Living on PLANET WHITE

Friends, can it really be true that we’ve had no tv series with a single African-American female lead since 1974???  The article below mentions Teresa Graves’s as an undercover detective in the 1974 made-for-TV flick Get Christie Love!, which I do not remember, but I DO remember watching the beautiful Diahnn Carroll as Julia when I was a kid back in the late ’60s.

So, um, let’s see.  Diahnn Carroll broke that glass ceiling, Teresa Graves followed her, and um, we’ve had a mere 40 year absence of series led by a single black woman??

Where have I been that I didn’t notice this disparity?  Me, the lifelong feminist writer and (I hope) someone who lives without racial prejudice of any kind.  Well, I guess I’ve been living where I’ve always lived, on PLANET WHITE!  Apparently, everyone who runs network tv also resides there.

Thanks to the wonderful Shonda Rhimes, who created both Gray’s Anatomy and The Practice, we will once again have a network series fashioned around an independent, intelligent, interesting woman of color.

http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2012/03/04/how-scandal-on-abc-got-off-the-ground.html

Check out the article and look for SCANDAL,an upcoming and LONG OVERDUE series inspired by the life of Judy Smith, a real-life political clean-up woman.