Stop Street Harassment

Making Public Spaces Safe and Welcoming

Together We Must Change the Culture of Masculinity

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We have some pretty amazing people serving on our board of directors, including Dr. Laura S. Logan, an assistant professor of sociology at Hastings College in Nebraska. In 2013, she wrote her PhD dissertation on street harassment: “Fear of violence and street harassment: accountability at the intersections.”

DrLauraLoganlectureNEOct2015Last week, she gave a lecture at her university on street harassment + intersectionality. Her lecture was covered in the campus paper by Mallory Gruben. Here is an excerpt:

“Through her research, Logan found that the underlying theme of street harassment stemmed from socialized gender roles. In the majority of the cases she studied, harassers that were “coded as masculine” targeted individuals they “coded as feminine.” Although this coding is often unique to each case, the harasser was typically male, and he typically identified the target as female or feminine.

Logan closed her lecture by offering a solution to fighting street harassment: stop gender policing. The prevalence of masculinity and femininity in cases of street harassment suggest a fulfillment of socialized gender roles. By allowing people to act within human nature instead of within set gender roles, there would be less expectation for men to be dominant and women to be sexualized, thus changing the culture of masculinity and breaking socialized gender roles.

Logan explains that in order to stop gender policing and change the culture of masculinity, everyone must play an active role.

“I don’t want anybody to be mistaken and think that means that we have to change men or that men are the ones responsible,” Logan said. “All of us—men, women, those who don’t identify as any particular gender, or gender queer—are responsible for changing the culture of masculinity.”

Agreed! You can view/listen to her full speech on YouTube.

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Two More Women Dead

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Trigger Warning

India: So horrific, two harassers stabbed a 19-year-old woman 35 times, killing her, as she entered a market because she protested their actions. Her mother was injured while trying to protect her. She filed a case against the men in 2013 several times, but the police did not do anything. So sad. So enraging. Our thoughts go out to her family.

Sandra Bland, via Heavy Editorial

USA: Sandra Bland just moved to Texas to start a new job when police pulled her over for failing to signal that she was changing lanes. The situation quickly escalated and two officers physically hurt her, slammed her to the ground, possibly broke her arm, and then arresting her for the vague offense of “assaulting an officer.” Bland was in jail for a few days and then allegedly hanged herself. Her relatives don’t believe it and neither do many people in the USA. Whatever the truth is about her death, everything leading up to it is certainly racism and police harassment. And if she was killed by police, which seems probable, there just are no words.

Today people have made #IfIDieInPoliceCustody a trending hashtag on Twitter, imploring people to never believe that if they die in police custody that they committed suicide. It is sobering and sad that Black people feel they must say this because the justice system is not to be trusted. And death is not so unfathomable.

In a recent online video Bland posted, she said, “What I need you guys to understand is that being a black person in America is very, very hard.” ‪

#‎SayHerName‬ ‪#‎SandraBland‬

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Charleston Shooting, Race, and Sexual Violence

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Yesterday, a white supremacist terrorist went to a Black church in Charleston and murdered nine people, six women and three men (read about them. My thoughts go out to their loved ones). This level of premeditated violence and hate is hard to comprehend, particularly at a place that is supposed to be peaceful and safe.

Survivors report he said, “I have to do it. You rape our women and you’re taking over our country. And you have to go.”

I keep thinking about that. And how wrong he is. Black women are as valuable as white women and women of any other race. There is no “our” and “their.” White men are more likely to rape white women overall than are Black men. Black people are certainly not “taking over” the country. I know I shouldn’t try to find logic in the thought process of someone like him, but, I can’t help but also ask, why kill mostly women if that is his line of reasoning? And at a church?

His words bring up longstanding problems in our society: the perceived value of white women’s bodies over Black women’s and white men justifying their violence against Black people over (usually just lip-service instead of actual) concern for white women.

Dr. Estelle Freedman’s book Redefining Rape: Sexual Violence in the Era of Suffrage and Segregation as well as Dr. Danielle McGuire’s book At the Dark End of the Street: Black Women, Rape, and Resistance–A New History of the Civil Rights Movement from Rosa Parks to the Rise of Black Power are good resources for learning about this in the late 1800s and 1900s in the USA. They show how our country, our legal system is built on the oppression of all women and men of color.

We can see that in how laws and the justice system today protect white men (especially wealthy and heterosexual) at the expense of everyone else. That has to change.

I also want to share what Courtney E. Martin, a writer and thinker whom I greatly admire, shared today on her Facebook page:

“I’m thinking about how, yes, the shooter is probably mentally ill, but how our racist society is, too, and how we can’t pretend he is an anomaly. He is the son of white people, the son of America, the son of our education system and our culture and our history. We made him. White Americans, especially, made him. So how can we stop making him? How can we take responsibility for the history and the present? And what is my role in that unmaking and that claiming of responsibility?“

As a white person too, I think about that. What can I do to challenge racism and to make it so that public spaces, churches, schools, and workplaces are safe and equitable for all? I implore any white people reading this to think about it too (if you aren’t already). We have to help make the change.

 

 

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#SayHerName

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Yesterday was the National Day of Action for Black Women and Girls. The African American Policy Forum (AAPF) release the report: “‪#‎SayHerName‬: Resisting Police Brutality Against Black Women” to help shed light on the extent of the issue.

From the AAPF website:

“Although Black women are routinely killed, raped and beaten by the police, their experiences are rarely foregrounded in popular understandings of police brutality,” said Kimberle Williams Crenshaw, Director of the African American Policy Forum and co-author of the brief. “Yet, inclusion of Black women’s experiences in social movements, media narratives and policy demands around policing and police brutality is critical to effectively combating racialized state violence for Black communities and other communities of color.”

#SayHerName gathers stories of Black women who have been killed by police and who have experienced gender-specific forms of police violence, provides some analytical frames for understanding their experiences, and broadens dominant conceptions of who experiences state violence and what it looks like…

In 2015 alone, several Black women’s lives have already been lost to police violence. For instance, just before Freddie Gray’s case grabbed national attention, police killed Mya Hall–a Black trans woman, on the outskirts of Baltimore. No action has been taken to date with respect to the officers responsible for her death. Most recently, police fatally shot Alexia Christian in the back of a police cruiser while she was handcuffed. And in Ventura, CA, Police officers fatally shot Meagan Hockaday–a young mother of three–within 20 seconds of entering her home in response to a domestic disturbance.

#SayHerName responds to increasing calls for attention to police violence against Black women by offering a resource to help ensure that Black women’s stories are integrated into demands for justice, policy responses to police violence, and media representations of victims and survivors of police brutality.”

There was a rally in New York City. Here is footage:

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