INTRODUCTION
At approximately 3:30 in the morning of Sunday, May 11, 2003, 15-year-old Sakia Gunn was murdered while waiting with four friends for a bus in Newark, New Jersey. The girls were on their way home from a party in Manhattan when, according to one of Gunn's friends, two men got out of a car and sexually propositioned them. When the women rebuffed them, saying they were lesbians, 29-year-old Richard McCullough fatally stabbed Gunn in the chest. McCullough turned himself in to Newark police on May 15, and was arrested and charged with second-degree murder. In a plea bargain, prosecutors reduced the charges to manslaughter, aggravated assault, and bias intimidation, for which McCullough is now serving a 20-year prison sentence.1
Mick Meenan, “Sakia Gunn's Killer Pleads Guilty,” Gay City News, 10–16 March 2005.
Ronald Smothers, “Man Arrested in the Killing of a Teenager in Newark,” New York Times, 16 May 2004.
These silences and hesitations, within both the dominant American public sphere and what Michael Dawson terms the “black counterpublic,” underscore the social devaluing of the identities that Gunn embodied, or was presumed to embody.3
Dawson's notion of the “black counterpublic” is modeled upon Nancy Fraser's concept of a feminist “counter public,” which is a critical response to Jürgen Habermas's ideal of democratic communicative action within a public sphere (Dawson, 2001).
See, for example, The Laramie Project (HBO Films, 2002).
See, for example, North Country (Warner Brothers Pictures, 2005), a movie inspired by the true story of a white woman who brought the first successful U.S. class-action lawsuit for sexual harassment in the workplace.
Black women's simultaneous embodiment of blackness and femaleness, as black feminists have long noted, leaves them between the categories of race and sex, thus forcing them to divide and prioritize social identities that are integral to their self-concepts and life experience. Black women are of course not the only group with multiple identities, but their legal and political bifurcation is more obvious than that of many other groups because race (read: blackness) and sex (read: femaleness) have historically evolved as two discrete and insular definitive paradigms for the detection and remediation of invidious discrimination.6
For an historical explication of this judicial doctrine, see Koppelman (1996).
Gunn's violent death at the hands of McCullough poses a direct challenge to black feminists both to articulate the political harm of street harassment among African Americans and to highlight the particular ways that black lesbian identification complicates that political harm. If black feminism is to be theoretically and practically meaningful to black lesbians, it must consistently and substantively recognize and value the sexual diversity that exists and has always existed among black women. One way to begin this work is for black feminists to retrieve the political vocabulary of “culture” and “behavior” from black conservatives, and redeploy these terms to critique interpersonal black sexist and heterosexist conduct. This is not to deny the simultaneity of plural identities such as class, age, and skin color within black women's lives. Nor do I deny other sexual and gender identities, such as bisexualism, transgenderism, and gender presentations of “fem,” “fem-aggressive,” and “aggressive,” that are unique to the contemporary black lesbian subculture in and around New York City (Moore forthcoming).7
For a portrayal of this subculture, see Daniel Peddles's film The Aggressives.
Black feminists direct our attention to the privatized arenas of black life, where much of black women's oppression occurs, but many of these arguments focus solely or mostly on the structural features of such oppression. I use “structural” in the same way that Charles Mills uses “social ontology” to mean “the basic struts and girders of social reality” (Mills 1998, 44), both psychological and material, that cannot be (easily) traced back to specific persons.8
See also the definition of “institutional racism” in Carmichael and Hamilton (1967).
Theorizing black women's structural location is important, but so too are the daily decisions that individual black men and women make within overarching systems of power relations, for these decisions can help to catalyze the reform of unjust cultural practices, such as street harassment, which can in turn chisel away at structural inequality.9
Extralegal social customs are often more tyrannical than formal law. Peer pressure, as John Stuart Mill ([1859] 1974) argues in On Liberty, can thus be a very effective way to change behaviors that constitute customs.
