‘Angry black woman’ review sparks furor
‘New York Times’ is on the defensive
‘New York Times’ TV critic says she was trying to praise showrunner Shonda Rhimes.
New York Times TV critic Alessandra Stanley on Monday defended her characterization of ABC showrunner Shonda Rhimes as an “angry black woman.”
In a review of Rhimes’ new series, How to Get Away With
Murder, posted Sept. 18, Stanley describes three black female characters developed by Rhimes as being molded in her image — that of an “angry black woman.” She also describes the fictional women — Grey’s Anatomy’s Miranda Bailey (Chandra Wilson),
Scandal’s Olivia Pope (Kerry Washington) and Murder’s Annalise Keating ( Viola Davis) — as “powerful and initimidating ” and as having “potent libidos.”
In a statement to Times public editor Margaret Sullivan, who revealed Monday that she is investigating how the piece was handled by editors, Stanley said she was trying to praise Rhimes for turning a stereotype on its head rather than perpetrating it.
“I referenced a painful and insidious stereotype solely in order to praise Ms. Rhimes and her shows for traveling so far from it. If making that connection between the two offended people, I feel bad about that. But I think that a full reading allows for a different takeaway than the loudest critics took,” she wrote.
Many critics also took issue with Stanley’s description of Davis as “less classically beautiful” than her lighter-skinned contemporaries, Washington and Halle Berry. Stanley disputed that, too.
“The same applies to your question about ‘less than classically beautiful,’ ” she wrote. “Viola Davis said it about herself in the NYT magazine, more bluntly. I commended Ms. Rhimes for casting an actress who doesn’t conform to television’s narrow standards of beauty; I have said the same thing about Helen Mirren in Prime Suspect. I didn’t think Times readers would take the opening sentence literally because I so often write arch, provocative ledes that are then undercut or mitigated by the paragraphs that follow. Regrettably, this stereotype is still too incendiary to raise even in arguing that Ms. Rhimes had killed it once and for all.”
Earlier Monday, Sullivan expressed regret over how “astonisingly tone-deaf and out of touch” Stanley’s piece was.
“Its first paragraph — (describing) Ms. Rhimes as an ‘Angry Black Woman’ — struck many readers as completely off-base. Many called it offensive. Some went further, saying it was racist. ... There are some big questions here — about diversity, about editing procedures and about how
The Times deals with stories about women and race.”
Rhimes tweeted Sept. 19 amid the controversy: “I’m going to need to put down the internet and go dance this one out.”