By Sikivu Hutchinson
In April thousands of schools did
outreach for Denim
Day, a global observance that honors sexual assault survivors. This Denim Day my Women’s
Leadership Project (WLP) students from Gardena and Washington Prep High
schools in South Los Angeles conducted classroom trainings on gender equity and
sexual violence; challenging their peers to critically examine the media,
school, and community images that promote sexualized violence against women of
color. WLP is a feminist humanist
mentoring and advocacy program based at Gardena and Washington Prep. Like most South Los Angeles schools these two
campuses are predominantly black and Latino.
They have high foster care, homeless, and juvenile offender populations
and will be among the most deeply impacted campuses if the Los Angeles Unified
School District proceeds with a plan to phase
out health education requirements.
Health education is a frontline social
justice issue in our schools. Much of WLP’s
curriculum focuses on HIV and STI contraction, intimate partner violence, and
sexual assault. Women of color have some
of the highest sexual assault rates in the nation. Yet, when the girls in our
workshops were asked to speculate about why our communities have disproportionate
rates of sexual assault they trotted out stereotypes like “mixed race women are
more likely to be raped because they are the ‘prettiest’ and “black women get
assaulted more because they have ‘big butts.’ The association between black
women’s anatomies and sexual violence was pervasive. It brought home how deeply our young women
are impacted by internalized racism and sexism.
And it underscored how hyper-sexual media depictions of young women of
color normalize sexual violence.
Youth of color do not have the
language to talk about the pain of sexual violence. As a survivor growing up in the 70’s and 80’s
I certainly didn’t. Coming of age in an
era in which they are stereotyped and criminalized as hard, swaggering, and
nihilistic youth of color don’t “play” as victims. So when the WLP students
began their presentations they encountered ridicule and bitter denial in some
classes. There is still widespread
belief among girls that women bring sexual violence on themselves because of
the way they dress, act, talk or walk. Consequently,
much of our training focuses on the culture of everyday misogynist violence
that makes it acceptable for young women to call each other “bitches” and “hos.” In fact, at the beginning of one presentation
with a particularly resistant class, a girl sitting in the front jokingly
referred to WLP 12th grade leader Liz
Soria as a “bad bitch.” When Liz checked her she apologized, but the cold reality
is that our girls are drowning in a 24/7 corporate media culture that serves up
gang rape in videogames like Grand Theft Auto and state-sanctioned “rape” via
the right wing family planning and abortion rights backlash.
Some girls claim they use the terms
“my bitch or my ho” playfully. In their
view this neutralizes the negative connotations of these words, ala the way some
young people use the word “nigga.” Of course, most girls of color use these
terms to put “bad girls” who are deemed promiscuous and unruly in their place. There is no consciousness that black women
have always been deemed “bad” in the eyes of the dominant culture; as less than
feminine, as bodies for violent pornographic exploitation, as essentially “un-rapeable.”
For example, under slavery the rape of a black woman (regardless of whether the
perpetrator was black or white) was not a punishable offense. And it was not
until the mid-20th century that the rapes of black women were even seriously
prosecuted. Thus, while white femininity
is the beauty ideal and hence the human ideal—exemplified by the tabloid
media’s obsession with missing white women and white girls who become
nationally eulogized as “our daughters” the face of victimhood—the “bitches”
and “hos” of the inner city symbolize the disorder and ungovernableness of
urban America.Unable to see themselves and their lives as valuable girls of color slam each other girls for being “ratchet” (the new term for an unruly promiscuous girl) and sloganeer violent misogynist lyrics without a second thought. But as the WLP students work through definitions, case studies, and scenarios of sexual assault and sexual harassment in the classroom they often see attitudes begin to shift. Debunking the myth that rapists are strangers lurking in dark alleys, rather than fathers, step-fathers, uncles, and cousins, the trainings often elicit identification from students who have never had this experience validated. WLP frontally addresses homophobia and the stigma surrounding male sexual assault victims, particularly in hyper-religious black and Latino communities. Getting young men and women to examine the destructiveness of traditional norms of hard, aggressive, invulnerable masculinity is also a key part of our outreach.
I consider myself fortunate to be
working with young women who are building a movement to change our local and national
culture of misogyny. Ultimately silence—as
the old HIV/AIDS activist saying goes—still does equal death.
Sikivu Hutchinson is program director of the Women’s
Leadership Project and the author of Moral
Combat: Black Atheists, Gender Politics, and the Values Wars.
