Feminists complain about street harassment all the time. I’ve never actually seen someone harass a woman on the street, I’ve never done it, and none of my friends have done it. So, I’ve always been a bit skeptical, because if something is so common, why haven’t I ever even seen it occur before. A few women have told me a story or two of a random crazy person on the bus doing something harassing (ie. one man on a bus just sat himself in the lap of a girl I dated), so I knew harassment did occur, but were usually isolated events done by crazy people. I never believed it happened as omnipresently as feminists claim.
Slate has tried to prove that harassment exists omnipresently by a woman filming herself walking for 10 hours. Here’s a two-minute highlight video of the harassment. Watch it.
First, that’s 2 minutes from 10 hours, so unless a lot of harassment was cut out, that’s not as much as feminists complain about. The video claims 100+ incidents, so that’s about one incident per every six minutes, that’s more, but still not much.
Second, if we assume the video included the worst of the harassment, a safe assumption give the point of the video, the “harassment” seem rather insignificant. this “harassment” included people doing nothing but saying “Have a nice evening”, “God bless”, and “how are you this morning?”. So in other words, to acknowledge a woman’s existence is harassment. What did the 80 incidences not bad enough to appear in the video include, people saying ‘hello’?
If this is the best evidence of harassment feminists can dredge up, I still do not buy the feminist argument. In fact, this video is a strike against it.
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The more interesting part of this video though is race. I counted the incidences in the video, and by my count there were 21 harassers (two incidences had two perpetrators). Of those, 10 of the harassers looked black, 5 looked white, 2 looked Hispanic, and in 4 incidences I could not identify the race (although, two sounded stereotypically black to me).
So, of the incidences where the race was known, black committed 10 of the 17 of the cases of harassment, about 60%. Also, the the most egregious harassments (she was followed twice and some yelled passed a first comment) were by blacks.
From this, it seems the major problem is not harassment from men in general, but harassment from urban black men in particular. This would explain why I’ve never witnessed it; there are very few urban blacks where I live. That the harassers are largely black is reinforced by the stereotypical ebonics name of the campaign the video is in support of, “Hollaback!”.
Also of interest is that only a couple harassers looked even remotely middle-class, the rest looked either working-class or welfare-class.
The target audience of Slate is middle-class white liberals with humanities degrees. These are not the type of people harassing the woman in the video. There is no point lecturing Slate readers on stopping harassment because Slate readers are not the ones harassing.
So, there seems to be no point to this article. Slate readers aren’t the ones doing the harassing and it’s not likely lower-class blacks will care about the moral protestations of middle-class white feminists.
The only reason I can think of to write this is to encourage white males to forcibly stop black men from harassing them. something which reminds me of the days when looking wrongly at a white woman was a lynching offence. It seems to me that Amanda Hess and Slate just inadvertently argued for society to resume lynching uppity blacks, or at least segregation to keep them off the streets white women might use. I think everybody involved needs to check their privilege.
Anyway, if you wish to donate to a campaign to stop uppity blacks from talking to white women, you can donate to Hollaback here.
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It looks like between writing this and posting it, the implications of this video have become clear and Slate is doing damage control.
And here I was thinking the long march through video games was the final march, now its men saying hello.
It’s another appeal for state action (and money), this time to criminalize men speaking to women. Focusing the attention on minorities may even been calculated, men can assume the White Knight role against rapists and woman beaters (though they later find out that the law criminalizes most men including themselves for doing nothing wrong), but a law putting men in jail if a woman complains she felt threatened when he said “Hello” is a tougher sell. But it’s clear the left now has ideological consensus for blanket restrictions on males, though whether they have the power to implement them remains to be seen
I’d go a step further and say it’s pointless to even lecture slate to do something when they see somebody harassing somebody else, which is part of what this campaign purports to be. It’s a “see something, say something” type deal. Except I don’t think you need much of an imagination to picture how your average humanities student upper-middle class liberal type instructing a troop of young urban blacks would go. Actually, we don’t need to use our imaginations.
This isn’t a white American problem. It’s a caste system problem, which is quite sex-biased towards black males (calling them somewhere akin to niggers), yet assimilates black blood from African females through Spanish/Portuguese conquistadores.
Problem is that she’s mixed with black. She probably has a black grandmother somewhere, which is why she has curly hair, since black American women are renowned for wigs, weaves and perms (chemical treatment which makes hair long and straight). In a caste system, both black men and mulatto men (sometimes even quadroon men) have very low-status.
Notice that she’s an olive-skinned (quadroon) Puerto Rican with curly hair. It isn’t a white American woman arguing for lynching. It’s a mixed quadroon woman from a mongrel Island in the Caribbean which is calling for lynching, since she sees herself as “fair game” (harassment) for those low-status males in the caste system she emerged from.
Black men, whether in the USA (racial segregation), or Central-South America (mixed populations + caste system), don’t have much political power, wealth, influence and have lower socio-economic status. The reason is two-fold.
The first is that the black community is technically not just dark-skinned/nappy haired but also matriarchal (e.g. welfare, single motherhood). The second is that the Spanish conquistadores preferred to mix with Amerindian women (various mestizos and castizos barely score black DNA), whereas Portuguese conquistadores mixed with black female slaves, so the black male Y-Chromosome is technically non-existent (most Brazilians score around 95% Y-Chromosome Southern European), despite the fact that black ancestry from the grandmother exists.
In places like Colombia, or Brazil, only black women were allowed to miscegenate with white male conquistadores whereas black men were overworked to death, died of diseases and didn’t reproduce (some of them were castrated by Middle Eastern Arab slave traders on the Mozambique coast of East Africa).
There’s a reason black men are called “Negros” in Brazil, whereas “Mulattos” (the mixed kids they produce) are stigmatized, and even the stigma against curly hair tends to derive from the “N-word”. It’s called “Mulatto Curly hair” (e.g. “cabelos cacheados”, “cabelo de mulatto”).
Black men just have a very low-status and that didn’t change through miscegenation. In places like Carribean, and Central-South America, black men were giving the middle finger and few people tried to help them.
The stigma against black ancestry is mostly because it’s male. It’s sex-biased. Black males? They’re “negros” (black), evil, stupid and low-status. Black females? A-Okay. Assimilating a black grandmother is alright. That’s how mixed-people in the Carribean, or Central-South America operate.
Watch Spanish-speaking television. Nobody likes black men. They’re low-status and that didn’t change through miscegenation. Black men are seen as disposable.
Apologies, I meant that “black men were given the middle finger”. They didn’t give others the middle finger, other people tried to lynch them. That’s why it’s the harassment attitude in a caste system is schizophrenic. It’s basically sex-biased towards the same ethnic group and divides the sexes from the same culture as if they were two different species (black man bad, black woman good).