Take a moment and imagine three women in your mind:  a supermodel being photographed on a beach, a woman walking down the aisle at her wedding, and an actress accepting an Academy Award for Best Actress.  If none of your mental images are of black women, then Sophia Angeli Nelson wants to change your perceptions of black women.

Nelson’s fingerprints can be found on the web, television, and magazine rack.  She is a regular contributor to online sites like theRoot.com and Grio.com, makes regular appearances on news channels like CNN, Fox News, and MSNBC, and has written pieces for the New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, and Jet Magazine.  No matter where you find Nelson, you will discover a sharp woman who uses her law degree and experience as an attorney at her former employer, Holland & Knight LLP, to provide an expert view on political and social issues.

While her accomplishments are many, one of the milestones that will define her legacy will be her upcoming book, Black Woman Redefined: Dispelling the Myths and Discovering Love & Fulfillment in the Age of Michelle Obama (hereafter referred to as Redefined) where she examines the multifaceted lives of black women in the 21st Century.  Backed by scientific research and including essays from various celebrities, this groundbreaking book will overturn the stereotypes that have long plagued black women while also providing solutions to real issues.

I had the opportunity to interview Nelson and learn about her recent meeting with President and First Lady Obama, how social media impacts politics, the experience of writing Redefined, her use of online marketing to promote the book, and how Redefined will impact black women in America.

Meeting the Obamas

As a seasoned political analyst, Nelson has visited the White House several times and has also met the President and First Lady of previous administrations.  However, the night before our interview, she met President Barack Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama at a White House holiday event.  The experience of meeting the Obamas had a profound effect on even a seasoned political journalist like Nelson.

“It was very humbling,” Nelson said.  “And, I’m not shy. I’m on the TV all the time, and I’m rarely at a loss for words, but [it was different] when I met the President. [He] was very nice, and he recognized me from Jet and the piece I had done on him and the First Lady last month and the month before.  He was talking to me, and I happened to fixate on the First Lady, and I just stopped talking!” she said with a laugh.  “She was sweet, and put her arm around me and grabbed me close to her to take the picture and was very kind.  I think she could see I was having a bit of a melt down.  She was a good sister, she helped me get through it so it was all good.”

Nelson also said she was struck by the fact that slaves built the White House and here she was standing with the first black President (whose father was Kenyan) and the first Black First Lady (who was only five generations removed from slavery).  It was a sobering moment for Nelson.

The Effect of Social Media on Politics

Nelson’s career in politics preceded the advent of social media, and she has watched it grow to become a major force in politics.

“Twitter is certainly a powerful communication tool, but it only allows you to speak in certain sound bites,” Nelson explained.  “Facebook allows you to post links and connects people in a way that is simply revolutionary, so much so that there was a movie about its founder.  It’s shaped our politics and changed our lives dramatically.”

Nelson went on to describe how students in Iran used social media to protest their government’s lack of transparency and how the world watched on YouTube as some of them were shot dead in the streets.  She also noted that the Department of Defense and Secret Service use social networks to track criminal behavior.  The impact of Facebook and Twitter on politics, according to Nelson, has  “changed our lives; never to go back again to the way it was.”

While Nelson has both a Facebook personal page and a Twitter account, she definitely prefers Facebook.

“I’m a Facebook kind of girl only because I’m verbose and I like to talk,” Nelson said. “Twitter is hard for me because it doesn’t give me enough room to speak.”

Black Woman Redefined

I asked Nelson why she decided to take on the task of writing Redefined.  She started the book in 2006 as a project to introduce fresh research into how black women truly live their lives in the 21st Century.  As a journalist and in her former career as an attorney, Nelson has always been an accomplished writer.  She wanted to combine her writing skills with her experiences as a professional black woman to create a book that shattered stereotypes.

“The issues of black women [before] The Obamas was something that obviously I live every day.  I live that experience, being in a black sorority, I’m an AKA, and having started an organization “I Am My Sisters Keeper” (iask, Inc.), so I deal with black women all the time [as well as] organizations [for black women]. It was something I wanted to do.  I wanted to tell our story beyond the myths and the stereotypes that often define us in the culture,” Nelson said.