More careful attention to the connections between these two analytical levels can help black feminists articulate the epistemological connections and disconnections between black lesbians and black heterosexual women. Gunn's murder should not be viewed as idiosyncratic, but instead as consistent with behavioral patterns that reinforce rather than challenge a black patriarchal structure predicated upon “compulsory heterosexuality” (Rich 2005) and its control of black women. I start with a short overview of the political harm involved in the street harassment of women in general, and of black women in particular.10
Boys and men are sometimes targeted for harassment by other males, but such harassment typically follows the patriarchal pattern of singling out boys and men who appear to be weak and/or effeminate, and can therefore be seen as gender policing. Girls and women sometimes try to street-harass other female or males, but it is difficult for them to wield patriarchal power in the way that boys and men can and do.
STREET HARASSMENT
Feminist Deirdre Davis describes the street harassment of women as the harm that has no name. The power to name one's experiences is a central theme across the ideological spectrum of second- and third-wave feminism, social and academic movements that have generally endeavored to bring into public light women's privatized experiences of sex-based oppression.11
For an overview of the major agreements and disagreements between second- and third-wave feminism, see Walker (1995). Kimberly Springer (2002) rejects the wave metaphor, arguing that it fails to portray the historical continuity of black women's oppressions.
Sexual terrorism aptly describes street harassment. As a woman you know it will happen, but you never know for certain when or how it will happen. This makes street harassment hard to define and difficult to combat. Its insidiousness derives in large measure from its venue: the semiprivate, semipublic everyday activity of walking, sitting, or standing along city streets, or in other public spaces such as parks and shopping malls. Its regulation raises obvious First Amendment issues of free speech and expression, which make it seem like just another female burden to be endured. Most girls first experience street harassment by boys and men at or even before puberty, and thus learn to see their bodies as sources of sexual danger; their sexual vulnerability to boys and men becomes an inescapable and constant condition of being female, a liability to be managed privately rather than discussed and remedied publicly. Indeed, it is the banality of street harassment that makes it so effective in maintaining a larger system of sexual terrorism. The point is not to prove a causal connection between street harassment and physical assault, but rather to acknowledge that street harassment “reminds women of their vulnerability to violent attack in American urban centers, and to sexual violence in general” (Davis 1994, 141). Unless the harasser's remarks and/or gestures lead to a physical assault, most women “transform the pain into something else, such as, for example, punishment, or flattery, or transcendence, or unconscious pleasure” (West 1987, 85).
It is only retrospectively, as in the stabbing to death of Gunn, that street harassment registers on the public radar screen as a likely precursor to violent assault. Davis's point, however, is that street harassment harms women even in the absence of physical attack. As she recounts, “An incident of street harassment often forces me to rechannel my energies away from issues on my mind to the intrusive interaction, makes me lose my train of thought, and interrupts my thought process. As a result, my way of knowing is replaced by men's thoughts of women” (Davis 1994, 143). Extrapolating from Frantz Fanon's depiction of racism's psychological damage, Davis concludes that “[t]he systematic and institutionalized phenomenon of psychological oppression causes a victim ‘to be weighed down in [her] mind … to have a harsh dominion exercised over [her] self-esteem’” (ibid., 146–47). This psychological “weight” both denies women equal concern and respect and restricts their mobility in public space.
If we are to understand the political significance of Gunn's murder, we must look within a larger system of U.S. sexual terrorism for the particular social meanings that are attached to black female embodiment. All black women must contend with the stereotype of promiscuous sexual deviance: the prostitute, the Jezebel, the wet nurse. Black feminists widely acknowledge this stereotype, but most fail to notice its profound heterosexism. Black women, like animals, “are promiscuous because they lack intellect, culture, and civilization. Animals do not have erotic lives; they merely ‘fuck’ and reproduce” (Collins, 2004, 100). Black lesbian identity may include parenting, but it also asserts an erotic life not tied to “breeding.” Black communities vilify black lesbians for their sexual rejection of black men, while the larger U.S. society deems them irrelevant and ungrievable. Gunn's murder elucidates these cultural patterns of punishment and neglect. Davis rightly concludes that “[s]treet harassment forces African American women to realize that the ideologies of slavery still exist” (1994, 163), but she fails to consider how heterosexism pervades slave ideology.
