Strategically Ambiguous Shonda Rhimes: Respectability Politics of a Black Woman Showrunner

Abstract

In this article I examine showrunner Shonda Rhimes’s 21st-century Black respectability politics, or what I call strategic ambiguity. I trace Rhimes’s performance of strategic ambiguity in the press first in the pre-Obama era and at the beginning of her first show, Grey’s Anatomy, when she stuck to a script of colorblindness, and a second in the #BlackLivesMatter moment and after a string of hits, when she called out racialized sexism and redefined Black female respectability. In the first moment, when Grey’s Anatomy just got its legs and when the press celebrated her and her new show as a success, Rhimes appeared to have a clenched-teeth approach to all aspects of self-disclosure, and in particular, to talking about race and gender. Then, in the second moment, and after a racialized and gendered attack, Rhimes spoke back with an unambiguous critique. In the shift from the pre-Obama era to the #BlackLivesMatter era, Rhimes’s careful negotiation of the press demonstrates that, in the former moment, to be a respectable Black woman is to perform strategic ambiguity, or not speak frankly about race, while in the latter, respectable Black women can and must engage in racialized self-expression, and thus redefine the bounds of respectability.

Keywords:

• African American
• Black
• post-racial
• representation
• respectability
• Shonda Rhimes
• television
• women

Acknowledgments

I thank all of the members of my writing communities, Sonnet Retman, LeiLani Nishime, Ileana Rodriguez-Silva, Sasha Su-Ling Welland, Habiba Ibrahim, Stephanie Smallwood, Michelle Habell-Pallan, Leah Ceccarelli, Christine Harold, and Laura Helper-Ferris, for all of the invaluable feedback I received on this piece.

Notes

“Oprah Talks to Shonda Rhimes,” The Oprah Magazine, December 2006.

Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, “African-American Women’s History and the Metalanguage of Race,” Signs 17, no. 2 (1992): 251–74; Righteous Discontent: The Women’s Movement in the Black Baptist Church, 1880–1920, Revised edition (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994).

Lisa B. Thompson, Beyond the Black Lady: Sexuality and the New African American Middle Class (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2009).

Gerald Horne, Race Woman: The Lives of Shirley Graham Du Bois (New York: NYU Press, 2002).

Cindy L. White and Catherine A. Dobris, “The Nobility of Womanhood: ‘Womanhood’ in the Rhetoric of 19th Century Black Club Women,” in Centering Ourselves: African American Feminist and Womanist Studies of Discourse, edited by Marsha Houston and Olga Idriss Davis (Cresskill, NJ: Hampton, 2002), 171–85.

Darlene Clark Hine, “Rape and the Inner Lives of Black Women in the Middle West,” Signs 14, no. 4 (1989): 912–20.

Horne, Race Woman: The Lives of Shirley Graham DuBois, 4.

Bill Cosby, “Pound Cake Speech” (Washington, DC, 2004), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Gh3_e3mDQ8.

Oscar Lewis, Five Families: Mexican Case Studies in the Culture of Poverty (New York: Basic Books, 1975); Daniel P. Moynihan, The Negro Family: The Case for National Action, Office of Policy Planning and Research (Washington, DC: Office of Policy Planning and Research U.S. Department of Labor, 1965).

Derald Wing Sue, Microaggressions in Everyday Life: Race, Gender, and Sexual Orientation (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2010).

“Strategic ambiguity” draws upon the notion that revered rhetorician Kenneth Burke created when developing a flexible analytic frame to understand a rhetor’s motives in constructing a speech or action. To lay out the terms of his “grammar of motives,” Burke states, “what we want is not terms that avoid ambiguity, but terms that clearly reveal [to rhetorical critics] the strategic spots at which ambiguities necessarily arise” (italics in original). In other words, we cannot rely upon seemingly clear language if we want to understand complex motivation. Kenneth Burke, A Grammar of Motives (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969), xvii.

One exception is a very special Scandal episode, “The Lawn Chair,” that took on police brutality of Black men and the issues of Black protest and Black armed resistance; Tom Verica, The Lawn Chair, Scandal (Hollywood, CA: ABC Studios, 2015, March 5).

Carole Boyce-Davies, Black Women, Writing and Identity: Migrations of the Subject (New York: Routledge, 1994).

Herman Gray, Watching Race: Television and the Struggle for Blackness (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1995 and 2004).

See, for example, Daphne A. Brooks, “‘All That You Can’t Leave Behind’: Black Female Soul Singing and the Politics of Surrogation in the Age of Catastrophe,” Meridians: Feminism, Race, Transnationalism 8, no. 1 (2008): 183; Safiya Umoja Noble, “Google Search: Hyper-visibility as a Means of Rendering Black Women and Girls Invisible,” InVisible Culture, no. 19 (2013).

