Week 1: What is ya girl reading about now?

Hello darling,

For week 1, I will share how and what positions Black women as the opposite to White women according to The Sisters Are Alright: Changing the Broken Narrative of Black Women in America written by Tamara Winfrey Harris.

Opposite #1: Mammy

“Mammy is the obedient, loyal domestic who loves most to serve her white family. Unfailingly maternal, she has no personal desires and is not herself desirable; her broad, corpulent body is meant solely for work and the comfort of others. Mammy is asexual, and to underscore this, she is generally depicted as dark skinned and with African features, a headscarf covering what we imagine to be nappy hair-the negative of the pale, fine-featured, light-eyed, and straight- haired whiteness seen as the pinnacle of beauty” (Harris 4)

What does the opposite, Mammy, reveal to us as Black women?

-We are comfortably subservient

-Molding Black women as unattractive dismissed the idea that enslaved Black women could be raped.

-Being bigger and dark skin automatically dismisses you from ever being seen as desirable.

Opposite #2: Sapphire

“Sapphire doesn’t know a woman’s (submissive) place and is therefore emasculating and repellent to men. Not so 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. “ (Harris 5)

What does the opposite, Sapphire, reveal to us as Black women?

-Black women are incapable of being pure in a society that defends innocent women

-Masculinized Black women by making us seem like we have an overbearing sexual hunger that is more associated with men.

-The Angry Black Woman

-Black women are emasculating men by being overbearing or angry.

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