SISTER CITIZEN: SHAME STEREOTYPES AND BLACK WOMEN IN AMERICA

By Melissa Harris-Lacewell (you’re brilliant. marry me)

http://yalepress.yale.edu/book.asp?isbn=9780300165418

(I’ve found the love of my life)

I USED TO ADMIRE AND LIKE YOU. I’VE FALLEN FUCKING HEAD OVER HEELS AFTER THIS VIDEO. Melissa Harris-Lacewell speaks about her new book on the politics of “shame” as a discarded side in the celebration of “pride”. She delves into three ( and then adds one forth one) general stereotypes of black women and their relationship to citizenship as seen through the American notion of “good” vs. “bad” subjectivity, “successful” vs. “failed” bodies.  Her work shades light on the racialized and gendered politics of “american” subjectivity in a political time where the GOP is urging the nation to hold “our founding (slave-holding-white-males) fathers” as the foci and “guiding light” of “our” nation. 

if the monument, the one monument we thought of building for african american women is a monument to “mammy” it gives us some clue about what the citizenship ideal is for african american women. The notion of what would constitute something that the larger community would value would place and say, this will make you a great american: it would make you a great american if you behave as “mammy” did. Which means that you brought your magical capacity to fix all problems despite the fact that you have very few resources of your own, in fact, in the case of “mammy”, not even your own freedom, not even the ability to control the lives of your own children and offspring, not even the ability to earn wages for your labor. You have nothing and yet you have the ability to produce wonderful food!.. a clean home!.. lots of advice!.. and to do so with a kind of fidelity to the white, domestic sphere that is worthy of the kind of value that is represented in a federal statue.