Shonda Rhimes has been a key player in the proliferation of black popular culture. She has received critical acclaim for the creation of strong black female television characters, such as Miranda Bailey on Grey’s Anatomy, Olivia Pope on Scandal, and Annalise Keating on How to Get Away with Murder. Rhimes’ hit television programs are emblematic of the ways that “within culture, marginality, though it remains peripheral to the broader mainstream, has never been such a productive space as it is now” (Hall 106). Rhimes has been enormously influential in the racial diversification of contemporary television programming. Despite this success, commentators, such as Alessandra Stanley, continue to undermine the power of this progress.

In a 2014 New York Times article, Alessandra Stanley writes a thoroughly problematic analysis of Rhimes’ cultural influence, although she claims it was intended to praise Rhimes’ contributions. The introductory sentence of this article categorizes Rhimes as an ‘angry black woman’, a categorization Rhimes publicly addresses and vehemently rejects. The article continues with postracial rhetoric which isolates Rhimes’ television characters from the greater cultural space in which they are situated. As Stanley explains, “[t]hey struggle with everything except their own identities, so unconcerned about race that it is barely ever mentioned.” To claim Rhimes and her characters are ‘unconcerned’ about race is not only wildly inaccurate, it also gives credence to the myth that racial equality has been reached and further discussion of the continual violence of racism is unnecessary. Stanley’s framing of black popular culture is insidious, for “the moment the signifier ‘black’ is torn from its historical, cultural, and political embedding and lodged in a biologically constituted racial category, we valorize, by inversion, the very ground of the racism we are trying to deconstruct” (Hall 111). Stripping Rhimes’ television series of their racial politics denies their political significance. Stanley also claims that “even when [Rhimes’] heroine is the only nonwhite person in the room, it is the last thing she or anyone else notices or cares about.” Stanley is espousing a ‘colour blind’ ideology that negates the importance of black representation in popular culture. Rhimes’ work is undermined when “control over [her] narratives and representations passes into the hands of the established cultural bureaucracies” (Hall 108). While supposedly ‘praising’ Rhimes, Stanley’s analysis presents her television programming as “a kind of difference that doesn’t make a difference of any kind” (Hall 106).