“We are the villains”: The critical woman of color and white cancellation anxiety in recent quality media

Recent feminist media studies scholarship has tracked the television industry’s response to public discourse on structural racism, which reached a peak in 2020. This essay builds on this work by attending to a conceptual figure that we see occupying an increasingly important role in the post-2020 media landscape populated with “messy millennial women”—the Critical Woman of Color—and the cultural anxieties that, we argue, this figure is both designed to speak to and is, ultimately, hindered by. We examine this figure through the on-screen persona of two quality media performers: Ziwe Fumudoh, a Black woman comedian whose eponymous Showtime series (2021–2023) uses humor to provoke racial discomfort in her white guests; and Sohla El-Waylly, an Asian American chef, food writer, and television cooking competition judge, known for HBO Max’s The Big Brunch (2022) and for her public criticisms of quality food media’s racist workplace practices. The Critical Woman of Color, we argue, alleviates and provokes what we identify as “white cancellation anxiety;” the fear, expressed by white media figures and institutions, of being called to account for structural racism and white supremacy. Both Ziwe (known by her first name) and El-Waylly have been rhetorically positioned as Critical Women of Color, arbiters of the “messy” racial politics of white millennial women, including food media personality Alison Roman, with their judgments cast as enacting (or preventing) cancellation. In light of all this, we suggest, the Critical Woman of Color is both an opportunity and a trap, and trace Ziwe and El-Waylly’s respective strategies for embodying her.