"Maid in Manhattan" as "progressive text"

It was commented upon in class, I believe, that "Maid in Manhattan" centers Jennifer Lopez at the expense of abjecting other, darker-skinned characters, as though to apologize for putting her in the center to begin with by highlighting her relative "lightness" in contrast to the darker-skinned characters in her orbit.  

Rita Felski however, albeit writing on the novel, gives us a means of potentially giving a text some credit for this move, instead of reflexively indicting it.  She writes: "Rendered as social allegories or assumed unworthy of scrutiny, entire categories of persons--servants, those of non-Western origin, the working class--were long relegated to the status of minor characters in fiction.... In an ingenious argument, however, Alex Woloch proposes that this patent unevenness of novelistic attention, the disproportionate space allotted to major and minor characters, does not blindly acquiesce to prevailing prejudice, but exposes and comments on it.  The effacement or the asymmetrical treatment of persons in fiction, their routine rendering as flat or one-dimensional types, is a means by which the novel registers and reflects on the pervasiveness of social hierarchies" (Rita Felski, "Uses of Literature," Malden: Blackwell Publishing, 2008, p. 93).  

While one might indict "Maid in Manhattan" of tokenism, then, one might also view it as a decided improvement upon "Steel Magnolias," in which race is altogether effaced, given no visibility whatsoever.