Despite the progress made by the civil rights and feminist movements, and most recently, #metoo, Black women are still finding it difficult to navigate society. We still face obstacles that challenge our very womanhood and our Blackness in addition to identity markers concerning sexuality, class, religion, ability, and others. One such obstacle is being able to define one's self truthfully in light of institutions that continue to misrepresent us; one such institution is the media. As Marquita M. Gammage points out in the introduction to Challenging Misrepresentations of Black Womanhood: Media, Literature and Theory, even First Lady of the United States Michelle Obama suffered humiliation and degradation at the hands of those who wanted to argue that her Blackness, womanhood, and physicality made her unfit for the role.

Gammage continues her introduction with a discussion of the most familiar and pervasive stereotypes of Black women—the Mammy, the Jezebel, and...

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