See Williams’s 2016 BET Awards speech at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HeRIUPlxlv4.

I write about these particular celebrities’ performances of strategic ambiguity in my forthcoming book, Screening Strategic Ambiguity: Reading Black Female Resistance to the Post-Racial Lie (NYU Press).

See Michael Bennett and Vanessa D. Dickerson, eds., Recovering the Black Female Body: Self-representation by African American Women (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2001).

I want to underscore the fact that I am in no way attempting to read Rhimes’s intent; instead, I am reading her performance, her self-fashioning as Janet Staiger writes (see “Analysing Self-Fashioning in Authoring and Reception,” in Ingmar Bergman Revisited: Performance, Cinema and the Arts, edited by Maaret Koskinet (London: Wallflower, 2008), 89–106.

See Stephen J. McNamee and Robert K. Miller, Jr., The Meritocracy Myth, 2nd ed. (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2009).

Nick Carey, “Racial Predatory Loans Fueled U.S. Housing Crisis: Study | Reuters,” Reuters, October 4, 2010, http://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-foreclosures-race-idUSTRE6930K520101004.

Pamela K. Johnson, “The Cutting Edge: Shonda Rhimes Dissects Grey’s Anatomy,” Written By: The Magazine of the Writers Guild of America, West, September 2005, http://www.wga.org/writtenby/writtenbysub.aspx?id=883.

See all of the popular press articles discussed in this piece.

Elana Levine, “Grey’s Anatomy: Feminism,” in How to Watch Television, edited by Ethan Thompson and Jason Mittell (New York: NYU Press, 2013), 139–47.

Aldore Collier, “Shonda Rhimes: The Force Behind Grey’s Anatomy,” Ebony 60, no. 12 (2005): 204–208; Pamela K. Johnson, “The Cutting Edge: Shonda Rhimes Dissects Grey’s Anatomy,” from the Sept. 2006 issue of Written By: The Magazine of the Writers Guild of America, West. Accessed on August 31, 2011 on proquest, “Oprah talks to Shonda Rhimes,” O, The Oprah Magazine, December 1, 2006, vol. 7, no. 12.

“Oprah Talks to Shonda Rhimes,” 321.

Janice Peck, Age of Oprah: Cultural Icon for the Neoliberal Era (Boulder, CO: Routledge, 2008); Kathryn Lofton, Oprah: The Gospel of an Icon (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011).

Brandi Wilkins Catanese, The Problem of the Color[blind]: Racial Transgression and the Politics of Black Performance (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2011).

Catanese, The Problem of the Color[blind], 17.

Kristen J. Warner, “A Black Cast Doesn’t Make a Black Show: City of Angels and the Plausible Deniability of Color-Blindness,” in Watching While Black: Centering the Television of Black Audiences, edited by Beretta E. Smith-Shomade (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2013), 49–62.

Amy Long, “Diagnosing Drama: Grey’s Anatomy, Blind Casting, and the Politics of Representation,” The Journal of Popular Culture 44, no. 5 (2011, October 1): 1067–84. doi:10.1111/j.1540-5931.2011.00888.x.

Timothy Havens, Black Television Travels: African American Media around the Globe (New York: NYU Press, 2013).

Horne, Race Woman: The Lives of Shirley Graham Du Bois, 63.

Aldore Collier, “Shonda Rhimes: The Force Behind Grey’s Anatomy,” Ebony, October 2005.

Another celebrated show featured a cast of color who rarely addressed racial difference, The Cosby Show, and Sut Jhally and Justin Lewis similarly suggest that it not only did not open up racial understanding, it created greater racial animus. Here White audiences never saw Black people fighting racism, implying that it does not exist. See Sut Jhally and Justin M. Lewis, Enlightened Racism: The Cosby Show, Audiences, and the Myth of the American Dream (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1992).

The #BlackLivesMatter movement was founded by three queer Black women activists who, in the words of one of them, created “a call to action for Black people after 17-year-old Trayvon Martin was post-humously [sic] placed on trial for his own murder and the killer, George Zimmerman, was not held accountable for the crime he committed.” Alicia Garza, “A Herstory of the #BlackLivesMatter Movement by Alicia Garza,” The Feminist Wire, October 7, 2014, http://www.thefeministwire.com/2014/10/blacklivesmatter-2/.

Anna Everett, “Scandalicious,” The Black Scholar 45, no. 1 (2015, January 2): 34–43. doi:10.1080/00064246.2014.997602.