That the history of slavery underlies white men's street harassment of black women is intuitive, but what are we to make of black men's street harassment of black women? Davis argues that when black men harass black women, they seek “the position of whiteness” occupied by white men. Quoting bell hooks, she argues that the futility of these efforts means that “men of color are not able to reap the material and social rewards for their participation in patriarchy. In fact they often suffer from blindly and passively acting out a myth of masculinity that is life threatening. Sexist thinking blinds them to this reality. They become victims of the patriarchy” (Davis 1994, 171). I agree that racism prevents black men from fully participating in white patriarchy, but I disagree that black men are mere victims of that patriarchy. For although black men suffer under the weight of racial stereotypes that constrict their lives in myriad ways, they also reap material and psychological rewards for perpetuating black patriarchal practices such as street harassment. I am not suggesting that Davis intends for the term “victim” to exonerate black men who street-harass, but I do think that her use of the term hinders frank discussion about personal and communal responsibility among African Americans, thus evidencing the normative equivocation of black feminism flagged earlier.
We can acknowledge that black men's relationship to patriarchy is complicated by race and still be critical of individual black men who use street harassment to monitor, intimidate, and control black women. Street harassment is not a uniquely black problem; it is pervasive throughout U.S. society and indeed throughout most of the world.12
Street harassment requires physical proximity, and so tends to be more prevalent in areas with pedestrian traffic: for example, U.S. northeastern cities. In suburbia and rural areas, street harassment often takes the form of boys or men catcalling girls and women from cars or trucks.
BLACK IDEOLOGICAL VOCABULARY
Addressing the problem of street harassment requires a theoretical vocabulary that captures both the structural features of black patriarchy and black men and women's interpersonal decision making. This section briefly explicates the political vocabulary of sex-neutral black ideologies in order to demonstrate the need for a black feminist vocabulary that is both structurally and interpersonally sensitive to black lesbians' intraracial treatment. These ideologies include black liberalism, which Dawson subdivides into radical egalitarianism and disillusioned liberalism (2001); the black radical tradition, which mainly consists of black nationalism,13
The borders of these categories are nevertheless porous, as Dawson points out that many disillusioned liberals come to embrace aspects of black radicalism (2001).
Kilson (1993) argues that older black conservatives such as Booker T. Washington were “organic” in that they had significant support from black communities, unlike the black conservatives who emerged in the 1980s—Glenn Loury, Shelby Steele, Thomas Sowell, and others—and who cultivate ties to white conservative think tanks.
Radical egalitarianism is an optimistic version of American liberalism that melds a scathing critique of American racism with optimism that a strong central state can and should correct for the moral and material inequities wrought by slavery, Jim Crow, and their aftermath. Radical egalitarians, such as Frederick Douglass and the early W. E. B. Du Bois and Martin Luther King, Jr., developed moral arguments based in a literal or “textualist” interpretation of equality references found in the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bible.15
Both invoke natural law to demonstrate the immorality of slavery in Douglass's time (Mills 1998), and Jim Crow in King's (King 1986).
For a discussion of Du Bois's invocation of Marx and Freud to theorize U.S. racism, see Holt (1990, 309). By 1967 King had become decidedly disillusioned (Dawson 2001, 17.)
Black feminists subscribe to the racial pragmatism of disillusioned liberalism, but criticize black liberals for not explicitly acknowledging sexism as an intersecting legal and social vector that disadvantages black women in unique ways. Although many of the political concerns of black women coincide with those of black men (e.g., voting rights, fair housing, heath care, and education), black women also experience sexism in interpersonal settings both within and without black communities that black liberals treat as private and thus beyond their analytical reach, such as intimate-partner violence, teen pregnancy, and street harassment. Black liberal civil rights organizations like the NAACP and the National Urban League mostly focus on eradicating public forms of racism through governmental intervention in resource redistribution and antidiscrimination law. A long history of black male leadership in these and other black organizations recycles a black patriarchal division of labor that casts black women “as helpmates rather than equals” (Zook 1995, 86). To the charge that black feminist calls for sexual equality within black communities splinter black racial solidarity, Kristol Brent Zook sees a house already divided, pointing out that “black women's voices don't move through public arenas in the same way that black men's do” (ibid.).17
For critical accounts of black women's organizational roles in the civil rights movement, see Collier-Thomas and Franklin (2001).
