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1. On Thursday, The New York Times’ Alessandra Stanley wrote “Wrought in Their Creator’s Image: Viola Davis Plays Shonda Rhimes’s Latest Tough Heroine.”
Here’s the lead, but really, read the whole thing.
When Shonda Rhimes writes her autobiography, it should be called “How to Get Away With Being an Angry Black Woman.”
Again, read the whole thing. The lead is not the worst part. By Friday, a lot of publications broke down everything that was wrong about the story, and that it ever ran in the first place. Here are selections from a few of them.
2. The Huffington Post’s Jack Mirkinson collected some tweets from Rhimes herself for “Shonda Rhimes Takes Down NY Times Critic Who Called Her An ‘Angry Black Woman'”. Here’s my favorite from Friday morning:
Final thing: (then I am gonna do some yoga): how come I am not "an angry black woman" the many times Meredith (or Addison!) rants? @nytimes
— shonda rhimes (@shondarhimes) September 19, 2014
3. Willa Paskin wrote “Shonda Rhimes Is Not an ‘Angry Black Woman,’ New York Times” for Slate.
The piece argues—admiringly—that Rhimes, the creator of Grey’s Anatomy and Scandal, and an executive producer of the forthcoming How to Get Away with Murder, and a singularly powerful figure—black or white, male or female—in the TV universe, has “embraced the trite but persistent caricature of the Angry Black Woman, recast it in her own image and made it enviable … single-handedly trampled a taboo even Michelle Obama couldn’t break.”
With compliments like these, who needs insults? Rhimes is no more the “angry black woman” than her characters, who are angry the way that a bird is bipedal: It’s not false, but it’s not to the point.
4. From Alex Abad-Santos for Vox, “Shonda Rhimes isn’t an angry black woman and neither are her characters”:
Putting the condescending race-splaining aside for just one moment, there’s a huge problem with Stanley’s assessment of Keating (Viola Davis), the star of How to Get Away with Murder — Shonda Rhimes isn’t the creator of the show. The creator of the show is a man named Pete Nowalk (who has written and produced on Rhimes’s shows in the past), as Rhimes pointed out on Twitte
5. Margaret Lyons takes down the article graph by graph with “There Are Just So Many Things Wrong With the New York Times’ Shonda Rhimes Article” for Vulture. Here’s one of those:
“Ms. Rhimes has embraced the trite but persistent caricature of the Angry Black Woman, recast it in her own image and made it enviable. She has almost single-handedly trampled a taboo even Michelle Obama couldn’t break.”
Congratulations to Shonda Rhimes for ending racism. But how are any of these characters cast “in her own image”? Futher, she didn’t “embrace the caricature” of the Angry Black Woman — she rejected it completely and wrote other things. What kind of character would Shonda Rhimes have to write before there was no twisted logic to suggest that secretly they’re still Angry Black Women? As it turns out, any black female character — and many black female real-life human beings — can be labeled an Angry Black Woman. That way, their ideas can be ignored, marginalized, and dismissed.
6. For Jezebel, Kara Brown wrote “The New York Times, Shonda Rhimes & How to Get Away With Being Racist”:
For black women, (and often black men) anger isn’t an emotion they feel or express. Any show of anger instantly characterizes them — it becomes who they are. Our society would rather reduce black women down to a single lazy stereotype than to allow them the fullness of the humanity and understanding afforded to white people.
Stanley goes on to cite basically every other black female character Rhimes has ever written and hit them with the Angry Black Woman indictment.
7. Richard Prince wrote “An ‘Angry Black Woman’ Firestorm” for the Maynard Institute, pulling together many articles which pushed back against the Times piece and also about Stanley and her knack for errors. (My colleague Andrew Beaujon also wrote about Stanley and her mistake-ey-ness in 2012.)
The piece by Stanley, as the Times’ television critic, is to appear in Sunday’s print edition but was posted online Thursday. In journalism circles, Stanley is known by many for the number of errors she has committed.
In 2009, Clark Hoyt, then the Times’ public editor, wrote, “For all her skills as a critic, Stanley was the cause of so many corrections in 2005 that she was assigned a single copy editor responsible for checking her facts. Her error rate dropped precipitously and stayed down after the editor was promoted and the arrangement was discontinued. . . . She was not even in the top 20 among reporters and editors most responsible for corrections this year. Now, she has jumped to No. 4 and will again get special editing attention. . . .”
8. NPR’s Linda Holmes had an on-stage interview set up with Rhimes at the Natural History Museum on Friday night. On Monday, Holmes wrote “The Only One: A Talk With Shonda Rhimes”:
One of the great manifestations of privilege for white guys who run television shows is that they rarely have to talk about this stuff on an institutional level. For the most part, as long as their shows have at least one character of color, they may be asked about particular happenings or portrayals on their own shows, but the fact that they are part of a system that turns out show after show about white guys doesn’t come up in every conversation. People who are making the same kind of television that’s already being made are usually left alone to make it.
It’s people like Shonda Rhimes who are asked, over and over again, to occupy time they could be spending talking about characters and shows, building their own narratives about their ambitions and careers, sitting on the stage at the Smithsonian, talking about diversity issues they’ve addressed in their work.
9. Also on Monday, Times’ Public Editor Margaret Sullivan wrote “An Article on Shonda Rhimes Rightly Causes a Furor”. Sullivan has asked questions of both Stanley and editors at the Times, and wrote that she’d be posting more later on Monday.
This is a preliminary post, and I’ll be adding to it later today, or posting again. But I’ll say this much: The readers and commentators are correct to protest this story. Intended to be in praise of Ms. Rhimes, it delivered that message in a condescending way that was – at best – astonishingly tone-deaf and out of touch.
Sullivan updated the post on Monday afternoon with comments from Danielle Mattoon, culture editor:
“There was never any intent to offend anyone and I deeply regret that it did,” Ms. Mattoon said. “Alessandra used a rhetorical device to begin her essay, and because the piece was so largely positive, we as editors weren’t sensitive enough to the language being used.”
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