The Animals: How Poussey’s Death Broke Us — and Why It Mattered

Some TV deaths blindside you. They come out of nowhere, designed for shock and hashtags. But Poussey Washington’s death in Orange Is the New Black wasn’t that. It was brutal, yes, and devastating, but it was also deliberate. Calculated. It was art designed to wound us into awareness.

Poussey wasn’t disposable. She wasn’t the annoying side character you shrug off or the “tragic queer” archetype that prestige dramas used to burn through like cigarette lighters. She was joy embodied — witty, sharp, full of light. She was someone who deserved a future, which is exactly why her suffocation under Bayley’s knee landed like a sledgehammer. It wasn’t that she was chosen because she was beloved — it was because the point was to show how even the most vibrant lives are treated as expendable inside broken systems.

Season 4’s “The Animals” aired in June 2016, right in the heat of #BlackLivesMatter. Eric Garner’s last words — I can’t breathe — were still echoing in headlines and protests. Michael Brown, Sandra Bland, Philando Castile: names that were more than names, they were lives cut short by police negligence and brutality. The image of Poussey, a Black woman suffocated by a white guard, wasn’t subtle. It wasn’t meant to be. It was television forcing us to hold the grief we’d been watching play out on the news for years.

The aftermath was no less shattering. Inside the show, her death became the fuse for a full-scale riot, a reminder that protest is often born out of mourning. Outside the show, it sparked essays, hashtags, thinkpieces — conversations about representation, incarceration, and the unbearable disposability of Black lives on- and off-screen. Netflix even established the Poussey Washington Fund, channeling money into real-world prison reform and justice organisations. A fictional death rippled into tangible activism.

For queer audiences, her death carried a cruel double edge. Poussey was one of the rare fully realised queer Black women on TV — tender, funny, sexy, flawed, hopeful. She wasn’t a token. And just when she found love with Soso, a sliver of happiness, it was snatched away. It was hard not to feel like another chapter in the long history of “bury your gays.” And yet… Poussey’s legacy has outlived that trope. She isn’t remembered as a tragedy, but as a rallying point, an icon of joy too vibrant to forget.

“The Animals” is still painful to rewatch. It’s supposed to be. That image — Bayley’s knee, Poussey’s body, Taystee’s scream — is meant to lodge in your chest. Because Orange Is the New Black wasn’t just a dramedy about prison. It was a mirror held up to the ugliest parts of the world we live in. Poussey’s death was both a story choice and a political act: a way of saying, don’t look away.

Because the truth is this: Poussey Washington may have died in a prison cafeteria, but the joy she represented — the brilliance of her laugh, the hope in her love — continues to reverberate. And that’s the kind of immortality TV rarely gets right.

What to watch, read, and listen to next if you’re not ready to let go of Poussey’s legacy:

• Watch: When They See Us (Netflix) — Ava DuVernay’s retelling of the Central Park Five case is gutting but essential, carrying the same fury and empathy that OITNB sharpened into its best moments.

• Read: Are Prisons Obsolete? by Angela Davis — slim, powerful, and still one of the clearest arguments for rethinking the entire system that took Poussey’s fictional life and too many real ones.

• Listen: Code Switch (NPR) — a podcast unpacking race, identity, and systemic injustice, mixing the political with the deeply personal. It’s the kind of conversation Poussey would have thrived in.