I might get crap for this, but I never really engaged with Shonda Rhimes’ shows. I like her as a person, I’m happy that a woman of color is dominating prime time network TV, and I will gladly defend Shonda on almost anything. But Thank God It’s Thursday and the whole Shondaland lineup isn’t my jam. So, if you want to talk about that stuff, God bless. Personally, I’d rather talk about Shonda’s new interview in Elle Magazine. Shonda sat down with the October issue of Elle (the one with Selena Gomez on the cover) to discuss race, politics, the writer’s room and more. You can read the full piece here. Some highlights:

The Scandal episode of ‘The Lawn Chair’, whether African-Americans are a monolithic community: “That episode was very interesting for us because Zahir McGhee, whose name is on the episode, [and] I basically wrote it together. He really did a good job with it, but [we] couldn’t be from more different worlds: He wanted Marcus to have attended a black college, and I didn’t want him to—I thought it meant something different. It was just a giant battle that we waged about every detail because [McGhee] was a young black man from Baltimore, and I grew up a lot like Olivia Pope. I was trying to explain to him, There is this weird belief from people on the outside and from people in black communities that there is only one way to be black. And I say it in the writers’ room all the time: My Black Is Not Your Black. What’s terrifying is that, just the same way we’ve all accepted that normal is white, everybody seems to buy into the idea that there’s only one way to be black or one way to be Hispanic. That’s as damaging as anything else.”

The resonance of telling stories about police violence: “That’s what was both heartbreaking and ironically, sadly, fortuitous. I woke up knowing that we were going to go write “The Lawn Chair” after Ferguson. I watched that coverage and was horrified. I woke up the next morning with this image of this man, of a lawn chair and a shotgun and a child underneath him. The episode came out of that. We shot that episode in October or November. I remember thinking, This is going to feel dated when it comes out. And then the police just kept killing black men. Literally the [day before] it aired, they released the Ferguson Report, and it was worse than the press had ever thought.”

Olivia Pope’s love life: “She is in love with the white, Republican president. She is in love with the man her father could not be more unlike. And that is what Rowan has been railing against. If you take it to its bare bones, metaphor scrubbed away, she is in love with the thing that her black father, who grew up in the 1950s and ’60s, could not be more disgusted by.”

Understanding power: “I think power is useless unless you know you have it. I’ve seen that a million times. And I feel like it happened with me for a while. I was always like, Why are people behaving this way? And now I know they were trying to treat me as if I were powerful. But because I was not ready to be powerful, I was like, What’s happening? The minute you realize or accept the concept that, Yes, I am a powerful person—guess what? The people who need to treat you that way to get things done—the business guys, and the money guys, and the finance people—they fall in line.”

[From Elle Magazine]

The whole piece is definitely worth a read. Shonda discusses the disagreements in the Scandal writers’ room and how those disagreements make the show better. She says Olivia’s relationship with her father is Shakespearean. She talks about power and love and owning her own boss-ness. I admire her so much. Just don’t ask me to watch the shows!

Photos courtesy of Jean Francois Campos/Elle Magazine & WENN.