Last year, media excitement over the Supreme Court nomination of Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson had as much to do with her physical appearance as it did with the possibility of her becoming the first Black woman to serve on the Supreme Court. Jackson’s Sisterlocks, a natural twisted hair style, unapologetically put Black women’s natural hair in the spotlight. As law professor Wendy Greene noted in an interview, Jackson’s choice affirmed the understanding that a person’s competence and opportunities for career success should not be connected to hair style (e.g., see Clyde McGrady. “What Ketanji Brown Jackson’s Sisterlocks Mean to Black Women,” Washington Post, 2022). That her confirmation hearings would occur only three days after the House passage of federal legislation protecting natural hair textures and styles from discrimination made her physical appearance all that more significant.
The relevance of Justice Jackson’s hairstyle is captured in Sister Style: The Politics of Appearance for Black Women Political Elites by Nadia E. Brown, a leading scholar on Black women political elites, and Danielle Casarez Lemi, whose research on political behavior incorporates innovative methodological and theoretical approaches. Brown and Lemi argue that Black women’s phenotypes are significant because of their interconnectedness to broader discussions on race, identity, and aesthetics.
Research continues to find high levels of political participation for Black women. When explored through intersectional frameworks, there is an understanding that Black women’s political behavior is distinct from that of Black men and White women. However, Black women’s political experiences remain understudied. Brown and Lemi incorporate multiple methodologies that effectively elucidate and move Black women’s political research beyond simple comparisons with other social groups. Sister Style opens a new window for understanding the ways in which Black women elected officials are evaluated by Black voters. It considers how stereotypes, culture, and social norms about appearance shape Black voters’ expectations and political behavior.
Sister Style takes current discussions of Black women’s political behavior further by examining Black women’s bodies in the American public space. Take for instance, the 2006 experience of Cynthia McKinney, a dark-skinned former Georgia Democratic congresswoman who faced racist and sexualized insults from a local white conservative radio personality who said that McKinney’s hairstyle made her look like a “ghetto slut” and “ghetto trash” (Erin Aubry Kaplan, “Going Ghetto,” Los Angeles Times, 2006). Or that of the light-skinned former Republican candidate and Ms. America winner, Ms. Erika Harold, attacked by members of her own party as “being used like a street walker” and “pimped” by “the Democrat Party and RINO Republicans” (Mollie Reilly, “Erika Harold, GOP Candidate, Targeted in Racially Charged Attack by Jim Allen, Illinois GOP Official,” Huffington Post, 2013). Both incidents highlight both the inseparability of Black women politicians’ physicality from how they are evaluated and the historical ideas that continue to be held about Black bodies and positionality in the United States. Although scholars may have an awareness of how race, gender, and heteronormative ideas inform external evaluations of Black women politicians, they often miss important internal perspectives and understandings. Brown and Lemi’s research turns the lens inward by explaining key experiences and ideas that inform Black opinions and behavior.
Throughout Sister Style, Brown and Lemi explore how Black women’s lives are intimately connected to their communities. This is seen especially in the chapter examining the Creating a Respectful and Open World for Natural Hair Act, also known as the CROWN Act. Introduced in state and local governments around the nation, this legislation has created protections for natural hair and natural hair styles. Although legislators from all backgrounds have signed on in support of the measure, it has been a Black women’s legislative effort. In interviews, Black women politicians, like State Senator Sandra B. Cunningham and Assemblywoman Angela V. McKnight (NJ), point out that their support of the legislation was as much connected to their constituents and the experiences of young men like Andrew Johnson, who was forced to cut his locks to participate in a high school wrestling match, as it was to their own natural hair struggles. The interviews provide powerful insight into how the politics of beauty factor into how Black women political elites present themselves.
The use of interviews centers Black women’s voices and knowledge, which are often missed in research on women in politics. This qualitative approach enables Brown and Lemi to highlight the unique Black female consciousness and the ways in which Black women use their intersectional experiences and awareness to interpret how appearance functions in the political space and to explore how best to navigate that terrain. We gain insight on why style may not always seem political for some, but for others it may represent a negotiation based on considerations of practicality, regional politics, autonomy, and voter preferences. In addition to interviews, focus group discussions reveal that Black women are not monolithic voters. Black women’s preferences are shaped by factors from policy matters to ideas informed by respectability politics and generational differences. In my view, among the most powerful observations were those of the younger focus group participants who felt that Black women candidates and elected officials who challenged expected norms were more likely to open doors of acceptance for others.
Brown and Lemi also review studies suggesting that Black women with more Eurocentric features are more likely to experience political success. To explore this idea and test several hypotheses, they created and analyzed a unique dataset for Black women candidates. They also incorporated online experiments with Black male and female respondents to assess how voter perspectives about Black women candidates on a variety of factors including ideology, preferences, organizational affiliations, and legislative relationships are influenced by their phenotypes. Although the authors noted several limitations of such experiments, they yielded provocative findings about the political behavior of Black voters and electoral outcomes for Black women candidates that merit further investigation.
Jewel Lamar Prestage, the first Black woman to receive a doctorate in political science, challenged us to examine the political lives and contributions of Black women in traditional and nontraditional spaces (“In Quest of African American Political Woman,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 515, 1991). We are still seeking to understand the depth and breadth of Black women’s political experiences. The growing body of scholarship by Black women political scientists provides new ways of examining Black women’s political experiences, their impact, and the environments in which they operate (e.g., see Nikol G. Alexander-Floyd and Tiffany Willoughby-Herard, “Introduction: Nobody Can Tell It All: Symposium on How Researching Black Women in Politics Changes Political Science: Methodologies, Epistemologies, and Publishing,” National Political Science Review 17 [1], 2015). Sister Style builds on the existing body of scholarship on the political socialization and political behavior of Black women political elites. Crucial to this research are the voices of Black women political elites.
Yet, what can we learn about the relationship between the multidimensional nature of the Black experience and the identities and commitments of Black women political actors who are outside the economic, social, and elected political parameters centered in Sister Style? More research is needed to understand these voices as well. This book starts an important conversation by highlighting the theoretical, methodological, and ethical value of Black women’s voices in political science research. Ultimately, Sister Style requires us to reflect on the institutional, cultural, social, economic, and political makeup required for all to perform in this country.
