Hollaback!, an organization against street sexual harassment, recently produced a video that followed a white woman around New York City for hours while she endured endless catcalling, largely, from men of color. The creators experienced immediate backlash for reportedly editing out their white counterparts.
The collective explained that “a lot of what they said was in passing.” Um, we’re going to go out on a limb and say that white and male privilege is at the root of whatever that actually means.
Before the week was over, a New York Times “Room for Debate” feature begged a very important question: “Should current laws dealing with harassment be strengthened to include catcalling?”
Apart from class and gender, the racial matters at hand add yet another layer to this already compact catcalling issue, which really does equate to sexual harassment more often than not, fellas.
Via NYMag:
Three years before anti-street-sexual-harassment group Hollaback! released its controversial video — in which a white woman walks New York and receives more than 100 catcalls in one day — the women-of-color-led group Girls for Equality produced a similar one. One of these videos has 33 million views. The other, fewer than 30,000. “I mean is everyone only paying attention because there’s a white woman in Hollaback’s video?” Crunk Feminist Collective’s Brittney Cooper asked yesterday. If it does take a white woman appearing to be victimized by black and Latino men to get people to care about street sexual harassment — which happens everywhere, to women of all races, at the hands of men of all races — that’s depressing. One small silver lining is that the backlash was loud and swift, yielding a much more interesting conversation that included race and class.
Two Twitter members summed up perfectly the crux of the problem with the catcalling video. See their tweets below. And let us know what YOU think in the comments.
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Photo: YouTube