Social conservatism regarding gender roles and homosexuality pervades all black ideologies,18
See Ta-Nehisi Coates, “Fear of Gay Marriage Gives the GOP Another Chance at Minority Voters: Queer Eye for the Black Guy,” Village Voice 24–30 September 2003.
THEORIZING INTERPERSONAL CONDUCT
In contrast to black liberalism and black nationalism, black conservatism and black feminism offer a political vocabulary for theorizing the privatized dimensions of black civic life, albeit with very different motivations, definitions, and results. Black conservatives' political vocabulary of personal and communal responsibility could supplement black feminists' structural accounts of black women's political travails, but not in its current format. Thomas Sowell, Glenn Loury, Shelby Steele, Clarence Thomas, Orlando Patterson, and other black conservatives fail to acknowledge intraracial power disparities between black men and women within the various civic associations they promote. Residual racial disadvantage, according to most black conservatives, is limited to economic disparity, which they link to the putative antisocial behavior of the black urban poor (Reed 1994). Behavioral change is needed, black conservatives argue, before blacks can take advantage of the formal equal opportunities that now exist within American capitalism as a result of the Civil Rights movement of the 1950s and 60s.
Black conservatives direct our attention to black civic life, but their analyses of black civic associations are vague. Loury, for instance, articulates a hazy set of moral directives for black civic reform: “Dealing with behavioral problems; with community values; with the attitudes and beliefs of black youngsters about responsibility, work, family, and schooling are not things government is well suited to do. The teaching of ‘oughts’ properly belongs in the hands of private voluntary associations: churches, families, neighborhood groups” (1995, 22).19
More recently, Loury has urged Americans to take collective responsibility for the putative pathology of black culture (2002, 12).
This quietude offers rich ground for black feminist criticism. For it is within black civic life that political problems such as street harassment are trivialized and dismissed. Black liberalism and black nationalism, as sketched earlier, do not direct our attention to black civic life. Black conservatives lead us to the associative aspects of black life wherein much of black women's political vulnerability lies, but they fail to connect individual behaviors such as McCullough's street harassment and murder of Gunn to the structure of black patriarchy. To be clear, I am not arguing that the aspirations of black conservatives and black feminists are compatible. I argue instead that black conservatives' lack of intraassociational critique gives black feminists a clear opening for retrieving the language of culture and interpersonal conduct, and recasting it as an integral part of their structural critiques of the intersection between racism and sexism.
Black conservatives' advocacy of free-market libertarianism based in the presentism of economic transaction, rather than historical remediation, fails to capture black patriarchy, which is by definition historical.20
“Presentism tends to slow down the process whereby erroneous or unhelpful formulations are discarded, and it can be pernicious when analyses of past events are distorted by a desire to support a contemporary political strategy” (Banton 2000, 62). For an overview of “patriarchy” (“rule of the father”) as it has factored into feminist political theory, see Tong (1998).
On the history of a black “politics of respectability,” see Gaines (1996).
Street harassment is not a behavior that is limited to the black urban poor. It is a tool of sexual domination available to all men. It is thus a democratic condition of male embodiment. The economic idiom of black conservatives' free-market libertarianism cannot explain this messier, more diffuse sense of culture. Furthermore, “the conservatives who maintain that persistent poverty in the inner city is the result of some cultural deficiency have garnered so much opposition from many liberals and radicals that few scholars are willing even to discuss culture” (Kelley 1997, 17–18). The trope of cultural dysfunction is also deeply gendered, as “the problems associated with the behaviorally focused ‘underclass’ are predominantly identified with [black] females” (P. Smith 1999, 268). Stereotypes of black women as hypersexual and hyper-fecund that circulate throughout the dominant American public sphere also circulate within black civic life, affecting intraracial gender and sexual politics. As mothers, black women are blamed for perpetuating intergenerational poverty by bearing too many children at too young an age, and for failing to impart the proper moral and cultural values to their children.22
Dorothy Roberts writes, “Black mothers are seen to corrupt the reproduction process at every stage…. They impart a deviant lifestyle to their children through their example” (1997, 9).
