As recent elections have confirmed, Black women continue to be the most uniformly loyal group to the Democratic party. Black women were imperative to ensuring Joe Biden’s victory in 2020, and thus far, many of his most groundbreaking accomplishments have been the appointment of Black women to various political roles, most notably the vice presidency and the Supreme Court. At the same time, Black women have continued to run for elected office throughout the country. Despite this, Black women “remain an underappreciated group in American politics.” (p. 2) Though remarkably consistent in their voting patterns and party affiliation, the politics of Black women candidates and voters are as diverse as any other group, a reality that oftentimes is not reflected in the political science literature. For example, while Stacey Abrams and Kamala Harris are both highly influential Black women, their physical presentation and appearance undoubtedly have important consequences for how they are evaluated as political candidates—all Black female bodies are not interpreted similarly.
In their book Sister Style, political scientists Nadia Brown and Danielle Lemi offer a nuanced and theoretically innovative analysis focusing on the consequences and meaning of the quotidian politicization of Black women’s bodies. How does Black women’s physical presentation shape political outcomes? How do Black women politicians make sense of the politics of appearance, and how do they make decisions about fashion and beauty? How do voters process the appearance of these candidates? The authors effectively demonstrate using a combination of qualitative and quantitative evidence that Black women’s appearance is a critical, yet understudied, aspect of their political performance and that Black candidates and voters are both highly cognizant of the implications of their aesthetic choices.
Broadly, Brown and Lemi’s argument rests on the idea that “Black women candidates face unique pulls and pushes in presenting an acceptable image in the eyes of voters.” (p. 7) The research is grounded in Black feminist theory that calls our attention to the specific context Black female bodies exist within—by situating the book within the literature on candidate evaluation and the politics of body, hair, and skin tone, the authors establish how crucial it is to assess Black female politicians as their own group, rather than in comparison to other groups. By employing a multi-method approach and effectively combining aspects of positivism and interpretivism, Brown and Lemi, in their words, “produce research that distinctly recognizes that social processes are entirely culturally, spatially, and historically specific.” (p. 13)
Central to the authors’ primary claim is the assertion that Black women should be afforded the ability to shape their own narratives. This assertion is best encompassed by an excellent Audre Lorde quote included at the beginning of the book, which reads “If I didn’t define myself for myself, I would be crunched into other people’s fantasies for me and eaten alive.” (p. 1) In the early chapters, they utilize interpretivist methods to understand how Black women’s appearances are subjectively constructed and understood. They combine a rich historical account of the development of the politics of Black women’s appearance, one-on-one interviews with elites, and several focus groups with elected officials and voters. In the second half of the book, they shift to a more positivist framework, using methods more traditionally invoked in the political science literature, including several survey experiments, to establish explanations and causal accounts for the insights uncovered in the first half of the book.
This book achieves its stated theoretical and methodological goals, and the authors are particularly strong in their usage of intersectionality theory. As they remind readers throughout the text, not all Black women are treated in the same way—utilizing an intersectional framework of analysis, they “argue that dominant, Eurocentric, beauty standards influence the electoral changes of Black women in varied and distinct ways.” (p. 16) One consistent finding in both the qualitative and quantitative data they offer is that lighter skin and straight hair are typically preferable for candidates and voters. They also note important generational differences between older Black women candidates and voters and younger ones. Though many of these findings won’t be a surprise to anyone who is familiar with the politics of respectability and colorism in the Black community, ultimately, this project underscores the need for intersectional, nuanced analyses of the politics of marginalized groups.
As Brown and Lemi note, they are attempting to further develop the methods scholars might employ when undergoing an intersectional analysis by focusing on intragroup diversity. Treating Black women as a monolith obscures revealing and pivotal distinctions regarding the ways in which Blackness and specifically Black femininity are constructed, performed, and interpreted. This book provides vital insight into the ways in which Black communities are making sense of and claiming a sense of agency over their politics. The investment in respectability politics (p. 73) is analyzed deftly and should spur further research into the reinforcement of these dynamics in Black communities. Their findings are highly relevant to discussions of electoral politics—for example, one of the insights offered by the experiments offers a potential reason for why the gender gap among Black voters (p. 170). Admittedly, the quantitative sections aren’t as compelling as the insights generated by the interviews and focus groups, but they will be especially useful to political scientists and other scholars concerned with utilizing quantitative methods to understand the politics of intragroup diversity.
Ultimately, this book should prove useful not only to scholars of race and ethnic politics but also to political scientists and researchers across disciplines concerned with answering questions around representation, the politics of appearance, and voter preferences. Fundamentally, the authors demonstrate a concrete method to aid in filling the vast gaps in Black politics research that political scientists have largely ignored. As Brown and Lemi explain, “because the dominant discourse on Black women in American politics is based on the perceptions of outsides, Black women have, in Lorde’s words, been ‘eaten alive’ in the political science literature.” (p. 17) Scholars, journalists, and political consultants alike should find this text to be an invaluable resource in shaping their work on Black women.
