The Sisters Are Alright: Changing the Broken Narrative of Black Women in America

GOLD MEDALIST OF FOREWORD REVIEWS’ 2015 INDIEFAB AWARDS IN WOMEN’S STUDIES

What’s wrong with black women? Not a damned thing!

The Sisters Are Alright exposes anti–black-woman propaganda and shows how real black women are pushing back against distorted cartoon versions of themselves.

When African women arrived on American shores, the three-headed hydra—servile Mammy, angry Sapphire, and lascivious Jezebel—followed close behind. In the ’60s, the Matriarch, the willfully unmarried baby machine leeching off the state, joined them. These stereotypes persist to this day through newspaper headlines, Sunday sermons, social media memes, cable punditry, government policies, and hit song lyrics. Emancipation may have happened more than 150 years ago, but America still won’t let a sister be free from this coven of caricatures.

Tamara Winfrey Harris delves into marriage, motherhood, health, sexuality, beauty, and more, taking sharp aim at pervasive stereotypes about black women. She counters warped prejudices with the straight-up truth about being a black woman in America. “We have facets like diamonds,” she writes. “The trouble is the people who refuse to see us sparkling.”

Tamara Winfrey Harris is a writer whose work has appeared in The New York Times, the Chicago Sun-Times, In These Times, and Ms. and Bitch magazines and online at the American Prospect, Salon, the Guardian, Newsweek/Daily Beast, xoJane, the Huffington Post, Psychology Today, Clutch magazine, and Change.org. She has been called to address women's issues in major media outlets, such as NPR's Weekend Edition.