The ascent of then candidate Barack Obama in 2008 captured the imagination of the entire nation, but the then treatment of his wife, Michelle Obama, by the media unsettled Nelson. “She came under fire making a remark that she was proud of her country for the first time,” Nelson explained.  “What she was talking about was that young people were engaged [and] that people from all walks of life seemed to be getting past race and looking at this young man, Barack Obama.  I think she was [speaking as] a wife and a citizen, and she was trying to say she was proud of her country.  What ended up happening, as you recall, the media jumped all over her.”

Accusations of Michelle Obama being anti-patriotic and claims by New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd that she had emasculated Barack Obama by mentioning that she made him take out the trash reminded Nelson of the “angry black woman” label.  Then the New Yorker ran theinfamous cover picture of Michelle and Barack Obama.

“The New Yorker sealed it all with that infamous cover they did with the First Lady having a dashiki, an afro, a flower in her hair, she looked a little like Angela Davis meets Huey Newton. She had a machine gun on her back, and [the cover] had the President in Muslim garb,” Nelson said.  “That that kind of did it for me, and I wrote this piece in the Washington Post called Black. Female. Accomplished. Attacked, and the thing went viral.  It broke all the records the Post had ever had for an online piece, it was the topped viewed [article] for that week.  That really sealed the deal. Publishers came knocking on my door step at that point.  I was shopping a proposal, but when that article took off and then it became obvious that Michelle Obama might become First Lady, people began to look at what I was talking about.”

As Nelson continued to refine her book idea, the media attacks on black women continued to increase.  Don Imus called Rutgers basketball players “nappy headed hoes”, a Yale study claimed that 70% of professional black women were unmarried, and then a series of YouTube videos depicted cartoon characters of black womenspeaking with robotic voices about their unrealistic expectations of black men.

“While I appreciate and understand that we have our issues as black women, let’s stop attacking, let’s stop having the narrative be we’re ‘too much of this’ and ‘not enough of that’ and let’s put the issues on the table, let’s get some research, let’s follow what the research tells us,” Nelson said.

Nelson wanted to provide a voice to speak against the onslaught of stereotypical images of black women that were pouring forth on television, in newspapers, and online.

“It was an answer to all the negativity that we’ve been barraged with,” Nelson said.  ”I wanted to tell our side of the story and let people know that, wait a minute, there’s a human being there, there’s a softer, kinder, gentler woman that you ought to know, we have a soul, we’re sensual creatures, we’re sacred creatures, we’re loyal, we’re true, yeah, we have our bad things like everybody else, but part of the problem is we’ve been defined in this culture for four hundred years in a certain light.  Three hundred years of it in slavery, a hundred years in Jim Crow and then the last fifty years in the post-civil rights era.  So, we’ve never defined ourselves for ourselves. And, it’s time for us to do that.”

The Challenges of Writing Redefined

As Nelson wrote the book, the magnitude of the journey on which she was taking began to dawn on her.  However, she was undaunted because of the importance of the message she wanted to communicate.

“One of the things that was hardest about this book was that it was a serious non-fiction book and it meant research and analysis and data,” Nelson said.  “I think that was the toughest part – wrapping my narrative style around the research and being a book that tells a story.  That meant being warm and kind of quirky and being able to tell it in a way that makes people go, ‘Wow, ok, I need to think about this.’  And writing it in a way that was loving when I had to give us hard messages.”

Using Social Media to Market Redefined

Nelson uses online social media sites as a communication channel in addition to her traditional media appearances on television and in print, and her team also has several strategies for using social networking sites to market Redefined.

“Facebook and Twitter are already a part of my strategy, and we’re doing things like offering through the Black Woman Redefined Facebook page, the official book page on the web site, and the blog things like an iPad, a spa gift card, and a Macy’s gift certificate for three of the first five thousand people to order the first print edition through Amazon,” Nelson said.

The Impact of Redefined

Nelson consulted experts and thought leaders to add further illumination to the results of the research and case studies she collected for her book.  Her goal was to get to the bottom of the issues that impact modern black women.  Nelson wants black women in 25 years to be free of the challenges that confront black women of today.

“That is important to me and I’m going to fight for that until I take my last breath,” Nelson said.  ”I have two young nieces, and I don’t know that I’ll have my own children at this stage.  I may be blessed with one, and I definitely am going to adopt within the next year or two, but I don’t want them having the same discussion that we had about Colored Girls 25 years from now.  And [continuing] this conversation about how broken, busted, and hurt, and downtrodden we are.  I just want it to end.  It needs to stop.  We need to move in a forward direction.”

Getting Redefined