Straight No Chaser: How I Became a Grown-Up Black Woman - Hardcover

The story of black women's struggle for voice and visibility on their own terms.  Black girls and women in America have too long been sent the message that they are flawed - they  have the wrong hair, body, and color. From the invisibility of the fifties to transformation by movements for social change in the sixties, to flirting with black nationalist politics in the seventies, to waking up not as Cinderella but as Reagan's evil welfare queen in the eighties, to erasure and misrepresentation in the nineties, black  women have seldom been in control of defining who they are. 

Scathing, funny, outrageous, and always honest and engaging, Straight No Chaser is a provocative look at black women's struggle to form positive identity in a hostile culture. Jill Nelson sets the terms of the discussion when she defines black women as "belonging to the two most loathed groups in America, those who are black and those who are female." Her book explores the attitudes, events, and icons- from Barbie to black nationalism to the Million Man March - through the eyes of a politically aware black woman. What she finds is that black women are most often invisible, ignored, and misrepresented.