The Sisters Are Alright

Everyone seems to have an opinion about American black women-they need to get married, change their hair, act like "ladies," and so on. Celebrated writer Tamara Winfrey Harris writes a searing account of being a black woman in America and explains why it's time for black women to speak for themselves. It is hard to name a group more caricatured, "othered," publicly dissected, and persistently defined by their challenges than black women. So what is wrong with "us"? Not a damned thing, says Tamara Winfrey Harris. She takes aim at negative propaganda about black women, replacing warped biases with the straight-up truth-the complicated but far from hopeless reality of being a black woman in America. When African American women arrived on American shores, the three-headed hydra of Mammy, Sapphire, and Jezebel followed close behind. Variations of these "controlling images" of black women as asexual and servile, angry and bestial, or oversexed and lascivious obscure the humanity of black women and are at the root of the mythology used to justify their continued oppression. The Sisters Are Alright plumbs the devastating effects of the negative perception of black women in areas such as marriage, career, motherhood, health, sexuality, beauty, and more-including the disorienting psychic impact on women of being constantly confronted with images of themselves they scarcely recognize. But throughout, Winfrey Harris shows how real black women are pushing back against these distorted cartoon versions of themselves and asserting the far more positive-and grossly under unreported-truth of the black female experience.