The Sisters Are Alright Quotes

“Black women’s stories look a lot different from what you’ve heard. And when black women speak for themselves, the picture presented is nuanced, empowering, and hopeful.”
― Tamara Winfrey Harris, The Sisters Are Alright: Changing the Broken Narrative of Black Women in America

“The world will tell you who you are, until you tell the world who you are.”
― Tamara Winfrey Harris, The Sisters Are Alright: Changing the Broken Narrative of Black Women in America

“No one can define black women but black women.”
― Tamara Winfrey Harris, The Sisters Are Alright: Changing the Broken Narrative of Black Women in America

“Society remains uneasy with female strength of any stripe and still prefers and champions delicate damsels—an outdated sentiment that limits all women. But because the damsel’s face is still viewed as unequivocally white and female, it is a particular problem for black women. As long as vulnerability and softness are the basis for acceptable femininity (and acceptable femininity is a requirement for a woman’s life to have value), women who are perpetually framed because of their race as supernaturally indestructible will not be viewed with regard. This may be why we so rarely see the black women who are victims of violence on true-crime television, despite the fact that black women are more likely to be victims of sexual violence and domestic homicidal violence.”
― Tamara Winfrey Harris, The Sisters Are Alright: Changing the Broken Narrative of Black Women in America

“The negative focus on single black motherhood is also not about helping black communities. If it were, those who rail against unmarried mothers would spend at least equal time calling for affordable family planning and reproductive health care, universal access to good child care, improved urban school systems, a higher minimum wage, and college education that doesn't break the banks of average people. And they would admit that the welfare-queen image is a distortion and a distraction.”
― Tamara Winfrey Harris, The Sisters Are Alright: Changing the Broken Narrative of Black Women in America

“In 2008 and 2012, black women led the United States in voter turnout. They”
― Tamara Winfrey Harris, The Sisters Are Alright: Changing the Broken Narrative of Black Women in America

“Some would argue that aggressive displays of sexuality by black female performers such as Nicki Minaj and Beyonce are empowering precisely because of historical perceptions of female sexuality and black women's sexuality in America. The idea that women cannot be overt about their sexuality is rooted in sexist notions of female purity. The idea that black women must prove their worth and disprove centuries of propaganda against their sexuality is buying into racism and sexism and making the oppressed responsible for adapting to oppression - instead of demanding that society stop treating women's sexual desires differently from those of men.”
― Tamara Winfrey Harris, The Sisters Are Alright: Changing the Broken Narrative of Black Women in America

“I never cared about being married. I care about being married to John. I”
― Tamara Winfrey Harris, The Sisters Are Alright: Changing the Broken Narrative of Black Women in America

“I would love to see more women feel free to think beyond this sense of sex as obligation or a chore or something we give away or something we do to keep men, but”
― Tamara Winfrey Harris, The Sisters Are Alright: Changing the Broken Narrative of Black Women in America

“It means that black women are neither innately damaged nor fundamentally flawed. They”
― Tamara Winfrey Harris, The Sisters Are Alright: Changing the Broken Narrative of Black Women in America

“Alright” does not mean possessing a life without hardship—being”
― Tamara Winfrey Harris, The Sisters Are Alright: Changing the Broken Narrative of Black Women in America

“Most children in single-parent families grow up just fine, and it is still unclear how much of the disadvantages to children are caused by poverty or family structure or whether marriage itself makes the difference or the type of people who commonly marry. Demonizing single Black motherhood does not improve the lives of children. On the contrary, the idea that 70 percent of Black boys and girls are congenitally damaged stigmatizes them.”
― Tamara Winfrey Harris, The Sisters Are Alright: Changing the Broken Narrative of Black Women in America

“Black women are not the inheritors of the cult of true womanhood’s picture of wifely domesticity. For them, the fight has not been to prove that they can be something other than mothers as much as it has been to have the myriad ways they mother recognized and cherished in a society whose family values rarely include them and those they love.”
― Tamara Winfrey Harris, The Sisters Are Alright: Changing the Broken Narrative of Black Women in America

“The freak-out over low Black marriage rates is connected to fears about the disappearance of Black families. And women, more so than men, are conditioned to be the keepers of family and culture. Black women viewed to be abdicating that responsibility are thought to be selling out in a way that men (who, when they date outside the race, get their own share of grief) are not. Hooking up with “the (White) man” is viewed as dancing with the Devil. And loving a non-Black man of color is reduced to perversion or fetish.”
― Tamara Winfrey Harris, The Sisters Are Alright: Changing the Broken Narrative of Black Women in America

“The final straw came when she finally unburdened herself to her mother, who had survived an abusive marriage to Carolyn’s father. “She said, ‘That sounds just like my marriage.’ That’s the day I knew I had to leave, because I could see years down the line, my daughter calling me crying about her marriage and me saying the same thing. I had to get out.”
― Tamara Winfrey Harris, The Sisters Are Alright: Changing the Broken Narrative of Black Women in America

“Reprimanding women for, as Harvey says, “being the masters of ‘handling it,’” robs us of our accomplishments while convincing vulnerable men that their manhood is dependent on the weakness of women.13 This is particularly damaging in the Black community, which faces an even broader achievement gap between men and women than do other races. (For instance, women make up 66 percent of African Americans completing bachelor’s degrees and 71 percent of those completing master’s degrees.) Forcing Black women to justify their success to partners, who should be their biggest cheerleaders, is a troubling message for both Black women and men.”
― Tamara Winfrey Harris, The Sisters Are Alright: Changing the Broken Narrative of Black Women in America

