Racialicious Crush Of The Week: Kerry Washington

By Andrea Plaid

Kerry Washington. Photo: Ernie Stewart/Retna Ltd. Courtesy: s2smagazine.com.

The R’s Managing Editor Arturo García and I confabbed last week about his adventures at the Democratic National Convention. He regaled me with some blogger star-gazing and gossip, Kerry Washington.

“Did you get to meet her?” I asked.

“No, but she looks good on the big screen,” he said.

I have to agree: in my big-screen movie, I’d cast Washington as Helen of Troy or Cleopatra, not only because she looks good (a vital attribute of you’re going to cast someone as two legends of human pulchritude, just as you’d cast a beautiful someone as Adonis) but also because she is good–and her work on Scandal and in real-life politics are why.

Say what you will, but ABC’s Scandal is my guilty pleasure.

Yeah, it’s just damn cool to watch Washington’s Olivia Pope (inspired by real-life DC fixer Judy Smith), aided and abetted by and her diversity-as-assumption team, handle some rather pearl-clutching–and usually law-breaking–situations without breaking a bead of sweat, a tone in her voice, a wrinkle in her outfit, or a tear down her face. It’s great to watch a Black woman exist in a universe where her intelligence is deeply respected and her word is not only bond, it’s the law of the presidential land that everyone–even the POTUS himself–follows.

And, yeah, it’s partly because of the way the show handles the lusty-love-on-hold interracial relationship between Pope and Tony Goldwyn’s Fitzgerald Grant: showrunner Shonda Rimes and her creative crew make the hellified leap of faith that not only would  no one in the upper DC echelons or the viewer blink an eye at one of the most powerful white men in the US having an open marriage, but also that his white wife condones the arrangement and his Black partner. Watching Pope and Grant, I get them: he’s drowning in love with her and would shipwreck his presidency for her. And, as much as Pope keeps DC’s pearls in place–and sometimes her feelings in deep check to do the job–she feels the same about Grant and would do the same with her own career, if her friends didn’t talk her of that ledge. And, yeah, she did shed some tears about it.

Washington plays Pope as much, much more than a Machiavellian steely hand wrapped in Armani threads. For all her maneuverings–some of which are direct-side-eye questionable, like cleaning up a crime scene so her intern, Quinn, isn’t implicated in a crime–the actor portrays Pope as doing them out of a sense of professional loyalty to her clients and go-to-the-mat love for her employees, who, while some having some sketchy pasts, serve as her support system and conscience as she does for them. Washington’s Pope isn’t a Strong Black Woman so much as a moving image of quiet, still certainty about power’s power to corrupt–sometimes mortally–and the desire and need to see the humanity of the person wielding it, even when it’s her own as she holds the president’s heart and career in her hands.

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