Animal Farm

There is a moral that HBO is trying to impart in its new series, Oz, a prison drama that's less an experiment in penal realism than a work of penal pornography. The moral is: Whitey best not drive drunk. If he does, he'll kill a little white girl, end up in the Oswald Maximum Security Prison (the "Oz" of the title), and become "bitch" either to a well-muscled black thug or, because this is television and scrupulous racial balance must be maintained, to a psychopathic Aryan Brotherhood member.

Such is the fate of the character Tobias Beecher (Lee Tergesen), a bespectacled white lawyer who cowers and cringes through the first episode, which raises the question: Didn't he ever see Sean Penn in Bad Boys? Didn't he at least see Scared Straight, the proto-gangsta documentary that introduced a generation of sheltered white boys to the idea that you shouldn't show fear in prison unless you enjoy the depredations of men who in less polite times were referred to as "buck Negroes"? Beecher is the stand-in for the mass of Caucasian viewers who have been conditioned by Hollywood to fear the prospect of being anally raped by black convicts. In the Jim Crow era, white men oppressed black men partially out of fear that the blacks would ravish virginal white women. Today, white men fear ravishment themselves. This is progress.
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