In a much-critiqued review of the new TV series How to Get Away with Murder, New York Times television critic Alessandra Stanley introduced award-winning super-producer Shonda Rhimes by suggesting that she should call her autobiography “How to Get Away With Being an Angry Black Woman”. The clichéd piece, which Stanley later said was intended to “praise Shonda Rhimes for pushing back so successfully on a tiresome but insidious stereotype”, was misguided and tone-deaf – but Stanley is hardly the first (and probably won’t be the last) white woman to demean a black woman with back-handed praise.

In a 2012 Oscar roundtable discussion about the lack of roles for black actresses, Viola Davis, who stars in the upcoming Rhimes show, spoke to the perception that she is automatically less attractive than women who “look like Halle Berry” – women with lighter skin or more loosely curled hair. It was a candid reflection on the way white supremacy manifests itself in the industry: Eurocentric beauty standards simply drive Davis (and people who look like her) out of the competition for roles for which they are qualified because decision makers think a “whiter” look is more relatable or desireable. Actress Charlize Theron then interrupted Davis’s complex critique of the political nature of beauty standards to say simply, “You’re hot as shit”– failing to process any deeper meaning whatsoever. The moment was not, as Theron seemed to understand it, about Davis having low self-esteem or seeing herself as less beautiful than Berry, but about understanding how the Hollywood system both fails to create roles for black women – especially those with dark skin – and see black women inhabiting roles not specifically created for them.

The dearth of black women in influential Hollywood roles, and Theron’s failure to understand the gravity of a critique of the driving force that impacts employment prospects, and Stanley’s disaster of a review, by no means exist independently of one another, and none of them need be actively malicious in order to cause harm. They are all bound together by a unifying thread: the inability or unwillingness to see black women as fully human, fully women and worthy of complex, multi-faceted characterizations on screen that reflect the full spectrum of our lives and our emotions.

Black women are more than props and more than interchangeable stock images employed to convey a sassy reaction to a white star’s plotline. We experience love, grief, anger, frustration and joy just like everyone else. Except that, when expressing those emotions, black women are policed, caricatured, judged and dismissed. We aren’t allowed to be situationally angry at the appropriate moments and have other emotions at other times: we are instead tasked with embodying a singular emotion (like anger) to the point of caricature.

Humanity is a luxury routinely denied to black women both within media and outside it. Indeed, it is the inability to see black women outside pre-packaged narratives that leads to reviews that call Shonda Rhimes angry, Olivia Pope a modern-day Jezebel and Viola Davis – who was nominated for an Oscar for her role as a maid in The Help – “less classically beautiful”.

The New York Times review comes at a time when television is grappling with the obvious fact that diverse shows attract more viewers. As a result, the networks are finally investing in shows with people of color in leading roles outside of Shondaland, including, but not limited to: State of Affairs on NBC (Alfre Woodard); Stalker (Maggie Q) on CBS; Empire (Terrence Howard, Taraji P Henson and Gabourey Sidibe), Sleepy Hollow (Orlando Jones and Nicole Beharie), Brooklyn Nine-Nine (Terry Crews, Andre Braugher, Melissa Fumero and Stephanie Beatriz), Red Band Society (Octavia Spencer) and The Mindy Project (Mindy Kaling) on Fox; and Selfie (John Cho), Cristela, and Fresh Off the Boat on ABC.

This impressive tilt toward showcasing a diversity of stories and faces in television, has been dubbed “the Scandal effect”, a nod to the huge success of Rhimes’s addictive political drama (and the first network television drama with a black female lead since 1974). Olivia Pope, played by Kerry Washington, is complicated: she is a brilliant workaholic with a messy love life who runs a tight ship in the office but occasionally succumbs to the weight of countless emotional burdens. She is intelligent and inspiring, flawed and frustrating.

She is like all of us: human, not a flat stereotype or a sidekick in someone else’s story. That is the success of the Shonda Rhimes model: finding a way to make space for black women’s multitudes without constraining us – or herself – to one dimension.