Trope & Associates: Olivia Pope\'s Scandalous Blackness

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Trope and Associates Tara-Lynne Pixley Published online: 20 Mar 2015.

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Trope and Associates Olivia Pope’s Scandalous Blackness TARA-LYNNE PIXLEY

merican television, entering 115.6 million homes at last count,1 is emblematic of both discursive production at possibly its most refined, and the politics of representation at its most apparent. A multitude of works buoyed by both research and opinion have ruminated on television’s influence as a transmitter of images that simultaneously emulates and constructs social relationships. Specifically, in its more than 60 years of national and global reach, television’s stereotypical images of blackness and womanhood have been both pervasive and unrelenting. Symbolic annihilation has historically been the most consistent (non)representation all women receive in mass media,2 but especially injurious is an untempered portrayal of a world without either blacks or women, establishing absence as the only space available to the black female in American television. When black women are not simply rendered invisible in narrative television, the few that achieve recognition appear primarily on stages created and produced by white males. Given the appalling prevalence of “mammies, matriarchs and other controlling images” depicting black women, it would appear that television and white hegemonic scripts of domination have been ideal bedfellows since the technology’s inception.3 An overview of the 12 narrative TV shows nominated for an Emmy in 2013 produces an unsurprising chart of white-dominated

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representation featured in and behind the scenes. Nine shows featured a white female lead, while only three have featured black female characters, even in secondary roles. None of these Emmy-nominated shows had black female leads or creators. Of the 12 nominated shows, only two identified women as the show creators; and in both of those (30 Rock and Girls), white women were the central characters.4 Scandal is a TV show that represents a glaring departure from the parade of white faces typically seen on television. The lead character, Olivia Pope, is based on the life of Judy Smith, a black woman who was George H.W. Bush’s Deputy Press Secretary and who later opened her own crisis management firm. Pope, like her real-life counterpart, works for a Republican administration as a media consultant and “fixer”—the person you most want to know in a time of highly publicized crisis. The show relies on both salacious melodrama and political intrigue to move frequently absurd, occasionally poignant plots forward. Created in 2011, it ranked as the 12th most viewed network TV broadcast and the second most watched primetime network drama in a 2013 Nielson’s poll. Given the show’s mainstream popularity across racial lines and its use of a black female lead, this essay considers Scandal as marking a progressive shift in the representation of black female characters in mainstream television—beginning to assemble a representational universe as varied as the humans it reflects. Central to this idea of representational diversity is Pope’s navigation of life as if her blackness and womanhood were ancillary characters to her ambition and integrity.

© 2015 The Black World Foundation The Black Scholar 2015 Vol. 45, No. 1, 28–33, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00064246.2014.997601

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Though the character rarely invokes race, when race is highlighted, it is usually done in a way that clearly underscores the white privilege of other Scandal characters or draws attention to the simmering inequity between Pope and her white counterparts. For example, in one of the show’s few references to race, Pope’s father rages at her, insisting she repeat a phrase he had clearly attempted to instill in her throughout childhood: “You have to be twice as good as them to get half of what they have.”5 This mantra is an invocation of the burden of race and a scathing indictment of white privilege—certainly a rare thing found in mainstream television. It is also an acknowledgement that Pope is clearly acutely aware of her particular embodiment. Yet, Pope (or, more likely, her writers) avoids primarily defining herself by physically embodied, racialized categories. Much like the whites and men of TV who are rarely, if ever, required to address or contend with their whiteness or maleness, her character is built on scripts of power, intelligence, leadership and the framework of her actions. Pope then becomes evident as a layered but human character whose flaws and failings are as recognizable as the intricacies that make her redeemable, possibly even admirable. Behind the character of Olivia Pope and the dramatized, tele-revised life of Judy Smith is another black woman: the show’s creator and producer, Shonda Rhimes. Ms. Rhimes’ rise to the ranks of the Hollywood elite was not founded on her media depictions of African Americans; rather, she made a name for herself writing and creating white female characters both lauded and reviled for their unapologetically conflicted moral compasses (i.e., Meredith Grey of Grey’s

