Book Review: Sister Citizen by Melissa Harris-Perry

In Sister Citizen, Melissa Harris-Perry seeks to define the citizenship of black women by correcting the misrecognition that black women face in America. Black women are political in that they always have to deal with negative assumptions about their character.  Black women’s politics involve exploring their unspoken experiences in their search for identity. In finding their true source of identity, black women must wrestle with negative societal stereotypes about their identity as well as continue to create who they are.  In the first few chapters of the text Harris-Perry presents a The Bridge Poem by Kate Rushin, and the concepts of “The Crooked Room” and myths of Black women. The Bridge Poem seeks to describe the great lengths that black women take to bridge communications between other people in their lives. At the end of the day black women are often so exhausted that they have no time left for themselves and no sense of self. Black women are then heaped with responsibilities that create a notion of strength and superpower among black women. Black women then feel a sense of shame in themselves when they are unable to life up to the impossible expectations of society and everyone in their lives. The text then seeks so find recognition of real and actual lives of black women by defining the intentional misrecognition of them. The text brings up both the many issues black women face in real life and literature as well as a way to change the way society looks at black women as a whole.

I suggest this book as a must read for all people seeking to understand the issues black women face in america. Its is as if they are attempting to stand up straight in a crooked room and that room is the stereotypes that are placed upon them.