I created this Street Harassment and Street Harassment + Misogynoir BINGO card (latter particular to intraracial misogynoir and street harassment as experienced by Black women), cataloguing the most common excuses provided to justify this violence towards women. It’s been on my mind for a while as excuses said to me, some of which I wrote months ago in 10 Common Ignorant Replies Made To Women Who Discuss Experiencing Street Harassment, but also surfaced in response to some of the excuses being used to derail an upcoming anti-street harassment chat #YouOkSis (hosted by @Russian_Starr and @FeministaJones) scheduled for Thursday, July 10th at 12pm.
As you know and I’ve shared here, I’ve experienced this violence for almost 23 years now, and have written about street harassment for two years in detail in my Street Harassment Is Violence (Essay Compilation) with perspectives from a variety of angles including: what I experience most which is intraracial street harassment, street harassment from White male cops/White men who associate Black womanhood itself with sex work and violently so, experiencing PTSD because of street harassment, some Black people’s demands for silence and derailment on this topic because of fear of the White Gaze coupled with lack of compassion for and recognition of Black women’s humanity and call Black women speaking truth to power “divide and conquer,” how it is in fact violence about reclamation/affirmation of power and not “flirting,” the racist and anti-intersectional mainstream media framing and centering of White women as the only victims of street harassment with Black men as only perpetrators, and how that removes other men’s culpability and silences Black women experiences, and many more perspectives.
Please join for the #YouOkSis chat if you can/able though be aware that racist, sexist, misogynoiristic men of a variety of backgrounds have planned to derail it and harm, however, as there are organized and disorganized campaigns to silence Black women online, in general. And while the focus is Black women— because margin needs to be centered versus silenced—understanding how women oppressed at multiple intersections and dehumanized via anti-Blackness and misogynoir actually facilitates the illumination of the understanding of those usually centered, and this facilitation doesn’t have to occur through erasure or co-opt via generalization. Margin to center is womanism. It is anti-Blackness and misogynoir (and often [trans]misogynoir as Black trans women face brutal street harassment and worse) to suggest Black women don’t deserve the space or time to analyze our experiences and value our own lives, to be clear. Specificity is not “oppression olympics” but is a matter of survival for Black women.
The chat isn’t only for Black women either; Black men who KNOW that they are more than a violent portrayal of a White supremacist and anti-Black construction of masculinity (and reject performing masculinity as such) and want safer and healthier experiences for Black women and our communities are welcome to be there. In fact, one of the moderators is a Black man. And since non-cishet or non-cis or non-het or non-binary gender Black people also experience street harassment, of course all of these voices matter.
This violence and the excuses have to stop. The demand for Black women to be silent has to stop.
