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The crooked room
Oct. 29th, 2024 10:29 amI didn’t know if I was going to make this week’s book club because I left the reading to the last minute, but I did in fact read Melissa V. Harris-Perry’s Sister Citizen: Shame, Stereotypes, and Black Women in America.
The first thing that struck me about this book is that it was written in 2011 and, while the stereotypes she dissects are still around, the current/recent events she uses as case studies are much less current and recent. The last section of the book is about Michelle Obama’s public image, which was a bit of a trip down memory lane, since it’s been a few years since Michelle Obama was omnipresent in public life. It’s also striking at times how clear it is that this book was written and published shortly before the first Black Lives Matter wave; it would be impossible to write this book now without ever mentioning BLM. Other sections feel a bit less dated just because their impact seems more lasting; I don’t think about Hurricane Katrina every day but it was a really big deal and the fact that there have been other hugely devastating hurricanes since then (most notably Hurricane Helene earlier this month) makes it more important, not less, to properly analyze all the aspects of Katrina and its aftermath.
Another thing I really liked about this book is its total avoidance of polemic, zippy overstatement, or One-Weird-Trick-ery. Harris-Perry is very up front about the limitations of her research and addresses critiques about overfocus on feelings/vibes/personal psychology over materialist politics. She defends her subject both by arguing for the place of understanding people’s perceptions in political action and by matter-of-factly acknowledging that this is one book on one aspect of politics and there are other books on the other aspects of politics that are important. It’s a refreshing change from a lot of current events writing, which seems to always have to frame itself as THE book with THE answer on THE key factor to solving THE problem, and I think that is almost never true, honestly.
Structurally the book had a bit of a grab-bag nature to its case studies that some folks in book club said made it feel a little disjointed, and I think this is probably true, but the individual sections were all pretty interesting. The book walks us through the three main stereotypes about black women imposed by white society–the Jezebel, the Mammy, and the angry black woman–and also looks at the idea of the “strong black woman” and its function in both empowering and limiting both black women’s self-images and the way they relate to political action and expectation.
While the expectation of strength was probably the most analytically interesting of the stereotypes examined, the one I found myself having the strongest reaction to was the “Mammy,” partly because I was less familiar with it and partly due to the inclusion of some really fucked up tidbits like the campaign to put a national Mammy monument on the Mall in Washington DC, or the photograph of a truly hideous kitschy restaurant called Mammy’s wherein the restaurant bit is inside a big hoop skirt, like the cake part of one of those Barbie cakes that used to be a thing. It’s really ugly and weird. I promise there’s a whole lot of actual analysis of the Mammy stereotype and how it affects black women but those two little tidbits were just so starkly gross and weird.
Overall I found the book illuminating and we had a pretty good conversation about it, even if we did end up getting off-track several times.
The first thing that struck me about this book is that it was written in 2011 and, while the stereotypes she dissects are still around, the current/recent events she uses as case studies are much less current and recent. The last section of the book is about Michelle Obama’s public image, which was a bit of a trip down memory lane, since it’s been a few years since Michelle Obama was omnipresent in public life. It’s also striking at times how clear it is that this book was written and published shortly before the first Black Lives Matter wave; it would be impossible to write this book now without ever mentioning BLM. Other sections feel a bit less dated just because their impact seems more lasting; I don’t think about Hurricane Katrina every day but it was a really big deal and the fact that there have been other hugely devastating hurricanes since then (most notably Hurricane Helene earlier this month) makes it more important, not less, to properly analyze all the aspects of Katrina and its aftermath.
Another thing I really liked about this book is its total avoidance of polemic, zippy overstatement, or One-Weird-Trick-ery. Harris-Perry is very up front about the limitations of her research and addresses critiques about overfocus on feelings/vibes/personal psychology over materialist politics. She defends her subject both by arguing for the place of understanding people’s perceptions in political action and by matter-of-factly acknowledging that this is one book on one aspect of politics and there are other books on the other aspects of politics that are important. It’s a refreshing change from a lot of current events writing, which seems to always have to frame itself as THE book with THE answer on THE key factor to solving THE problem, and I think that is almost never true, honestly.
Structurally the book had a bit of a grab-bag nature to its case studies that some folks in book club said made it feel a little disjointed, and I think this is probably true, but the individual sections were all pretty interesting. The book walks us through the three main stereotypes about black women imposed by white society–the Jezebel, the Mammy, and the angry black woman–and also looks at the idea of the “strong black woman” and its function in both empowering and limiting both black women’s self-images and the way they relate to political action and expectation.
While the expectation of strength was probably the most analytically interesting of the stereotypes examined, the one I found myself having the strongest reaction to was the “Mammy,” partly because I was less familiar with it and partly due to the inclusion of some really fucked up tidbits like the campaign to put a national Mammy monument on the Mall in Washington DC, or the photograph of a truly hideous kitschy restaurant called Mammy’s wherein the restaurant bit is inside a big hoop skirt, like the cake part of one of those Barbie cakes that used to be a thing. It’s really ugly and weird. I promise there’s a whole lot of actual analysis of the Mammy stereotype and how it affects black women but those two little tidbits were just so starkly gross and weird.
Overall I found the book illuminating and we had a pretty good conversation about it, even if we did end up getting off-track several times.