“Prostitution arrests are racist. They have always been racist. In 1866, San Francisco police arrested 137 women, ‘virtually all Chinese’; the police boasted that they had ‘expelled three hundred Chinese women’. In the 1970s, the American Civil Liberties Union found that Black women were seven times more likely to be arrested for prostitution-related offenses than white women. This disparity is no relic of the past: between 2012 and 2015, 85 percent of people charged with ‘loitering for the purpose of prostitution’ in New York City were Black or Latinx - groups that only make up 54 percent of the city’s population. Increases in prostitution enforcement mean increases in the arrests of women of colour. Between 2012 and 2016, the New York Police Department stepped up enforcement targeting massage parlours. As journalist Melissa Gira Grant details, during this period the arrests of Asian people in New York charged with either ‘unlicensed massage’ or prostitution went up by 2,700 per cent. Arrests on the street target Black and Latina women - who may not even be selling sex - simply for wearing ‘tight jeans’ or a crop top. The NYPD do not arrest white women in affluent areas of the city for wearing jeans.”
— Revolting Prostitutes: The Fight for Sex Workers’ Rights, Juno Mac and Molly Smith (via marieduplessis)