For instance, Patterson argues that blacks' best strategy for achieving racial parity with whites is through heterosexual interracial marriage (1997, 193).
REVISING BLACK FEMINIST POLITICAL VOCABULARY
As noted previously, all black feminist arguments posit an intersectional analysis of at least race and sex, and are launched within the epistemological framework of fighting antiblack racism. Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham explains that “[b]y continually expressing overt and covert analogic relationships, race impregnates the simplest meanings we take for granted” (1992, 255). Race is a “metalanguage” that functions “to subsume other sets of social relations, namely gender and class,” while it simultaneously “blurs and disguises its own complex interplay with the very social relations it envelops” (ibid.). Higginbotham does not say how race “subsumes” lesbianism within an intersectional framework. Indeed, across a wide range of contemporary black feminist arguments, one finds tension and contradiction between the dualistic metaphor of intersection and the multiplicity of black women's other social identities.
Black feminism should be pragmatically attuned to black women's legal and political bifurcation, but it should also theorize black lesbians' place within the intersection of race and sex. In 1977, the black feminist Combahee River Collective issued its manifesto declaring that black feminism should be “committed to struggle against racial, sexual, heterosexual, and class oppression” (1995, 232), thus setting in motion the now-common practice of black feminists' nominal inclusion of class and sexuality. Kimberlé Crenshaw later used the trope of “intersection” to portray black women's bifurcated status within antidiscrimination law (1991). Some black feminists working within law and the social sciences rely on the trope of “multiplication” to convey the intuitive sense that black women's oppression exceeds the sum of their constitutive identifications (King 1988; Wing 1997). However, these mathematical metaphors obscure rather than clarify black lesbians' theoretical status within black feminism.
The arts and humanities allow more room for theorizing identity proliferation and complication. Poet-activist Audre Lorde urged us to recognize that our identities are more numerous and unruly than most of us let on: “Those of us who stand outside [the mythic norm of white, thin, male, young, heterosexual, Christian, and financially secure] often identify one way in which we are different, and we assume that to be the primary cause of all oppression, forgetting other distortions around difference, some of which we ourselves may be practicing” (2000, 539). In stretching human difference to its logical conclusion—pluralistic humanism—Lorde inspires self-examination and interpersonal learning. These are worthy goals, but difficult to translate into the categorical language of law and politics. We get a sense of human complication, but no instruction on how black lesbian identity affects the intersection of racism and sexism.
Collins emphasizes Gunn's “coming out” as a lesbian as precipitant in her murder, but she then brackets Gunn's sexual identity: “Like African American girls and women, regardless of sexual orientation, they were seen as approachable. Race was a factor, but not in a framework of interracial race relations” (Collins 2004, 115; my emphasis). In calling attention to Gunn's sexual orientation and then bracketing it, Collins detracts somewhat from her earlier argument regarding black lesbians' particular relationship to a heterosexist slave ideology that gets refracted to contemporary black civic life. Cathy Cohen uses the term “cross-cutting issues” to depict the secondary marginalization of black lesbian and gay political interests within black politics (1999). At the level of interpersonal politics, black lesbians like Gunn must make situational decisions about whether to try to pass for straight or to “come out.” This sparks an internal sense of transgression that David Richards calls a “psychic ghetto of the mind” that deprives lesbians and gay men of a public “language of sexual experience and sensual bonding” (2000, 175). Black lesbians and gay men are completely absent from Elijah Anderson's (1999) ethnographic account of “the code of the street” within poor black Philadelphia neighborhoods. A plausible conclusion to draw from this lapse is that the code of the street still silences black lesbian and gay voices, even as it may tolerate their visible presence. Gunn broke the code of the street by verbalizing her lesbian identity, which instantly challenged McCullough's power within the black patriarchal turf of the street.
