The point about the difference between work coming from within communities of color and other subordinated communities versus work outside of these spaces is key. Clearly there is a long history of profoundly distrubing initatives, some well-intentioned, some not, of privileged groups telling other people what’s what. In particular, white bourgeois feminism has frequently been guilty of this. Our collective problem, as I see it, is how to build alliances necessary for effective struggle in light of that history and suspicion.

People, of course, have different views on this. Some think that alliances with, for instance, progressive and radical predominantly-white groups are inherently problematic and we must act autonomously. I do not think that is politically or strategically sound. There is a time and place for women-only spaces, queer-only spaces, spaces for people of color, etc. I am in no way suggesting otherwise. However, I think we must think very carefully about rejecting alliences with groups doing good work because they are white alone.

I’m speaking generally here and know little about this particular case of the websites. It seems it is a good case study for this discussion broadly, though, in that it is not the classic, clear-cut case of a privileged group coming into a specific oppressed community and arrogantly regulating - I am in no way interested in working with people in that tradition. But the streets are everybody’s. So you have a white group, presuming that’s what it is, targetting a practice that is a problem for women generally (harassment by men), but the issue is that many of the culpable men are not white. Who, then, has the authority and legitimacy to call these men out?

The issue of membership composition aside, I don’t see anything on these sites that is disturbing on its face - in fact, the project seems to me quite sound politically. It is also evidently quite successful in terms of getting the word out about this issue without relying on explicit demonization of men of color, looking at the press coverage. They certainly seem to be quite aware of the dangers we’ve been talking about here. However, the issue of who the members are–and how they are represented–is not nothing.

-Would this be fixed if half the group were meaningfully-involved people of color also represented on the site itself?
-If they are all white, would it have been better if they put up photos of people of color holding phones on the site to tactically prevent generalizations (lighter-skinned women doing the photographing of, in many cases, darker-skinned men), or would that in fact be worse and disingenuous?
-If they are white, should they recruit a diverse membership actively?
-And if they did, would we join?

Just some thoughts.

@Sandra: Thank you for your post as well. I definitely don’t want to come off like the folks who deflected conversation about sexism so as to not make Puerto Ricans look bad; as a Puerto Rican woman myself, I think that’s the same old bullshit all over again.

As for the Holla Back NYC site, like I wrote in my post, I didn’t think it was horrible or completely worthless, but I did find a lot of things that made me uncomfortable, especially given that the site is not run by women of color. These are thorny issues, indeed.

Anyway, I was interested in how representation issues play out on these anti-harassment sites. I actually posted a photo on the Holla Back NYC site a long time ago, and was concerned about men of color being overrepresented and made to seem worse than white men. So I counted them all, starting with the latest post (Jan. 27, 2008) back through the first one (Oct. 4th, 2005). I counted at total of 140 men (some photos are of more than one man). Of these, 48 were totally unidentifiable, because the photo was either blurry or from really far away. There is obviously a problem with putting people in racial categories based on a photo. Nevertheless, of the other ones, I think that 47 were clearly white (one is a staged YouTube clip, but the guy playing the harasser is white). 46 were men of color from a range of diverse backgrounds.

This obviously isn’t definitive because race is a cultural category and maybe other people would differ about how to categorize some of these guys. There is also the issue of racial markers being used in posts with no pictures, like the slang thing. But it’s a pretty diverse group of harassers all around anyhow. I actually think they’re doing a good job with these thorny issues, and some of the readings/resources on the “Anti-Racism” link are really useful and informative.

I understand, of course, the anxiety driving this, but I think it is quite dangerous to question/”complicate” fighting patriarchy in our own communities in the name of fighting white racism. Some of the comments come close to suggesting that women of color must somehow choose between their race and their gender (and, in speaking out about the sexism of men of color, risk being “race traitors”), a predicament we have been put in far too often. This is a false binary, as demonstrated by the work of feminists of color time and time again.

It is, as the post and many of the comments point out, of course highly important not to perpetuate racist stereotypes while fighting sexism, which is rampant in communities of color as well as other communities. Downplaying that such sexism exists is not an effective tactic, and in fact subverts both our struggles and those of our sisters before us. Rather, we should be thinking about developing new strategies and building alliances that join anti-patriarchal and anti-racist struggles.

I think my plan may be tragically flawed in the same way! Damn - I knew there was something I was overlooking…

ABB - thanks so much for posting this. It’s the clearest articulation I’ve seen of the intersections of race, class and gender WRT street harassment and the movement against it. I live in DC and this debate has been all over the place for the last couple of years.

I think I see the tragic flaw in my plan, and it involves interacting with other humans…

Peggy Sue: Thanks for your comment. It’s always reassuring to start off a possibly difficult and fraught conversation with a positive response.

Yeah, it’s somehow more disappointing when people who are oppressed in certain ways just don’t get the other ways in which they’re privileged and perpetuate the oppression of others, isn’t it? Sometimes I’ll find myself getting more pissed off at, say, queers than other folks, especially when they’re politicized around queer stuff - kinda like, “Shouldn’t you know better?” But nah, I think we’re all kind of attached to the power and privilege we do have, even if in other ways we don’t have it.

You hit it perfectly with:

“…men exerting their gender privilege and sexism over women who have class and/or race privilege over them.”

YES. It’s really important to say this out loud. Because it’s true and because we cannot abandon the fight against racism or classism in favor of defending a woman’s right to safely walk the streets.

It’s ALL inescapably linked, and letting a white woman off the hook for racist behavior against a harasser of color is just as bad as looking the other way when a woman suffers street harassment, IMO.

I remember when I came out as a big ole queer. I was excited and I thought wow, now I’m a part of this group, this group of people that understands oppression, so they’ll certainly be less sexist and racist. Yeah, uh, not so much. It was such a depressing and demoralizing thing to realize that oppressed people also buy into the “get ahead by stepping on others” mentality.

So thank you for bringing this subject into the light so clearly. I don’t know the answers or where we all go from here but I do know that this is an incredibly important conversation to have. Thanks again.