Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Public Relations Review journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/pubrev Post-racial public relations on primetime television: How Scandal represents Olivia Pope Cheryl Ann Lambert Kent State University, 301C Franklin Hall, P.O. Box 5190, Kent, OH 44242-0001, United States ARTICLE INFO Keywords: Public relations Media representations Intersectionality Television Popular culture Postracial ABSTRACT Scandal follows the fast-paced fictional world of Olivia Pope, an attorney, crisis management expert, and former White House communications director who owns and manages her own public relations agency. As the first U.S. network television drama with an African American woman in the lead role since 1965, Scandal represents a step forward for televisual portrayals of African- American women. Nevertheless, this program recirculates common constructions of race and gender. I use a cultural studies framework to interrogate representations in the post-racial world Olivia Pope navigates, through the lens of intersectionality (Crenshaw, 1989). Findings reveal that the representational reality of Scandal is decidedly different from the lived reality of public re- lations professionals. 1. Introduction In 2012, ABC launched the first U.S. network television drama with an African American woman in the lead role since Get Christie Love in 1965 entitled Scandal. The show centers around the life of Olivia Pope, an attorney, crisis management expert, and former White House communications director who owns and manages her own public relations agency. The central scandal is the fact that Olivia is a single, African American woman having an affair with the married, White, Republican President of the United States. A real woman who broke through racial and gender barriers in the George Bush White House, Judy Smith, inspired the program. Other than Judy insisting that Olivia be portrayed by a Black woman (Inside a scandal, 2012), race is rarely included in the program narrative. The markers of identity that typify Black culture such as “linguistic innovations in rhetorical stylization of the body, forms of occupying an alien social space, heightened expressions, hairstyles, ways of walking, standing and talking” (Hall, 1993, p. 109), are largely missing from Scandal. Although Scandal is a step forward for televisual portrayals of African-American women, I assert that this program recirculates common constructions of Blackness. I examine in particular the problematic ways that race is represented and misrepresented in the post-racial world Olivia Pope navigates, through the lens of intersectionality, the ways in which race and gender interact to shape the multiple-dimensionality of Black women’s experiences (Crenshaw, 1989). 2. Sociopolitical context Scandal cannot be fully understood without consideration of the social context in which it—and its viewers—exist. During the 2016 summer hiatus, the then-Republican nominee for United States (U.S.) now-President Donald Trump gained national news exposure by castigating Muslims, Mexicans, immigrants, and African-Americans. Simultaneously, the killings of unarmed African- American citizens prompted the Black Lives Matter movement to hold marches, demonstrations, and protests throughout the U.S. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.pubrev.2017.07.004 Received 21 September 2016; Received in revised form 22 May 2017; Accepted 13 July 2017 E-mail address: clambe17@kent.edu. Public Relations Review xxx (xxxx) xxx–xxx 0363-8111/ © 2017 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. Please cite this article as: Lambert, C.A., Public Relations Review (2017), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.pubrev.2017.07.004