Anatomy). In a November 2013 NPR interview, when asked how she managed to bring such atypical female and black characters to network television, Rhimes recounted the attitude of network executives who believed audiences would never be interested in female characters that were openly sexually promiscuous and competitive in their careers. She claimed that when pitching her first series, the expectation for women on TV was to be perfect and representative of “everybody.” This is unsurprising given the historical prevalence of perfection as “norm” in television’s portrayal of women, clearly evidenced in 1950s family programming like “Leave It to Beaver,” “I Love Lucy,” “Father Knows Best,” and “Make Room for Daddy.” Such shows propagated an image of feminine perfection realized specifically through the cult of domesticity; yet even as female TV characters moved into the workplace and were allowed more intricate identities, idealized beauty and chastity remained cornerstones of their depiction. Rhimes indicates that in the eight years since her breakthrough with Grey’s Anatomy, the huge success of shows with more complex women at their forefront have minimized such limiting conditions. Though so-called “perfection” may no longer be the prevailing framework for representations of white women according to Rhimes, black women on TV appear affixed to a different standard. Racialized and sexualized, they are doubly bound to conceptions of perfection through which they are expected to simultaneously transcend and conform to their blackness. Criticisms leveled at Scandal’s depiction of race and Pope’s embodiment of black womanhood frequently come from deeply entrenched expectations of what Tara-Lynne Pixley

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spaces black women can inhabit or have occupied and how blackness must be presented, often mimicking the underlying assumptions the critics aim to decry. Pope’s character has met with a plethora of angry rants. Many of these criticisms claim that her interracial relationships with questionable power dynamics are outrageously offensive. Others insist that her lifestyle itself is unrealistic, and her depiction of black womanhood simply scandalous. Pope has been criticized for representing a composite of nearly every black female stereotype—the Jezebel, the Mammy, and the Sapphire. These stereotypes turned filmic tropes,6 first anthologized more than four decades ago by Donald Bogle, are now common parlance in mainstream criticism of black representation.7 To many media critics, Pope’s cunning maneuvers in service to the so-called “Republic” (read: primarily white, primarily wealthy, American political behemoth) smacks of Mammy-esque mothering and her “immoral” relationships with a white married man align with the notion of the oversexed Jezebel. When Pope runs her own business to laudable success through iron-fist maneuverings coupled with a commandeering personality, critics then insist she fits snugly into the Sapphire trope. The New Yorker opened a review of Scandal with a nod to the 1974 Blaxploitation series “Get Christie Love!,” acknowledging that little has changed in nearly 40 years of black female representation. Pope was then accused of being boringly righteous and the show’s choice to make her ethnicity almost irrelevant was vilified. Early in a critique of Scandal’s multitudinous affronts to feminism and blackness, a Feminist Wire critic is quoted as saying, 30

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Although a black woman is allegedly at the center of the storyline, the standard ‘ingredients that make Hollywood Hollywood—sex, violence, violation and action—’ (hooks 122) are an ever-present force in Scandal. Little changes about the normative Hollywood M.O. other than the fact that Olivia Pope, a black woman, is the one allowed to save the day alone.8

The same critic later makes several excellent points on the pitfalls inherent to the show’s romantic and political relationships, but this early dismissal of having a black female lead is what I find fundamentally disturbing. It seems to imply that black female visibility is of nominal importance. Claiming that “little has changed” in the typical Hollywood apparatus when discussing the first black female lead on television in 40 years is a radical understatement that then colors further critique of Olivia Pope as rather oversimplified. The accomplishments of Judy Smith and Shonda Rhimes, which are both simultaneously celebrated and obscured by television’s flair for the dramatic, are diminished by this mode of critique. Other media bloggers have framed criticisms of Pope by pointing to the uproar caused by the character Claire Huxtable on The Cosby Show. Claire was guilty of a perfection so unachievable that it inspired rage in the viewing public to have women held accountable to such an impossible standard. Such antagonistic sentiments align with the history of women’s TV portrayal, where Claire Huxtable resonated as a modern-day June Cleaver or Margaret Anderson. However, if one is to take these criticisms of black women specifically on television as a

