by: Djéné Diané
cover image: Entertainment Weekly
"The only thing that separates women of color from anyone else is opportunity." - Viola Davis
Who's Shonda Rhimes?
Shonda Rhimes is a famous American television producer, screenwriter, and author who is most well known as a showrunner. She holds the title of being one of the TIMES magazine’s 100 most influential people in the world. Shonda Rhimes is also valued because as a Black woman, she succeeded by imposing herself within the Hollywood industry. Her success has come at the cost of the challenges that she has faced in Hollywood. These challenges include being discriminated against since the Hollywood industry is known for being a racist and sexist industry ruled by white old men who tend to dominate the environment and as a result make it difficult for diversity and women empowerment to be shown.
Successfully, Shonda Rhimes managed to overthrow the status quo ( defined by Paulo Freire as the norms established by the leading group in his book Pedagogy of the oppressed, and managed to represent the society in a more inclusive way.
Background information of 3 of her TV shows :
Grey’s anatomy : Relates the surgeons’ daily life of the Seattle Grace Hospital (it will later be named the Grey Sloan Memorial). A balance between the surgeons’ career and their personal life is shown which displays their coping mechanisms with life, sickness and death of patients.
How to Get Away with Murder : Features Annalise Keating ( Viola Davis ) as a renowned and brilliant lawyer and law-teacher in Philadelphia. The show includes five of her best students and we follow their adventures spiced up with illegality, murders, competition, twisted and unhealthy relationships.
Scandal : An American political thriller show which focuses on Olivia Pope ( Kerry Washington ) who is a really talented PR running a crisis management firm, Olivia Pope & Associates ( OPA ). She ends up working as the the President’s adviser and will basically lead his presidency.
"I grew up at a time when it was an anomaly to see people who looked like me on TV. When you don’t feel seen or heard, you don’t feel validated or valued." - Oprah Winfrey
Overriding the Status-Quo because representation matters, duh.
We used to live in an era where people fitting with beauty standards : white, straight, and slim were considered as the lucky ones, the winners chosen among the masses to be represented on television, in order to make people escape from their reality and make them aspire to be a certain physical way. The goal was to give them a fantasy. Television was the medium allowing you to dream and get away from your boring and miserable life. Few decades later we realise how much representation is important within the process of one’s identity building.
People no longer want to see unrealistic characters who they will never be like. Instead they want to see realistic characters they can identify to, characters who look like them, who can give them hope, create ambitions and help set them a goal to reach.
Shonda Rhimes doesn’t stage a pretty fancy superficial world, she discusses reality, real life. The life where joy, success, sadness and death happen. Although, because she wants to screen characters who look like people she sees in the real life, her shows doesn’t conceal the minority, on the contrary she puts them forward and displays them as heroes. For example, in the instance of Grey’s Anatomy, Since the beginning, her desire to represent everyone was apparent by screening Afro- American, Asian and mixed-race characters. Over the seasons, the show moved with the times, always in order to depict reality. Thereby, gradually she put on stage people with different sexual orientation (straight, bisexual, homosexual, transexual ), which highlights that there is not a single way to be a man or a woman. In the latest seasons, we witnessed the appearance of a Muslim character. In a time when islamophobia is growing, Shonda Rhimes advocates for peace, respect and inclusivity.
Down with the Stereotypes!
(If you were thinking about hearing juicy stories about drug dealers or prostitutes , you can go on your way, BYE. 👉)
It is important to keep in mind that every time Black people have been represented on television, it was always in accordance with the stereotypes they are associated to. Indeed it was really frequent to see Back women in the role of a cleaning lady, a prostitute or a black man in the role of a gangster or a fool . Black people are also depicted as a joyful community who love to party. All these stereotypes are what Patria Collins calls controlling images within the Chapter 5 of her book : Black Feminist Thought : Knowledge, Consciousness and the Politics of Empowerment, to describe the identities given to a sub-group by a dominant group. However, in her tv shows Shonda Rhimes gives to her audience another reality when she decides to overturn the perceived ideas associated to Black people and especially to Black women often associated with the jezebel, mammies, matriarchs like Collins explains in her book, Black Feminist Thought. Indeed, she shows to her audience that Black women empowerment, where they are in charge, successful powerful and brilliant. 💪
Strong female characters, yassss! 💁
The female characters she features are similar to her image ; strong and successful. They deconstruct a lot of stereotypes associated to women and remind us that women are extremely powerful and important to society :
1. Female Empowerment
A woman doesn’t have to be soft to be appreciated: Bailey is called the tyrant , Annalise and Olivia Pope are as cold as a stone, this teaches us that in order to impose themselves and gain respect from their peers, women have to be heartless and fierce. As women they have to show a stronger fight and mentality to be taken seriously in this patriarchal society.
2. Self-Definition
A woman doesn’t have to be married or to have kids to feel complete: this is already evident however it is so refreshing when Christina Yang reminds us that a woman can be married to her career, and have a medical research project for a baby and consider her best friend as the most important person in her life.
3. Politics, a Men's World? Really? Behind every great man there is a great woman : Olivia Pope and Mellie Grant are like the genius who whispered into the President’s ear. I mean, without Olivia’s incredible PR skills and Mellie’s ambitions first for her husband and then for herself
( spoiler alert ⚠: she becomes the first female president of the United States ) Fitzgerald Grant would never have been president. Good job ladies !
4. No Stigma It’s ok to be a successful lawyer, PR or surgeon and not to be ok. No one is perfect. We all know that. But in a way, maybe because women have been associated to hysteria for centuries (Thanks Freud we appreciate the legacy) the patriarchal society tends to stigmatise women more than men
when it comes to mental health condition. Through her TV shows, Shonda Rhimes reminds us that mental health condition doesn’t discriminate, so we shouldn’t either, we shouldn’t be ashamed about it and it doesn’t define us. Each one of her characters has a complex identity, they are brilliant, for sure but God knows how strong they are to cope with their mental health too.
Apolitical Will, but Strong Political Messages
Shonda Rhimes goal is not constructed to be a political initiative from the beginning. Indeed, In several interviews, Shonda Rhimes states that she’s tired of being congratulated for working for inclusivity on TV. Her main purpose is to put realistic characters on the screen. Moreover, what we cannot deny is that television is one of the biggest mass media of the world, therefore everything that goes on tv, somehow gets politicised and creates discussions amongst people. By screening empowered people of colour, she challenges the narrative that Caucasians are not the only ones capable of the best when it comes to social standing in society and Hollywood performances. Additionally, if Shonda Rhimes’ goal is not political, we have to admit that her shows discuss social issues whether these are to show the difficulties that Black women, and women in general face to be recognised and respected in a "so-called men's world" , police violence, sexual assaults, mental health condition etc. She aims to dismantle the effects of the discrimination that people face by deconstructing them one by one.