A scholar of the African diaspora, Spillers is known for her essays on African-American literature, collected in Black, White, and In Color: Essays on American Literature and Culture, published by the University of Chicago Press in 2003, and Comparative American Identities: Race, Sex, and Nationality in the Modern Text, a collection edited by Spillers published by Routledge in 1991.
Thus a prominent chapter in Spillers's book, entitled "Interstices: A Small Drama of Words," re-examines the harmful characterization of black women in literature and in society at large.
[12][13] She approaches these topics through a grammarly lens, and reappropriates the term "Interstices" from a computer science phrase to a description of the flaws in our modern language that allow some things to metaphorically "slip through the cracks".
Spillers argues that black women's sexuality is poorly described in speech because of institutions of white supremacy, which in turn objectifies and silences them.
Their sexual experiences are depicted, but not often by them, and if and by the subject herself, often in the guise of vocal music, often in the self-contained accent and sheer romance of the blues."
Spiller's paradox is a response to Judy Chicago's Dinner Party and its portrayal of the black woman's vagina, but the sentiment holds for gender construction and sexuality as a whole.
She wrote with a sense of urgency in order to create a theoretical taxonomy for black women to be studied in the academy.
It goes on to argue that "there is one truly great discontinuity in family structure in the United States at the present time: that between the white world in general and that of the Negro American".
The report states that "nearly a quarter of Urban Negro Marriages are Dissolved," and that the proportion of non-white women with husbands continued to decline between 1950 and 1960.
Moynihan links all of these 'deficiencies' in relation to typical conceptions of the American family with the breakdown of the black race, leading to an "increase in welfare dependency".
[16] Spillers has been referenced numerous times by influential Black feminist group The Combahee River Collective.
Smith claims that she, Spillers, and other notable black women of the time formed what was known as the Afric-American Female Intelligence Society of Boston.