Melissa Harris-Perry is the MSNBC host as well as an American author and political commentator and professor of political science at Tulane University. She was also the hot topic of this week’s “So What Do You Do?” column. Harris-Perr discussed how the show was created and whether ratings play a significant role.

“Having a show with your name on it makes you a brand. Who decides the direction of the show, and how do you balance the network’s desire for ratings with your own vision?

I have never once had someone from this network come to me and have a conversation about ratings, good or bad. No one. Maybe they’re talking to my executive producer, and that’s completely possible. But none of them have ever walked in here and said, “You know what? You cannot do that because of the ratings” or “Please do that more because of the ratings.” I will say that I have been completely clear, to the point of being fanatical, that my staff is not to share with me ratings information. I don’t ever want to know because, for me, the point of doing this show is not about the ratings. But I can tell when it’s not been a good weekend just by looking at the staff the next week. It’s kind of like after President Obama had that bad showing in the debates, like you just know that nobody was walking around happy in [Obama campaign quarters] OFA 2012. So, I can kind of tell if I had a week that wasn’t great because people are kind of down but, if I had a week that’s great, people are in there bouncing around.” (mediabistro.cm)

Harris-Perry has been concerned with issues of race and gender and the intersection at which subjects converge. Harris-Perry has always been acquainted with sophistication and eloquence in expressing heated, controversial topics and maintaining her poise. She is a woman who speaks her mind with honesty and grace. For example, when she appeared on Democracy Now! She articulated herself with refinement:

What's she's trying to do there is to make a claim towards bringing in Black women into a coalition around questions of gender, and asking us to ignore the ways that race and gender intersect...I think that ignores an entire history of White women that have in fact been in the White House. They've been there as an attachment to White male patriarchal power. It's the same way that Hillary Clinton is now making a claim towards experience. It's not her experience. It's her experience married to, connected to, climbing up on male patriarchy. These are exactly the ways in which this system actually silences questions of gender that are more complicated than simply putting White women in positions of power, and then claiming that women's issues are cared for.

Harris-Perry has brought focus on intersectionality, the pressing need for multi-vocality and law, politics and society as well as the necessity of problematizing categories and essentialist knowledge.