What constraints are placed on Black women politicians’ physical presentation in the United States, and how do Black women candidates navigate choices around their appearance? In Sister Style, Nadia E. Brown and Danielle Casarez Lemi address these questions, examining how Black women political elites make fashion, hairstyle, and beauty decisions with respect to their roles as aspiring representatives and current elected officials. The authors bring forth considerable evidence supporting their hypotheses that Black women’s appearance has political implications and that “dominant, Eurocentric, beauty standards influence the electoral chances of Black women in varied and distinct ways” (16). The book evaluates interpretive, qualitative, and quantitative evidence of how Black women voters and elites modify their appearance to be recognized in politics. This book is a must-read for scholars of gender and politics and offers a serious, well-executed, intersectional analysis of the body politics of Black women.
First, Brown and Lemi use the implementation of New Jersey’s Create a Respectful and Open Workplace for Natural Hair (CROWN) Act (2019), which protects individuals against hair-based discrimination, as a case study of how and why hair texture and styling as a reflection of racial, gendered, and class identities is a novel form of discrimination that state legislatures have recently addressed. The increase in the number of Black women legislators allows for the introduction of such topics, which otherwise would be invisible for nonracialized representatives. Here, the authors point to the importance of lived experiences of Black women in influencing how they represent their communities both descriptively and substantively (19).
Next, Brown and Lemi analyze in-depth interviews with Black women political elites at various levels of political office to demonstrate how these women are both agentic and constrained in their hair styling and hair texture choices. These constraints include the embrace of respectability politics, which pressures Black women to conform to Eurocentric beauty standards for their professional advancement (93). At the same time, several Black women political elites reject such politics and embrace their natural tresses despite the looming threat of political losses. These decisions about presentation are not taken lightly. In interviews, Black women elected officials expressed the belief that “their humanity and equal status as Americans were conveyed through their styling choices” (93).
Recognizing that conversations around hair and beauty occur in informal and racialized spaces, Brown and Lemi mimic this environment with two focus groups among Black women political elites and among members of a historically Black sorority. In these focus groups, the authors capture Black women’s candid and supportive relational dynamics. A central finding from these data is the presence of generational cleavages between older and younger Black women on the ideal appearance of Black politicians to their constituencies. On their own, the qualitative data are impressive and reflect a thorough consideration of the origins of a variety of Black women’s perspectives. Survey data are inadequate to capture the complexities and nuances that Brown and Lemi piece together seamlessly.
After establishing the relevance of hair texture and hair styling, fashion choices, and skin tone for Black women elites, Brown and Lemi examine their political implications. Most women running for office have straightened hair and otherwise conform to Eurocentric beauty standards (133). Compiling a unique—perhaps the only—data set of Black women candidates in 2018, Brown and Lemi conduct an exploratory and descriptive analysis of common phenotypical traits among candidates. From this, the analysis turns to experimental data on voters’ perceptions of Black women candidates from two well-designed experiments. Varying the skin tone and curl pattern of hypothetical Black women candidates, Brown and Lemi find that Black voters, particularly Black Democrats, react differently to candidates’ hair style and skin tone, especially when candidates diverge in their self-presentation. Through another series of experiments, we learn that this effect is not driven by levels of linked fate or racial-gendered linked fate. Instead, we learn that Black men and women vary in their perceptions of Black women candidates. Ultimately, the takeaway is that appearance matters, and voters gather information about Black women candidates based on their appearance.
This book is a refreshing mixed-methods investigation of a salient topic for Black women voters, aspiring political candidates, and elected representatives. It forcefully breaks new ground on the study in political science of Black women’s appearance and produces a methodological toolkit for future researchers to expand on the topic in meaningful ways. The book is especially important for scholars of gender and politics. Too often, women are viewed and analyzed as a monolith, and the pressures that Black women face—in and out of elected office—are ignored, undocumented, or undertheorized. This book rejects the notion that women are a monolith by demonstrating an important layer of intragroup diversity among Black women, and further demonstrating how Black women are evaluated differently compared with their non-Black counterparts.
While Black women political elites are agentic in shaping their appearance, some aspects are out of their control. Skin tone is an immutable characteristic, which cannot be manipulated without notice. While styling choices can meaningfully evolve, and hair texture and styling can be manipulated daily, Black women cannot rearrange their skin tone to appeal to voters. Normatively, should we expect fairer-skinned Black women politicians to behave differently, or overcompensate for their skin tone in the policies they choose to support, and are they constrained in doing so? The authors do not thoroughly engage how access to financial resources changes some forms of appearance, but not all. This a minor drawback from an overall exceptional analysis. The politics of hair, alone, is an important expansion of the study of candidates’ appearance. Generations of future scholars will cite this text for its agenda-setting analysis on phenotype, hair style, and hair texture of Black women candidates, and for its creative use of tools to evaluate these topics.
