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Jamie Foxx attended the MTV Movie Awards on Sunday night to accept the 2013 Generation Award. He did so while wearing a shirt that had the phrase “kNOw Justice” above photos of Trayvon Martin and the Newtown kids.

Many intelligent humans would view Jamie Foxx’s shirt as a way a celebrity can…

Olivia Pope: From Juggernaut to Jezebel?

As season 2 of Scandal resumes, fans wonder if the lead remains the gladiator they’ve come to love.

By: Nsenga K. Burton, Ph.D. | Posted: March 21, 2013 at 3:14 PM

Kerry Washington as Olivia Pope on Scandal (Richard Cartwright/IMDb)

(The Root) — Season 2 of ratings favorite Scandal resumes with a new episode Thursday. During its two weeks off, chatter on social media ranged from gasps to swoons over what and to whom Olivia Pope (played by Kerry Washington) will do next — not to mention ire over the showing of repeat episodes at the height of the show’s popularity! The fervor over the show featuring the first black female lead in a drama in four decades has not died down. In fact, it has accelerated, building a following not seen, since, well, show runner Shonda Rhimes’s prior ABC hit, Grey’s Anatomy.

What is it about Olivia Pope and her crew of misfits that make the show so perplexing? There’s definitely the Shonda Rhimes effect. The creator and head writer worked her mojo on Grey’s Anatomy to such an extent that she was able to resurrect the notion of a black female lead on network television (the first being Teresa Graves in Get Christy Love!). Ten years ago, imagining a black female show runner with a black female lead and a multiracial cast that garnered excellent ratings was about as plausible as thinking that the United States would elect an African American to the highest office in the land. Who knew?

If black women like Susan Fales-Hill, Yvette Lee Bowser, Jacque Edmonds, Eunetta Boone, Mara Brock Akil, Vida Spears, Pam Veasey, Sara Finney-Johnson, Winifred Hervey and Debbie Allen kicked open the door for black female show runners, then Rhimes has kicked it down with her formula for network television success.

In addition to having Rhimes at the helm, Scandal’s success is due to excellent casting. Kerry Washington and Tony Goldwyn shine as the couple that should be but never can be: Olivia Pope and President Fitzgerald Grant. The show also features the talents of Columbus Short as Harrison Wright, Guillermo Diaz as Huck and Jeff Perry as Cyrus Beene. On-again, off-again nemeses are first lady Mellie Grant (Bellamy Young) and Vice President Sally Langston (Kate Burton); and emotionally and professionally abused attorney David Rosen (Joshua Molina) and power grabber Verna Thornton (Debra Mooney) — the last two being off-again forever. The chemistry, dialogue (in that speedy delivery known as “Scandal-pace”) and story development pull viewers in, while the suspense, melodrama and — dare I say it, scandal — keep viewers coming back.

The ongoing narrative enigma is the love affair between Olivia and Fitz. Fans and scholars have debated whether Scandal represents post-racial television — a show in which cast members are ethnically diverse but are not defined by their race or ethnicity. In the first season, it was easy to make this claim as Pope worked her magic, managing crises without mentioning that her ongoing affair with Fitz was problematic, not only because he was married and in a powerful position that demanded strong family values, but also because they were a mixed-race couple living in Washington, D.C. (formerly known as Chocolate City).

Season 2 has knocked that theory out the window, with Pope commenting on the fact that she felt like Sally Hemings, the lover-mistress-property of Thomas Jefferson, when engaging in illicit activities with President Grant. While many speak about the strength and power of Pope’s character, the way that their love affair has gone further awry this season undermines the strength and power that Pope’s character exuded in the first season. Who is this weepy woman, crying over a man who has proven himself to be a creep (and a killer), who ostensibly used and disposed of her like trash? Are we to believe that a strong, dynamic black woman who manages crises day in and day out, “the fixer,” can’t manage to fix her private life?

We know folks like this, people who give great advice but fail to implement said advice in their personal lives. Season 1 gave viewers a black female lead who was sure of herself, exercised personal and political power and made sure that race (and sexuality) were not factors in who she was or could be. Season 2 has done just the opposite, making us wonder if Pope’s intertextual reference to Sally Hemings was foreshadowing or concession? 

Perhaps the latest episode will help answer this question: Has Olivia gone from juggernaut to Jezebel in one season? We might have to wait until May 16 for the answer; on Wednesday Shadow and Act reported that ABC has set that date for the season finale.

Then, perhaps, looking ahead to season 3, we’ll see more of the depth and complexity in Pope’s character about which we’ve been dreaming for black female characters since the advent of television (family, neighborhood ties, friendships outside of the office, flirting inside of the office — hello, Harrison Wright!). Perhaps we won’t? Maybe it will be more of the same.

Based on the popularity of the series, most fans just want more Olivia Pope, in whatever package Shonda Rhimes wraps her. 

Nsenga K. Burton, Ph.D., is editor-at-large for The Root. She is also editor-in-chief of the Burton Wire, a blog dedicated to world news related to the African Diaspora and global culture. Follow her on Twitter.

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The Django Moment; or, When Should White People Laugh in Django Unchained?

by Cord Jefferson

Beware some SPOILERS in this piece.

To paraphrase Oprah, call it a “Django Moment.” This is the moment when, while watching Quentin Tarantino’s campy new slave-revenge movie, a person of color begins to feel uncomfortable with the way white people around them are laughing at the horrors onscreen. Though the film from which it stems has only been in wide release for less than 48 hours, if what I’ve heard in private conversations is correct, the Django Moment is already a fairly widespread phenomenon.

