Kerry Washington tackles subjects like politics, race and turning 40 in a new interview out this week.
The actress, who has played Olivia Pope in political drama Scandal since 2012, discusses how the Shonda Rhimes hit tackles the subject of race. Kerry told Glamour for its May 2017 issue: “In the first season it was as if Olivia Pope was raceless. There was no denying that Olivia was a black woman, because I’m a black woman. But we didn’t talk about her identity as a black person. Since then the writers have become more and more willing to deal with race.”
When Olivia was kidnapped, it was not lost on me that the fictional president of the United States was willing to go to war to save one black woman at a time when hundreds of black women were missing in Nigeria and we were begging the world to pay attention. ‘Shonda was saying, “The life of a black woman matters.”‘ she added.