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whole, an image more disturbing than that of any single trope develops. Pope cannot be unabashedly strong and competent, sexually active, or act as caretaker without being categorized as some variant of a stereotype. She cannot be Olivia Pope first—with all its intrinsic specificities and complications—and a black American second, with all the intrinsic specificities and complications of that role too. Clearly, an untenable set of expectations overdetermines the representation of black women in popular culture. Among the lone representations of black women in popular culture, Olivia Pope must be perfect enough to not reflect poorly on a community that spans the nation, yet also realistic enough to be recognizable to everyone in that community. Above all, to be considered authentically black, she must present her blackness as a core characteristic that informs her actions and rationale. While some critics dismiss Pope as a mere embodiment of an array of stereotypes, these criticisms are founded on the same fallacious thinking that underscores the tropes themselves: an assumption that this one character can represent all black women. Furthermore, the critics speak within the constraining discourse of blackness as the primary attribute of all black people, re-establishing white as normative and black as the Other, encased by difference that allows blacks to be both nothing more and nothing less. By making a limit appear as a height, the prevailing discourse of blackness then becomes always a primary and most central characteristic in the self-sustaining engine of hegemonic production. Thus, whatever else a person may be, they can only be that if they are a black version of it: a successful CEO becomes a

black CEO,9 a beautiful woman becomes beautiful for a black woman. Whiteness, however, is rarely so bound. As the standard by which all else is measured, a white man can be represented in any medium without having to invoke his whiteness, and white women—though certainly saddled with their own particular limits within the patriarchal order—can exist as individuals extant to their whiteness. Scandal invites a variety of critiques in a medium that is prone to the missteps produced by flattening characters to fit them into fantastical yet digestible hour-long plots. The show can easily be maligned for its neoliberal bent, where all characters commit wretched acts in service to the oft-invoked American “Republic.” The series could also be criticized for its lack of diversity outside of the black and white characters: few Hispanics or Asians occupy lead roles in the storylines, or even make appearances. Yet, Scandal’s appeal is not in being above reproach; rather, it excels where it revels in personal imperfections or marginalized identities, presenting a cast of gay, straight, black, white, male, female characters who live powerful, complex and unabashedly morally ambiguous lives wherein those types of classification are minor aspects of their character. Rhimes offers what could certainly be viewed as an unrealistic post-racial world; but an alternative reading suggests the possibility of a world more true to the reality many currently strive to attain, where no individual can be encompassed within or consumed by a category forced upon them. Perhaps we are so accustomed to television’s production of stereotyping and tropifying unreality that it becomes increasingly difficult Tara-Lynne Pixley

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to see vestiges of the real. The key problem I wish to underscore is that Olivia Pope exceeds the tropic limits set by her detractors in a framework of historical typifying. Shonda Rhimes created a new approach to portraying women and blacks—where race and gender are significant, but not quintessential to character. However, criticisms of Pope indicate that even in the face of this new representational model, viewers are wedded to interpretation only through the very tropes decried for decades.10 Olivia Pope is not a monolith. She is a black woman, but she is also more than that. It is true that various parts of Pope can be reductively categorized into tropes, but such a simplistic viewing of any individual character would invite similar conclusions. Rather, I would argue, she represents a sort of supertrope—a person whose motivations might include traces of simplified stereotype, but whose complex humanity stretches beyond the lines that would attempt to limit them to just one aspect of their character. Attempts to critique Olivia Pope or Claire Huxtable or Christie Love as regrettable stand-ins for “The Black Woman” at their respective points in history are reductive. Such an approach minimizes the complexity of black women’s experiences to a handful of media representations—some of which were pathetic and offensive. Black women are both mothers and professionals; jive-talking and suit-wearing; welfare recipients and business owners; conflicted corners of love triangles and committed partners. They, like anyone, are created out of a multitude of experiences. No single or individual experience can define them or encapsulate their character. It is significantly due to the lack of 32