My personal Django Moment came when an Australian slaver, played by Tarantino himself, haphazardly threw a bag full of dynamite into a cage of captive blacks before mocking their very real fear that they might be exploded to nothingness. A white man behind me let out a quick trumpet blast of a guffaw, and then fell silent. My face got hot, and my nephew, who was sitting at my right, shifted uncomfortably in his seat. Throughout the film, I’d laughed along with everyone in the theater as a lynch mob of bumbling rednecks planned to slaughter the “fancypants nigger” Django, and when the villainous house slave Stephen, played pitch perfectly by Samuel L. Jackson, limped dumbly around his master’s plantation, kowtowing to every absurd demand with an acerbic and foulmouthed loyalty. But for whatever reason, the dynamite in the slave cage was a bridge too far for me. What the fuck is he laughing at? I thought, and just like that, the theater went from a place of communal revelry to a battleground.

Just so we’re clear, I really liked Django Unchained, and there’s probably no other movie I’ll discuss more with my friends—and friends of friends—over dinner in the coming months. I also don’t think it’s important for everyone in the world to have the same opinions about what is and isn’t funny. God forbid, for instance, that Seth MacFarlane were forever allowed to be the one and only arbiter of comedy in the United States. Nevertheless, as Tarantino’s latest continues making its bloody cultural ascent, it seems more important to recognize the difference in audience reactions to Django Unchained more so than, say, the difference in audience reactions to Love Actually.

Dave Chappelle once said that the impetus for him walking away from his hugely successful Comedy Central show was an incident in which he felt like a white employee was laughing maliciously at one of his more racially steeped sketches. “[S]omebody on the set [who] was white laughed in such a way—I know the difference of people laughing with me and people laughing at me—and it was the first time I had ever gotten a laugh that I was uncomfortable with,” Chappelle told Oprah months after he’d quit the show. “Not just uncomfortable, but like, should I fire this person?”

Today, Django Unchained has me considering, like Chappelle did years ago, what exactly white people are taking away from a film in which a subject like slavery is treated with such whimsy and humor. Was my Django Moment just me being too touchy? And beyond that, did my tittering at some of Django’s brutality or Samuel L. Jackson’s pathetic moaning cause someone else, black or white, to feel awkward?

Relentless and over-the-top violence is a hallmark in most of Tarantino’s work, but in Django Unchained, the gore seems different from the director’s previous efforts. There is a wide gulf, for instance, between the ultra-bloody kung-fu fights from Kill Bill and the Django scene in which a pack of wild dogs tears apart a defenseless runaway slave. Also difficult to watch is Django’s wife, Broomhilda, being whipped for attempting to escape her plantation, and then being branded on the face. Even Tarantino’s other recent take on monstrous ethnic oppression, the WWII drama Inglorious Basterds, had but one scene—the tense opener—that rivaled the hideousness of Django’s ugliest moments, made all the uglier because they actually happened.

Considering that some of the real-life, well-documented tortures inflicted upon nonfictional slaves were much worse than the ones shown in Django Unchained, it’s almost impossible to not feel self-conscious when Tarantino asks you to rapidly fluctuate between laughing at the ridiculousness of Django’s characters and falling silent with shame at the film’s authentic historical traumas. It’s in this disunity that the Django Moments arise. One moment you’re laughing at Mr. Stonesipher’s unintelligible bumpkin drawl; next you’re wincing as Stonesipher’s hounds shred a man limb from limb. (In my theater, one man in front of me scrambled out during this scene and only returned when it was over.) You smile as plantation owner Big Daddy attempts to figure out how to treat a free black man better than a slave but worse than a white person, but then you grimace while watching the vicious slave master Calvin Candie exalt phrenology, the bullshit pseudoscience many racists continue to cite as “proof” that blacks are biologically inferior to whites. And since Django runs close to three hours long, at a certain point you start to catch yourself laughing where you shouldn’t or—worse, even—hearing others laughing at something you don’t find funny at all. Eventually, you begin to wonder if you’re being too sensitive, or if the movie and everyone else around you are insensitive. Then you start to consider whether any of that even matters.

The tradition of gleaning strength from self-deprecation and gallows humor is prevalent in oppressed cultures. Be it Jews or blacks or gays, there is comfort to be found in picking at your own failings and defeats before others get the chance. But Django Unchained inverts the tradition throughout the film: Tarantino is white, and there are few laughs to be had from seeing slaves tortured over and over again. Beyond that, black viewers are themselves offered times to provide their own Django Moments, such as when I cracked up after Django blasts Calvin Candie’s feeble, widowed sister in the guts with a revolver, sending her flying out of the frame, or when, directly in earshot of my nephew’s white high school classmate, I giggled at Django saying his dream job was to get paid to kill white people.

After watching Django slaughter every white person in sight, I felt strange as I exited the theater alongside the rest of the mostly white audience. I wanted to pick out the dude who had laughed at the dynamite in the slave cage, but I also hoped nobody had been too put-off by my delight at an unarmed white woman getting more or less executed. Still, the unease I felt walking out was probably my favorite part of Django Unchained: On the one hand, you’re unsettled by the behavior of the characters in the film; on the other, you’re also unsettled by how you and everyone else in the theater reacted to those characters. Were you laughing with the movie, or was the movie laughing at you?