In this book Townes undertakes an inquiry into the cultural production of evil that has aimed at defining African American women as morally depraved. More specifically, she defines cultural evil as a set of images and stereotypes that originate in the imagination of whites and thereafter transformed into cultural tools of disrespect and degradation. This is study of the internal structure of systemic evil and its pathological products namely, mammy, Aunt Jemima, Jezebel, Sapphire, Tragic Mulatta, black matriarch, welfare queen, Topsy and others. The multi-dimensional character of cultural evil necessitates a variety of descriptive voices which the author expresses by writing as ethicist, historian, narrator, and poet. Most important, Townes also provides her readers with a cultural antidote for this excellent diagnosis of an enduring cultural disease