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A Roundtable Conversation on Scandal

I n the middle of editing this roundtable for The Black Scholar on Shonda Rhimes’ hit television thriller Scandal, the unpredictable, but not unexpected, happened. Trying pathetically to praise Shondaland, veteran New York Times television critic, Alessandra Stanley, put her foot in her mouth. In the first paragraph of her article on the new series, How To Get Away With Murder, which was created by Peter Norwalk and executive produced by Rhimes, Stanley wrote: “When Shonda Rhimes writes her autobiography, it should be called How to Get Away With Being an Angry Black Woman.” Published online on Friday, September 19, the comment elicited a firestorm of commentary from social media pundits, journalists, and bloggers, all tripping over themselves to critique Stanley for her offensive reporting. As several of these writers noted, Stanley’s review struck many readers as racist. After all, she made two incorrect assumptions. First, she didn’t bother to fact check her story well enough to find out who actually created How to Get Away with Murder. Second, she participated in a form of gendered racism that American society has enacted against black women with the highly charged “angry black woman” trope. It’s undeniable that such comments resonate with old-school racist stereotypes constructing self-respecting black women as domineering, aggressive, castrating, and unfeminine. Stanley’s article was yet another daily reminder that the painful racial stereotypes of yesteryear (i.e., the mammy, the Jezebel, the tragic mulatto, the welfare queen, Sapphire, and Topsy) are still with us. The history of black female performance on stage, on radio, in film and television (and the social construction of African American subjectivity) has been marked by gendered racism. Since the antebellum era and the early days of vaudeville, black women have been lampooned in popular entertainment. The scientific racism of the Enlightenment resulted in epistemological misconstruction of black bodies that later informed the literary, vaudevillian, silent motion picture and musical depictions of black people. Scholars of minstrel theater (Eric Lott, Marjorie Garber, Harry Elam, David Krasner, and Michael Rogin) have demonstrated that much of the early minstrelsy was a transracial, transvestite theater in which white men crossdressed as black women. Suffice it to say, black women have a long acquaintance with transgender play in popular culture and a repertoire of caricatures. The more recent stereotype of the castrating welfare dependent is attributable to midtwentieth-century sociology. Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s study, The Negro Family (1965), is still etched on the collective unconscious. It focused on the roots of black poverty in America and concluded controversially that the relative absence of nuclear families (i.e., those with both a mother and a father) would hinder social mobility toward economic empowerment and political equality. Moynihan asserted that the rise in singlemother families was due not to the lack of jobs, but rather to a destructive vein of