Sister Citizen

In Sister Citizen: Shame, Stereotypes, and Black Women in America (2011), American professor, political theorist, and Afro-feminist scholar Melissa V. Harris-Perry examines what it means to be both black and female in the contemporary United States: a particularly fraught and marginalized crossroads of identification. Harris-Perry contextualizes the problems and possibilities of black feminine identity in current political movements, particularly, in movements to break down racist or otherwise reductive conceptions of black culture. Harris-Perry contends that the construct of race informs black American women’s conception of the self as citizen and community figure, which in turn affects their orientation to virtually all aspects of life, including art and media, climate change, politics, and public discourse. Harris-Perry criticizes certain entrenched norms and patterns that marginalize and oppress black women’s impulses to claim, or organize in support of, their natural liberties and gifts. She spends particular energy on the evolving division between white and black people. Sister Citizen has been acclaimed for being a comprehensive analysis of the state of contemporary racial discourse, and a compelling, progressive rebuke of the status quo.

Harris-Perry begins by making explicit the notion that the boundaries of politics are not equivalent to the boundaries of normative political ideologies or the boundaries delineated in the legal world. Instead, politics always consists of humanity’s search for identity, belonging, and place. Often, it makes progress toward these distant ideals by securing the passage of laws that enshrine improved rights and liberties for previously marginalized groups. Harris-Perry argues that the everyday struggles of black women cannot be strictly categorized with the struggles braved by all Americans. Rather, they are tightly entangled in racial and sexual politics.



Harris-Perry elucidates an interpretation of field dependency, a sociological concept based on research on human cognition. She cites an interesting study on visual perception called “The Crooked Room.” In the study, each subject was instructed to enter a room consisting of a chair and walls built at non-orthogonal angles. The subject was then asked to modify their sitting position until they felt their body was positioned orthogonally with respect to the room. Some subjects successfully restored their orientation to that which they would conform to outside the crooked room. The psychologists called this ability “field independence.” Others, however, exhibited “field dependency,” and would contort their bodies at extreme angles to accommodate what they perceived in their immediate environment. Harris-Perry analogizes from this study into the social domain, arguing that marginalized people, including the black women who are her subjects of focus, live in a kind of “crooked room” by default, deprived of the same legal liberties and other socioeconomic affordances as white males. Unable to rationalize their condition in a healthy way, they internalize the crooked room and feel shame.

Harris-Perry proceeds to break down three powerful racist archetypes which she believes regulate the contemporary conception of the black female subject. The first is the “Mammy,” which stems from an earlier era of American white supremacy in which caring, usually ugly, wise, domestic workers were valued as social figures in the white household. The Mammy generally is abject, caring for the lives of white people over her own. Harris-Perry argues that the Mammy is an enduring archetype because it perpetuates a fictional humanization of a warm and happily oppressed black womanhood. The second archetype is the Jezebel, the Black mother who uses strategies drawn from wartime to achieve her ends. The Jezebel is perceived as impulsive, likely to bear an unsustainable number of children on purpose, and bent on manipulating social systems in self-interest. Harris-Perry argues that this stereotype helps white people rationalize the systemic oppression of black women using policy. The third archetype is the Sapphire, or “angry black woman.” Defined by insatiable hostility, loudness, and masculinity, the Sapphire is used to squelch black voices that would fear being labeled irrational or crazy. Harris-Perry outlines a fourth, more positive, newly emerging archetype: that of the “strong black woman,” who is staunchly independent and strives to form an identity in opposition to any norms. She criticizes this also, stating that it minimizes the importance of the innate human needs for cooperation and compassion.

Harris-Perry concludes, stating that in a racist world, all aspects of personhood must be tied back to race in any useful theoretical framework. She laments the fact that the independent thoughts of black women are automatically construed as speaking not from the individual, but from a black persona. For these reasons and more, Harris-Perry’s critique expresses no grand formula to correct the objects of her criticism; rather, it exposes the tools that are currently working to oppress black womanhood, so that her audience might know and defeat them.