Book Review: Sister Citizen: Shame, Stereotypes, And Black Women In America

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by Melissa V. Harris-Perry

Publication Date:
List Price: $28.00
Format: Hardcover, 392 pages
Classification: Nonfiction
ISBN13: 9780300165418
Imprint: Yale University Press
Publisher: Yale University Press
Parent Company: Yale University
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Read a Description of Sister Citizen: Shame, Stereotypes, And Black Women In America

Book Reviewed by Kam Williams

"This book is concerned with understanding the emotional realities of black women's lives in order to answer a political, not a personal, question: What does it mean to be a black woman and an American citizen?




The selfless Mammy's behavior is marked by a slavish devotion to white folks' domestic concerns, often at the expense of those of her own family's needs. By contrast, the relatively-hedonistic Jezebel is a sexually-insatiable temptress. And the Matriarch is generally thought of as an emasculating figure who denigrates black men, ala the characters Sapphire and Aunt Esther on the television shows Amos and Andy and Sanford and Son, respectively.

Professor Perry points out how the propagation of these harmful myths hastemp served the mainstream culture well. For instance, the Mammy suggests that it is almost second nature for black females to feel a maternal instinct towards Caucasian babies.


Sadly, that notion has persisted to this day, which is why so many African-American women's rape allegations aren't taken seriously, like that of the NYC hotel maid who recently leveled just such a claim against a well-connected guest from France. Despite the existence of DNA evidence, the charges were dropped, thereby leaving the accuser shamed by the insinuation that the contact must have been consensual.

The author might argue that the stigma of the black female as loose played a role in the case's disposition without even a trial. For as she points out here ever so succinctly, "White men's right of access to black women's bodies was an assumption supported both by their history as legal property and by the myth of their sexual promiscuity," and "Emancipation did not end the social and political usefulness of this stereotype."


Read Yale University Press’s description of Sister Citizen: Shame, Stereotypes, And Black Women In America.