I saw this over at CW’s blog. It is a research paper called A Black Feminist Critique of Same-Race Street Harassment. It is by Hawley Fogg-Davis Associate Professor Department of Political Science Temple University
I can’t quote it without the author’s permission, so I am just providing a link.We often rely on anecdotes. Academic studies tend to move you beyond conjecture and provide data to support your arguments. You can never have enough data and Black women need more. This paper isn’t “data” rich, however, it offers some historical perspective and dedicates and entire section to Black political thought which ought to cause a few members of the CRIC and the BEE to go apoplectic .
Does someone know of a DATA-rich academic study on same-race street harassment? Not a compilation of historical philosophies, but good old fashioned numbers.
I know y’all get tired of me referring to “Getting Played” by Jody Miller, but the reason that book is featured in the sidebar of this blog is that it is data-rich. So consider the comments section a data-dump. Put up the link. Numbers. I want numbers.
13 comments ↓
Not same race specific, but may help if that’s not documented yet:
http://www.stopstreetharassment.com/resources/index.htm
See bibliography at bottomfor sources that may have stats
This report has some general stats: “Hidden in Plain Sight, Sexual Harassment and Assault in the New York. City Subway System,”
http://www.nytimes.com/packages/pdf/nyregion/city_room/20070726_hiddeninplainsight.pdf
Gina, thank you for this! I can’t wait to read it. As far as I know, there is no body of work documenting same-race street harassement in the form of hard social science research. I’m going to check if one exists besides the one on CW’s blog. Maybe some of your readers may know of one. Time to start pouring through the scholarly peer-reviewed journals.
Ok, this one is a little long, I guess I’ll will read it on the train. But its good to know that some black academians are actually studying black folks and just not how white folks treat black folks. At this point many of us have become our own worst enemy. Destroying our childrens soul so they don’t even make it to getting a job or a house where someone can actually discriminate against them.
As always Sis. Gina, thanks for keeping up on this. Since I have to read such works for my job/community organizing, you make some of my work easier; I often refer people to your blogspot.
Yes, there are many people of African descent who do this work/research all the time. Check out Dr. Oliver Williams, I think his organization is Institute on Domestic Violence in the African-American Community; I think his organization is somewhere in Wisconsin or Minnesota. There is Sis. Rev. Aubra Love, The Black Church and Domestic Violence Institute, Atlanta, GA. Lastly, an organization I used to be a member of, INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence. Google these resources and their websites, etc., will come up. I pray this is helpful to everyone.
Dr Williams is based at the University of Minnesota. The Institute’s web site: http://www.dvinstitute.org/
Thanks for all your work, I love and learn so much. as a student in graduate methods, your link to this paper was helpful as I link you to a classmate for her thesis work. I also am reading the paper for my work. Again thanks for all you bring to this blog
Slightly off-topic, but I had to share this. On one of the street harassment blogs I frequent (the same one Nathalie linked upthread), I found information on this group called “HOTGIRLS” (Helping Our Teen Girls In Real Life Situations), a group that helps empower young Black girls.
A recent story at the Stop Street Harassment blog is about their group, and how some of the girls took a Justin Timberlake song and an LL Cool J song and made anti-street harassment songs out of them:
http://streetharassment.wordpress.com/2009/05/14/let-me-tell-you-how-to-talk-to-me/
Groups like that make me so happy. I’m so glad people are realizing that street harassment towards Black women is a problem, and that it’s an even bigger problem when it happens to young Black girls!
Regarding the research paper: I can understand where the writer is going, but dense academic language makes me sleepy. Sorry.
I live in NJ. I had read and heard about the young woman’s vicious murder when it happened.
I’ve gone through the harassment phase growing up in NYC, up to and including when I was wearing business suits and working there. A day could not pass without some chuckle-head f****r bothering me. I carried a long umbrella with a sharpened tip just to let these a******s know I was serious. I have nothing but contempt for these subhuman lowlife pukes.
The only remedy was to live and work in the suburbs. I’ve never heard a peep from any man in the decade I’ve lived here.
@betty I concur I hate academic-speak it clogs discourse. Ironically I think it repels the women who need to read it most. I try to make sure that I am entertaining and break it down like a fraction. Sometimes I fail.
I still want some numbers. I will plod through in order to get some hard data.
I just wrote a piece on the subject of the sexual profiling of by black women by black men in public spaces:
http://celiesrevenge.blogspot.com/2009/05/checking-sisters-attitude-sexual.html
I found another thesis on Black women and street harassment, but it’s also more on the anecdotal side:
http://etd.gsu.edu/theses/available/etd-04092007-190105/unrestricted/Mills_Melinda_200705_MA.pdf
Finding one that has more statistics and facts is not easy!
Hi – I’m the facilitator of the Stop Street Harassment blog & website cited a few times in this thread. Many readers at What About Our Daughters also helped w/my book research by taking an informal online survey I conducted last fall about public interactions between strangers, including street harassment (thanks everyone who helped!).
Golden Silence is one of my allies and she also shared Melinda Mills’ thesis with me and I read it this week. Today I also came across a youtube slide show asking why do black men harass black women on the street. So this morning I wrote a post about these related topics (& also tracey rose’s black woman walking) and now I’m hoping for input from any one interested in the topic: http://streetharassment.wordpress.com/2009/06/12/you-think-youre-better-than-me/
I know it’s just more anecdotes rather than the hard data we all could use, but sharing our stories and having our views and voices heard is still really important. (related, if you want any of your street harassment stories shared on my blog, you can fill out a new anonymous online form to do so: http://stopstreetharassment.wufoo.com/forms/z7×4m1/) thanks.
Good news – I found Hawley Fogg-Davis’s article “Theorizing Black Lesbians within Black Feminism: A Critique of Same-Race Street Harassment” in its entirety online – it’s based on the article cited in the original post. Since it’s a published article, it can be cited:
http://journals.cambridge.org/download.php?file=%2FPAG%2FPAG2_01%2FS1743923X06060028a.pdf&code=966a01273c1b218314e1b68b258da7cd