By Lavender Kitchen Sink Collective
On August 7th there was a link via Upworthy on the Stop Street Harassment Facebook page to a YouTube video titled the “Smile Bitch Training Camp.” This one minute video was a satirical take on the misogynist expectation that women in public spaces should present themselves as smiling and cheerful at all times. Created by Black comic actress and blogger Janelle James, the satire featured a cast of mostly white young women and girls (about three of the female actors were visibly people of color) who enrolled themselves into boot camp to train on how to smile on demand for strangers at all times. Despite the presence of Black and Asian faces, the overrepresentation of middle class-presenting white women presents street harassment as a threat to white female bodies. I also noticed a problematic aspect about the actors playing the street harasser roles. First, all the harassers were portrayed as either low-income and/or homeless. Secondly, all but two of the men were visibly Black. While the central message of the video was critically important, the racialized subtext that equates “poor Black man = street harasser” undermined the video’s message.
In response to criticism about the racial characterizations from viewers on the video’s YouTube page, James replied, “It was something I really struggled with during editing. I’d never want that to be the message. These [the actors] are all my friends, they worked (hard) for free and I had to work with what I had. And if it wasn’t funny, it had to go.”
While it is understandable that limited budgets and time constraints affected James’ casting decisions, it is much harder to justify why the male actors embody common classist and racist tropes about harassers: thuggish, unwashed, uneducated, and homeless. If the same set of actors had portrayed these characters as middle-class, college-educated, the video still would have had the same powerful message—minus the racist/classist subtext. In fact, the video would have included a crucial and long-ignored fact about gender violence: so-called “respectable” men regularly harass and assault women.
The idea that all street harassment involves a Black perpetrator and a white victim is not only incorrect, but dangerous. First, studies on street harassment reveal that intersecting forms of marginalization often make women more vulnerable to harassment. Stop Street Harassment’s own 2014 national study “Unsafe and Harassed in Public Spaces” revealed that Black and Latina women and girls are more likely to experience street harassment than their white counterparts. Black women and girls also experience harassment in ways that specifically entrench misogynoirist and cissexist violence against Black women’s bodies, as womanist blogger Feminista Jones noted during the #YouOkSis hashtag campaign on Twitter. Second, the idea that Black men are inherently dangerous to white women has been used historically to criminalize Black men and justify racial disparities in criminal profiling, arrests, and incarceration. Third, having an image in our heads of the street harasser as a poor Black man keeps us from recognizing genuinely abusive and dangerous people in public spaces, all because they don’t fit our racial preconception of what a sexual harasser-predator is.
In the last couple of years, there has been a growing public awareness about street harassment, and the many social, economic, and political costs that sexualized harassment in public spaces can exact on women and other marginalized communities. While street harassment is generally understood as a form of misogynist verbal assault that (cisgender) men use to exert external control over women, street harassment is often employed as a way to reinforce all forms of social domination in public space. People of color, trans/gender-nonconforming people, disabled people, children, immigrants, and homeless people all regularly face street harassment and attendant violence that reinforces the systemic oppression that they face. What needs to be understood about street harassment is not only how this violence threatens women’s personal autonomy and access to space, but how the right to public space for all marginalized people is still contested in a hegemonic society.
Lavender Kitchen Sink Collective is a project that centers queer/trans people of color perspectives on economic, gender, and political justice. Check LKSC out at www.lavenderkitchensink.com or follow on Twitter at @lkscollective.
