Tamara Winfrey-Harris

Like many women, each day I am tasked with measuring my self worth by solving a beauty equation:
My hair is thick and long. (Add 10.)
I have a flat ass. (Subtract 5.)
I have a pretty face. (Add 10.)
I am fat. (Subtract 400 then divide by 10 to the tenth power.)
The beauty standards I am supposed to meet are narrow, mercurial, and often absurd — we all know this. I am a 47-year-old black woman. I don’t look like Kylie Jenner. And I don’t want to. But that doesn’t stop the beauty industrial com...

Black women are like flowers in a field of kudzu. Beautiful, bright and colorful, we fight our way to the light so we are not overcome by society’s demands that climb and shade, smother and constrict our true selves.
There are so many ways to be Black and so many ways to be a woman.
Oh, to throw our arms wide and embrace the expansiveness of Black womanhood!
Hundreds of years of misogynoir* — misogyny directed at Black women — have made that harder than it should be, though. Slavers insisted ...

We are the fighters. We are the women who don’t take shit from no man.
We are the women with the sharp tongues and hands firmly on hips. We are the ride-or-die women. We are the women who have, like Sojourner Truth, “plowed and planted and gathered into barns and no man could head us.” We are the sassy chicks. We are the mothers who make a way out of no way. On TV, we are the no-nonsense police chiefs and judges. We are the First Ladies with the impressive guns.
Strong. Black. Woman.
The word...

This article appears in our 2013 Summer issue, Micro/Macro. Subscribe today!

Who run the world? If entertainment domination is the litmus test, then all hail Queen Bey. Beyoncé. She who, in the last few months alone, whipped her golden lace-front and shook her booty fiercely enough to zap the power in the Superdome (electrical relay device, bah!); produced, directed, and starred in Life Is But a Dream, HBO’s most-watched documentary in nearly a decade; and launched the Mrs. Carter Show—the mu...

Illustration by Angie Wang
In February 2012, PBS host Tavis Smiley interviewed Viola Davis and Octavia Spencer about their Oscar nominations for their roles as Aibileen and Minny, Jim Crow–era domestic workers in The Help. “I'm pulling for both of you to win on Academy Award night,” Smiley ventured. “But there's something that sticks in my craw about celebrating Hattie McDaniel so many years ago for playing a maid”—a reference to the actor who won for her role as Mammy in 1939's Gone with the...

This article appears in our 2015 Spring issue, Law & Order. Subscribe today!

“My son, pay attention to my wisdom…. For the lips of an adulteress drip honey, and her speech is smoother than oil; but in the end she is bitter as gall, sharp as a double-edged sword.” PROVERBS 5:1–4

“When I met you last night, baby/ Before you opened up your gap/ I had respect for ya lady/ But now I take it all back.” — Snoop Dogg, “Ain’t no fun (if the homies can’t have none)”

“We don’t love them hoes.” — Mobb De...

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"You have those DSL lips — dick-sucking lips."
That's what he called them. One day, a white boy turned to Lexy, now 24, in the cafeteria and declared how great her full lips must be for blow jobs. She was 13 — and mortified. One of just a few black girls in a predominantly white middle school, she was already self-conscious. "He didn't say anything like that to the white girls at the table. He just felt like it was OK to say that to me and my big lips," Lexy remembers. Sudd...

In the words of Fannie Lou Hamer, Black America is “sick and tired of being sick and tired.”
We are fed up living in an America where a pack of Skittles and a hoodie renders us suspicious and selling loose cigarettes gets us a death sentence. America has been telling black folks “fuck your breath” for hundreds of years. And it’s just too much. We are fed up…again.
The stolen lives of black men in Sanford, Ferguson and Baltimore have galvanized African Americans and our allies. But as a black ...

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Rachel A. Dolezal, who stepped down Monday as president of the Spokane, Wash., chapter of the N.A.A.C.P., could have been a powerful ally to African-Americans. The participation of white allies has always been important to anti-racism work. By most accounts, she is educated about black cultures and an advocate for black causes. But empathy evolved into impersonation. And Ms. Dolezal’s subterfuge, made easier by the legacy of racism in America, undermines the very people she claim...

Never in a generation have women, people of color, and the LGBTQ community more dearly needed active allies to counter inequality. Unfortunately, the contours of active allyship are elusive to most Americans — even progressive ones. It’s not simply that it is easier to disapprove of bigotry passively than it is to actually do something about it. (Though it is.) It’s also that many people lack experience resisting the prejudice baked into American society.
But there are plenty of men and women...

By the time the sun rises on November 9, America will likely know whether Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump will be our next president. But many of us will still be reckoning with some ugly realities about this country, and just how (un-) welcome we are here.
During this campaign, the Republican presidential nominee dispensed with “polite” dog whistles in favor of bolder bigotry. Donald J. Trump describes African America as an inner-city hellscape and “the blacks” as uneducated and unemployed. ...

“He said I should be a stripper. He said that was all my body was good for, anyway.”
Last Saturday, at a workshop for Black girls, a sweet-faced 17-year-old talked to me about how the boys at her high school viewed her developing body. She was still on my mind later in the evening when I read Ayesha Curry’s controversial tweets about “class” and women who wear too little.
Throughout history, women have been separated into those who are respectable and those who are not. And it is Black women ...

*Editor’s Note: This post originally ran in February of this year, following the release of Beyonce’s hit single, ‘Formation’
Beyoncé is that bitch.
She dropped a video and single, “Formation,” on Saturday and “caused all this conversation.”
“Formation” is peak Yoncé . Impossible choreography. Hot beats. Gif-able moments. New pop culture totems (#hotsauce). Ass. It is also the artist’s most radical production to date, heavy with symbolism and challenges to prevailing narratives about race and...

INDIANAPOLIS, Ind. — I am a black woman born and raised in the space between the coasts and above the Mason-Dixon line. I am a face of the heartland, but you might not know it if you’ve been following the Trump-era reporting and commentary about the lives and political choices of people in the Midwest.
After the 2016 election, it was common to hear musings about how Midwestern voters flocked to Donald Trump because he spoke to the America they wanted to make “great” — a descrip...

Updated at 10:32 a.m. ET on June 15, 2020.
On May 25, George Floyd died, calling for his mother and gasping for breath. Derek Chauvin, a white Minneapolis police officer, killed him, forcing his knee onto Floyd’s neck until the man stopped moving, and for several minutes after that. The agonizing moments were captured on camera and shared with the world.
When black husbands, fathers, sons, and neighbors fall victim to law enforcement, often black wives, daughters, mothers, and girlfriends pic...