“If madness is the mark of female singleness, the delirium is spreading. The percentage of married women across all races is decreasing.6 Despite this shift, society’s views on women and marriage have hardly changed since the Irish essayist George Bernard Shaw wrote, at the start of the twentieth century: “It is a woman’s business to get married as soon as possible, and a man’s to keep unmarried as long as possible.”7 Singleness and its associated freedoms are viewed as a man’s game. And a woman without a wedding band, or at the very least an adoring male partner to signal her worthiness, is to be viewed as warily as a steak without a USDA stamp—something must be rotten there.”
― Tamara Winfrey Harris, The Sisters Are Alright: Changing the Broken Narrative of Black Women in America

“Society has always been willing to be titillated by women. It has not historically valued women who titillate. This has not changed.”
― Tamara Winfrey Harris, The Sisters Are Alright: Changing the Broken Narrative of Black Women in America

“The challenge was that many would-be naturals found little support in traditional places for beauty advice, including beauty magazines (even ones catering to Black women) and professional stylists. Often, even mothers and grandmothers were of no help; the hair care that many Black women learned from their fore-mothers was solely focused on “fixing” or “taming” natural hair, not on celebrating its innate qualities. Many Black women had not seen or managed their natural texture in decades. Black beauty magazines such as Essence continued to mostly feature models with straightened hair. And, until the recent renaissance, education for beauticians included little to no training about the care of natural Black hair. Stylists were tested only on their ability to handle straightened Black tresses.33”
― Tamara Winfrey Harris, The Sisters Are Alright: Changing the Broken Narrative of Black Women in America

“Hair has been a lightning rod for enforcement of White standards of beauty. And reactions to Black women’s natural hair help illustrate the broader disdain for Black appearance. While Black hair can have a variety of textures, most tends to be curly, coily, or nappy. It grows out and up and not down. It may not shine. It may be cottony or wiry. It is likely more easily styled in an Afro puff than a smooth chignon. For centuries, Black women have been told that these qualities make their hair unsightly, unprofessional, and uniquely difficult to manage.”
― Tamara Winfrey Harris, The Sisters Are Alright: Changing the Broken Narrative of Black Women in America

“In 1784, Thomas Jefferson praised the skin color, “flowing hair,” and “elegant symmetry of form” possessed by White people, writing that Black men prefer the comeliness of White women “as uniformly as is the preference of the [orangutan] for the Black women over those of his own species.”
― Tamara Winfrey Harris, The Sisters Are Alright: Changing the Broken Narrative of Black Women in America

“If beauty and womanhood are symbiotic, that a $50 billion cosmetic industry has historically ignored Black women is surely illustrative of who big brands believe get to be beautiful and get to be women.”
― Tamara Winfrey Harris, The Sisters Are Alright: Changing the Broken Narrative of Black Women in America

“What Black women really need is for the world, including many people who claim to love them, to recognize that they cannot be summed up so easily.”
― Tamara Winfrey Harris, The Sisters Are Alright: Changing the Broken Narrative of Black Women in America

“tsk-tsking Black women never made a sick body well or a neighborhood safer, improved a school system, fed and clothed a baby, or built a happy Black family.”
― Tamara Winfrey Harris, The Sisters Are Alright: Changing the Broken Narrative of Black Women in America

“Black women know better than anyone that as a group they face significant challenges. As individuals, many Black women are struggling. More than a quarter of African American women are poor, making them twice as likely as White women to be living in poverty.47 Black women suffer from high rates of heart disease, high blood pressure, and diabetes.48 In a society that benefits married people, they are half as likely to marry as their White counterparts.49 About 30 percent of Black women are victimized by intimate partner violence in their lifetimes.50 They are, as a whole, overworked and underpaid, earning a fraction of what White and Black men do for the same work.”
― Tamara Winfrey Harris, The Sisters Are Alright: Changing the Broken Narrative of Black Women in America

“The media, pop-culture critics, and brainwashed members of the Black community may think Black women are problems. In truth, African American women are seen as troubling because of the reductive way they have been viewed for hundreds of years. But Black women are not waiting to be fixed; they are fighting to be free—free to define themselves absent narratives driven by race and gender biases.”
― Tamara Winfrey Harris, The Sisters Are Alright: Changing the Broken Narrative of Black Women in America

“Erasing yourself is no good way to be seen.”
― Tamara Winfrey Harris, The Sisters Are Alright: Changing the Broken Narrative of Black Women in America

“The Matriarch—the negative of the pleasantly nurturing Mammy—is a motherly figure who has overstepped her place and become the head of a Black family. By her failure to perform her womanly domestic duty of being subordinate to a man, we are to understand that she upsets the stability of the family, her community, and the fabric of America, leading to crime, poverty, confusion of gender roles, and moral decay.36 In that her dominance renders her unfeminine, the Matriarch has much in common with Sapphire, and her alleged unchecked baby-making recalls Jezebel.”
― Tamara Winfrey Harris, The Sisters Are Alright: Changing the Broken Narrative of Black Women in America

“Jezebel, the embodiment of deviant Black female sexuality. During slavery, Black women were positioned as seductive and wanton to vindicate the naked probing of the auction block and routine sexual victimization and also to justify the use of Black women to breed new human property.32 The stereotype positioned Black women as incapable of chastity in a society that demanded the innocence of women. And it further masculinized them, ascribing an unlady like sexual hunger more typical of men.”
― Tamara Winfrey Harris, The Sisters Are Alright: Changing the Broken Narrative of Black Women in America

“In the mid-twentieth century, the image of the masculinized Black woman found an identity in the form of “Sapphire,” a character in the Amos ’n’ Andy radio and television shows. By then, the stereotype had evolved into a rancorous nag—the stock angry Black woman.31 Sapphire doesn’t know a woman’s (submissive) place and is therefore emasculating and repellent to men.”
― Tamara Winfrey Harris, The Sisters Are Alright: Changing the Broken Narrative of Black Women in America