Black patriarchy did not predetermine McCullough's actions, but it did make readily available to him a social script in which his street harassment and physical assault of a black lesbian would be downplayed or ignored by black civic organizations and the greater U.S. public. As I have argued, black feminists should explicitly and consistently hold black men responsible for their treatment of black women. Likewise, they should hold black women accountable for their decisions to reinforce black patriarchy. Heterosexual black women reinforce black patriarchy when they distance themselves from, and fail to speak up on behalf of, black lesbians. Black lesbians reinforce black patriarchy when they fail to draw links between their political welfare and black feminist activism and scholarship. As Barbara Smith reminds, “Black feminism and black lesbianism are not interchangeable” (1995). We cannot assume that Gunn identified or would have ever identified as a black feminist. Black feminist consciousness requires introspection and awareness beyond one's experiences and desires. This means dispensing with perfunctory identity lists and engaging in the hard work of compassion, which necessitates familiarity, which in turn demands specificity.
The slogan “the personal is political” not only refers to one's own personal orbit but also issues the challenge of understanding and valuing sexual choices and identities that differ from one's own. Gunn's murder, if we are to confront its systemic features, can make black lesbian embodiment familiar to heterosexual black women by reminding them that they too are disciplined to stay within the narrow confines of a tenuous ideal of black womanhood that they can never possess but are compelled nonetheless to reach for. Like all gender ideals, black women's individual efforts to master such ideals are asymptotic at best. Epithets such as “ho,” “bull-dagger,” and “dyke” are disciplinary tools that need not correspond to a woman's self-identification or “true” identity. Confronted with the relentless onslaught of messages that depict them as natural prostitutes and “breeders,” many black women adopt the defensive stereotype of the “strongblackwoman” (Morgan 2000) or “bullet-proof diva” (Jones 1997), which prevents them from seeing street harassment as a pressing political issue that harms them. Quoting Veronica Chambers, Kimberly Springer “likens Black women to magicians, ‘masters of emotional sleight of hand. The closer you get, the less you can see. It was true of my mother. It is also true of me’” (Springer 2002, 1070).
Interest convergence between black lesbian and heterosexual women does not, however, erase black lesbians' particularity within black politics. So while both black straight and gay women's sexualities are distorted and clouded by what Naomi Zack calls the “American sexualization of race,”24
Zack writes that “there seems to be no historical precedent for the sexualization of race in the United States, that is, no earlier cultural example of the assignment of a debased form of sexuality to an hereditary caste, over generations” (1997, 148).
See Kimberly Springer's (2002, 1073) critique of Joan Morgan's memoir.
CONCLUSION
My hope is that black feminism will begin to consistently theorize the connections and differences between lesbian and straight black women. This requires reconsideration of the political vocabulary used by black feminists both to describe black female embodiment across sexual identities and to develop behavioral prescriptions for reforming the structural inequalities they flag. There are specific “oughts” that ought to be taught within black families, schools, churches, and community organizations concerning the treatment of black girls and women within black civic life, and black feminists should not equivocate on this. Chief among these “oughts” is for boys and men to understand the psychological and existential harms they inflict when they participate in a long-standing culture of street harassment, and for black girls and women not to dismiss such harm as trivial.
Street harassment indicates a sexual imbalance of power that is connected to broader systems of patriarchy, racism, and homophobia. This is what black conservatives miss in their presentist accounts of an urban black culture of poverty. Black conservatives are not entirely wrong to point up the need for cultural change, but such cultural change must go hand in hand with critical inquiry into the social and economic structuring of U.S. society as it impacts black civic life, as well as with serious investigation of the gender and sexual dynamics within black civic associations. Black feminists have begun this important work, but they must investigate the theoretical specificity of black lesbian identity as it interacts with the structural intersection between racism and sexism. Black lesbian identification is central to this intersection because the macro and micro control of black women's sexualities is central to black patriarchy. In light of this, a central project of black feminism should be the promotion of black women's sexual autonomy, their right to an erotic life with or without black men.