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varied representations (created by a hegemonic pool of TV professionals that both knowingly and unknowingly produces itself as normative) that Pope must be made to stand in for and portray African American women. Television in its procedural, situational or fantasy-laden forms has consistently underscored the prevailing hegemony, wherein blacks and women have consistently been portrayed and viewed as mere props for whites, objects to the ultimate Subject, both on screen and behind the scenes. Diversity among TV producers, developers, creative artists and directors like Shonda Rhimes suggests that the tide might be changing. Characters such as Pope represent the possibility of a move toward a televisual world populated by many different stories, with a multitude of complexities and difference. It is this possibility that must be embraced and nourished, so that stories of black women— like those of Shonda Rhimes and Judy Smith —are spread widely and eventually recognized as standard rather than exceptional. The triangle of Pope/Rhimes/Smith represents strong, powerful black femaleness that is not without its complications, embellishments and pitfalls; but this is precisely what imbues Scandal with the potential to usher in a future of televisibility of the flawed/respectable, strong/burdened real black woman.

Notes 1. “Nielson Estimates 115.6 Million T.V. Homes in the U.S., Up 1.2%,” last modified May 7, 2013, http://www.nielsen.com/us/en/insights/ news/2013/nielsen-estimates-115-6-million-tv-ho mes-in-the-u-s---up-1-2-.html.

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2. Gaye Tuchman, “The Symbolic Annihilation of Women in the Mass Media,” in Hearth and Home: Images of Women in the Mass Media, ed. James Benet et al. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978), 77. 3. Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought (New York: Routledge, 2000), 76. 4. “65th Primetime Emmys Nominees and Winners,” http://www.emmys.com/awards/nomin ees-winners/2013 (accessed August 5, 2014). 5. Shonda Rhimes, Scandal, Television, directed/performed by Joe Morton (2013, ABC Studios). 6. I use “trope” here and elsewhere in the mode of the following definition as it applies to creative works: “a common or overused theme or device : cliché ”. Specifically, tropes as “devices and conventions that a writer can reasonably rely on as being present in the audience members’ minds and expectations.” Barbara Tomlinson nodded to this definition given in the introduction to TvTropes.org as a particularly salient way to think

through tropes in television; see Barbara Tomlinson, Feminism and Affect at the Scene of Argument: Beyond the Trope of the Angry Feminist (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2010), 205. 7. Donald Bogle, Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies and Bucks: An Interpretative History of Blacks in Films (New York: Viking Press, 1973). 8. Brandon Maxwell, “Olivia Pope and the Scandal of Representation.” TheFeministWire. Last modified February 7, 2013. http://thefeministwire. com/2013/02/olivia-pope-and-the-scandal-of-repr esentation/. 9. As Toni Morrison says “In this country, American means white. Everybody else has to hyphenate.” Quoted in Geoffrey Hughes, An Encyclopedia of Swearing: The Social History of Oaths, Profanity, Foul Language, and Ethnic Slurs in the English-speaking World (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 2006), 249. 10. Point clarified during a discussion with Dr. Sarah Clarke-Kaplan of UC San Diego on October 15, 2014.

A scholar of visual media, as well as a documentary photographer and filmmaker, Tara Pixley’s research in communication at University of California San Diego is focused within the field of film, media and documentary studies. She is currently producing a documentary film, turning the lens on the contemporary dance communities of Atlanta, GA and the underlying racial schisms of its embedded high art/low art structure.

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