Straight, No Chaser

Black women, declares Nelson (Volunteer Slavery) in this tart, forceful book, are too often demonized or ignored by the majority society. An offspring of the New York City of the 1950s and 1960s, a world with few black female role models, she remains angry that the beauty industry markets ""whiteness as the norm"" and that blacks still prize lighter skin. Her dentist father left the family while she was a teenager, blaming the pains of racism, while her mother dismissed her husband as crazy. The author, an unmarried mother at 22, was accused of child abuse because she put her daughter on a macrobiotic diet, and she here expresses anger at the authorities. Most potent are her criticisms of black women who prop up patriarchy--from nationalist matriarch Queen Mother Moore, who endorsed polygamy, to those who supported the Million Man March--and of black leaders who have done little to change society. Nelson's husband once beat her, and if the links she makes between domestic and political violence (i.e., entitlement cuts) are strained, she also shows how popular culture demeans black women. Inspired by heroines such as Fannie Lou Hamer, Nelson took her activism beyond rhetoric by helping lead an effort to stop a 1995 Harlem rally on behalf of Mike Tyson. Her advice to black women: organize and channel the voice of the collective ""niggerbitchfit""--a term she coined to reject invisibility and disrespect. First serial to Essence; author tour. (Sept.)