The New Orleans Tribune

A Book Review: Sister Citizen

Melissa Harris-Perry’s provocative and beautifully researched book begins with the assertion that the internal, psychological, emotional, and personal experiences of Black women are inevitably political. She uses literary and cultural analysis, current events, political theory, focus groups, surveys, and experimental research to explore how African-American women understand themselves and participate (or not) as citizens. The appalling history of the intentional misrecognition of Black women which began during slavery is meticulously documented. These women and girls labored under coercion and the constant threat of physical and sexual violence; and yet the “white supremest imaginations remembered these powerless, coerced slave girls as soothing, comfortable, consenting women.”

Harris-Perry delineates the stereotypes that have arisen in White minds to explain and accommodate slavery, Jim Crow, and current racist structures. These perceptual distortions create a “crooked room,” as in a fun house that isn’t fun, in which Black women struggle to stand up straight. The stereotypes are so familiar that our common culture has given them names. Jezebel’s lascivious sexuality, Mammy’s devotion, and Sapphire’s in-your-face anger often distort the media’s presentation of the news, skew assumptions about social policy, and create obstacles to coalitions for organizing and advocacy. They also play hell with the self-esteem of Black women by instilling shame. “The gaze of the powerful is neither neutral nor benign” because we become who we are as a result of being seen.

Even the coping mechanisms of Black women to navigate the crooked room – the counter myth of the strong Black woman who endures in the face of every obstacle and gives selflessly to her family, her church, and her community – has steep political and personal costs because she’s not supposed to ask for help and she is often overwhelmed. It’s as if she’s damned if she does and damned if she doesn’t try to cope. So she turns to God (and she’s quicker to do that than White women or White or Black men). For her, faith is a resistance strategy. “Black liberation theology asserts a special relationship between God and black people. It asserts that black people will receive from God what they fail to receive from American social and political structures: recognition.”

But the problem is that all churches, Black and White, have a history of gender inequality. So while Black Christianity has resisted racial domination, it has perpetuated sexism and gender inequality, Harris-Perry claims. Again, the author points out the antidote: womanism, the attempt of Black female religious scholars to straighten the crooked room by offering Black women positive visions of themselves as full citizens. Hagar, for example, was the enslaved servant of Sarah, whom God comforted, provided for, and created a survival strategy for her and her child in exile. Predictably in this book, a “yes but” pops up. “To the extent that womanism is also rooted in the imperative of strength, it might lead black women to silence their concerns within the church.”

For me, the book was a tough slog for several reasons. But the insights and understandings made the effort well worthwhile. The first reason is the depressing nature of the content. The subtitle is “Shame, Stereotypes, and Black Women in America.” The chapter on shame offers the most complete definition, etiology, and statistics to back it up that I have ever seen.

The second is that the conclusions Harris-Perry draws, based on an aggregate of specifics, end up as poignant generalizations. I’ll use a generalization to point out why I think these will get most of our backs up. White women like me have been raised to think we are special and that generalizations don’t apply to us. My Black sisters (if I can stretch the fictive kinship) are tired of being generalized about, they tell me, because it happens all the time.

An example that was particularly alarming to me: Black women (in general) see White women (in general) as “passive, stupid, dishonest, arrogant, and privileged.” My immediate reaction was NOT ME! which I then realized would, of course, be the reaction of someone who was stupid, dishonest, and arrogant. My next reaction was “who says?” Harris-Perry has been careful to answer that question with footnotes on practically every other sentence. She even includes many of the tables and statistical analysis from which her research was drawn.

The third reason is the academic vocabulary. The author is, after all, a professor and a social scientist. For instance: “Womanism was the term these black women scholars gave to the work of crafting a fully articulated racialized and gendered theology . . . Womanism lays claim to the intersectional experience of race and gender for women of color.” She refers to the intersection of race and gender so often that I started picturing actual street signs (somewhere near the intersection of Race and Magazine) and wondering if a left turn was permitted. Would any of us rue the course we had pursued? Does the intersection have a speeding camera and, if so, isn’t it participating in White racial profiling just by sitting there with its beady eye out in the Garden District?

But, as I have said, the tough slog was well worth it. How else could Black and White women have enough information to truly appreciate and constructively deal with the misperceptions of themselves and each other? How could we know how profoundly Michelle Obama as Mom-in-Chief “subverts a deep, powerful, and old public discourse on black women as bad mothers”? How could White women fully grasp the horror of the Faustian bargain that they struck long ago to maintain their White skin privilege? I don’t mean to imply that this is not a book for men because it is. As we all struggle to own the mistakes we have made and the misperceptions we have fostered, that much more room will be created for authentic and much needed voices in the public space.

Orissa Arend is the author of Showdown in Desire: The Black Panthers Take a Stand in New Orleans.