Tamara Frey | Akateeminen Kirjakauppa

Not a damned thing but the biased lens most people use to view them, says Tamara Winfrey Harris.

When African women arrived on American shores, the three-headed hydra of asexual and servile Mammy, angry and bestial Sapphire, and oversexed and lascivious Jezebel followed close behind. In the ’60s, the Matriarch, the willfully unmarried baby machine leeching off the state, joined them. These caricatures persist - even in the “enlightened” 21st century - through newspaper headlines, Sunday sermons, social media memes, cable punditry, government policies, and Top 40 lyrics.

The Sisters Are Alright delves into areas such as marriage, motherhood, health, sexuality, beauty, and more. And using progressive author analysis brought to life by the stories of real women, it reveals the effects of anti–black woman propaganda and how real black women are living their lives and pushing back against distorted cartoon versions of themselves.

The book takes sharp aim at pervasive stereotypes about black women, replacing warped prejudices with the straight-up truth - the complicated but far-from-hopeless reality of being a black woman in America.

“We have facets like diamonds,” Winfrey Harris writes. “The trouble is the people who refuse to see us sparkling.”