Ms. Wiley and her girlfriend, Lauren Morelli, a writer on the series, discuss the season’s penultimate episode.
Lauren was the one to write episode 12. Some highlights:
L.M.: We got into some very heated debates in the writers’ room about which character it should be. And ultimately Jenji made a point that has really stuck with me, and that I’ve used as my centering device throughout the season — and that is, whatever character we chose, she wanted it to feel like that character had a future on the outside of prison ahead of them, so that the loss of that future would really be felt. Her point was that would be most clearly seen through Poussey, which I completely agree with.
Honestly this is really dehumanizing. This is also a huge testament to the amount of ignorance and white privilege it takes to convince yourself that it’s more important to show the black person with the most potential DIE than it is to see them LIVE and SUCCEED. What’s crazy to me is that white people still think this concept is groundbreaking. Killing the innocent peaceful black person, the beacon of hope is not f*cking revolutionary. Didn’t y'all read To Kill a Mockingbird in high school? Haven’t you seen The Hunger Games by now? THIS. IS. NOT. INVENTIVE. It is literally the worst trope to plague black people since the dawn of Western media.
L.M.: It was important to everybody that we find a way to make it as gray as possible — like when two forces of good collide, a tragedy can result, instead of there is evil in the world and good in the world, and evil will prevail. We did flashbacks for Bayley to humanize that side of the experience. I hope it’s in there that racism can be a very subtle thing. And I’m hoping that the viewer walks away wondering, “If that person had been white, would they still have been on the floor that long?
All of this is messed up. There was no acknowledgement of racism in this case. Racism is not is not “two good forces of good colliding”. Racism is one hundred percent evil, there is no grey area. By making this an accident, by trying to humanize the law enforcement (WHO ARE ALREADY HUMANIZED BY THE LAW AND THE MEDIA) they completely missed the point and really, just continue to keep police in a positive light. They mimicked the Eric Garner case which wasn’t even slightly ambiguous. Several officers were literally crushing him to death. There was no riot or other distraction going on, they were just relentless. There is no grey area. What they depicted was more a series of unfortunate events instead of deliberate racial profiling and excessive force. That ambiguity shows the lack of understanding regarding this issue and is why they shouldn’t have tried to tackle it in the first place. Poussey died for nothing.
Samira about filming the scene.
S.W.: To be honest, that was one of the things that wasn’t hard, because everyone else had just found out that this was happening. So they were all dealing with this shock that I had been dealing with for months. I had already gone through so many stages: I was mad; I was happy to be embarking on something else; I was so sad; I remember sobbing. So I felt like there was part of me that had to take care of them, to let them know that it was O.K. — that I’m all right — especially that day. I couldn’t sit there and cry because everyone else was.
Samira knew FOR MONTHS, had been grieving FOR MONTHS, they put a black lesbian out of a job for a stupid storyline and she had to go the whole season laughing and smiling and knowing where it leads. Jfc.