Jessica Yu, Blown Away, Scandal (Hollywood, CA: ABC Studios, 2012, December 13).

Robbie Myers, “Shonda Rhimes on Power, Feminism, and Police Brutality,” Elle, September 23, 2015, http://www.elle.com/culture/career-politics/q-and-a/a30186/shonda-rhimes-elle-interview/.

Willa Paskin, “Network TV Is Broken. So How Does Shonda Rhimes Keep Making Hits?” The New York Times Magazine, May 9, 2013, http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/12/magazine/shonda-rhimes.html.

Allison Samuels, “How Scandal on ABC Got off the Ground,” Newsweek, March 5, 2012, http://www.newsweek.com/how-scandal-abc-got-ground-63697.

Alessandra Stanley, “Wrought in Rhimes’s Image: Viola Davis Plays Shonda Rhimes’s Latest Tough Heroine,” The New York Times, September 18, 2014, http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/21/arts/television/viola-davis-plays-shonda-rhimess-latest-tough-heroine.html.

Marcyliena Morgan and Dionne Bennett, “Getting Off of Black Women’s Backs: Love Her or Leave Her Alone,” Du Bois Review: Social Science Research on Race 3, no. 2 (2006, September): 485–502. doi:10.1017/S1742058X06060334.

Kimberly Springer, “Divas, Evil Black Bitches, and Bitter Black Women,” in Interrogating Postfeminism: Gender and the Politics of Popular Culture, edited by Yvonne Tasker and Diane Negra (Durham, NC: Duke University Press Books, 2007), 249–76. See also J. Celeste Walley-Jean, “Debunking the Myth of the ‘Angry Black Woman’: An Exploration of Anger in Young African American Women,” Black Women, Gender & Families 3, no. 2 (2009): 68–86. doi:10.1353/bwg.0.0011; Rachel Alicia Griffin, “I Am an Angry Black Woman: Black Feminist Autoethnography, Voice, and Resistance,” Women’s Studies in Communication 35, no. 2 (2012, June 22): 138–57.

Kara Brown, “The New York Times, Shonda Rhimes & How to Get Away with Being Racist,” Jezebel, September 19, 2014, http://jezebel.com/the-new-york-times-shonda-rhimes-how-to-get-away-wit-1636868442.

Lesley Goldberg, “30 of Shonda Rhimes’ Stars Respond to New York Times’ ‘Angry Black Woman’ Column,” The Hollywood Reporter, September 22, 2014, http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/live-feed/shonda-rhimes-angry-black-woman-734607.

Margaret Sullivan, “An Article on Shonda Rhimes Rightly Causes a Furor,” The New York Times, September 22, 2014, Public Editor’s Journal, http://publiceditor.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/09/22/an-article-on-shonda-rhimes-rightly-causes-a-furor/.

Maerz, Melissa, “The Anatomy of How to Get Away with Scandalously Good TV,” Entertainment Weekly, September 11, 2015.

Maerz, “The Anatomy of How to Get Away with Scandalously Good TV,” 8.

Linda Holmes, “The Only One: A Talk with Shonda Rhimes,” National Public Radio, September 22, 2014, http://www.npr.org/sections/monkeysee/2014/09/22/350563549/the-only-one-a-talk-with-shonda-rhimes.

Kobena Mercer, Welcome to the Jungle: New Positions in Black Cultural Studies (New York: Routledge, 1994), 234.

Mercer, Welcome to the Jungle, 240.

Long, “Diagnosing Drama,” 1068.

Kristen J. Warner, “The Racial Logic of Grey’s Anatomy: Shonda Rhimes and Her ‘Post-Civil Rights, Post-Feminist’ Series,” Television & New Media 16, no. 7 (2015): 633.

Ibid., 633, 635.

Ibid., 638.

Everett, “Scandalicious,” 34.

Ibid., 37.

Alexandra Wolfe, “The TV Producer on Her Hit Shows, Finding Balance and Her One-year Plan to Conquer Her Fears,” Wall Street Journal, October 30, 2015, sec. Life, http://www.wsj.com/articles/shonda-rhimess-prime-time-life-1446222889.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Ralina L. Joseph

Ralina L. Joseph is an Associate Professor in the University of Washington’s Department of Communication and the Founding Director of the Center for Communication, Difference, and Equity. Ralina’s first book is Transcending Blackness: From the New Millennium Mulatta to the Exceptional Multiracial (Duke University Press, 2012). Her current book project, Screening Strategic Ambiguity: Reading Black Female Resistance to the Post-racial Lie, is forthcoming from NYU Press.