose something better, for all our sakes.