“African-American actress Danièle Watts claims she was “handcuffed and detained” by police officers from the Los Angeles Police Department at CBS’s Studio City production facility on Thursday after allegedly being mistaken for a prostitute….
Sadly, this isn’t the first time something like this has happened. In 2008, a Galveston, Texas couple sued three police officers who arrested and beat their 12-year-old daughter after mistaking her for a prostitute. And at the 2011 Netroots Nation convention in Minneapolis, Minn., Cheryl Contee of Jack and Jill Politics asked a panel of African-American women to raise their hands if they had ever been mistaken for a prostitute. Everyone’s hands went up.”
This is UNACCEPTABLE. And even if she were a sex worker, LAPD should never have treated her this way.
Related, anecdotally, in my 7+ years of street harassment activism, I’ve found that Black women are more likely to be propositioned and called out to as if they are sex workers by street harassers compared with any other race of women. A student’s study about street harassment in Egypt a few years ago found the same thing to be true in Egypt — dark skinned women were more likely to be assumed to be and treated as prostitutes.
Related:
* Monica Jones was arrested basically for being a transgender woman of color walking down the street.
* A Sudanese woman featured on Humans of New York talked about being solicited “all the time”
