Institutional Racism, is there anything that it can’t justify or explain?
After a video went viral of a woman in New York walking around and being harassed… mainly by minority men, the cries of racism went up along with assorted justifications.
“Part of being honest about street harassment and creating awareness of it has to be an honest assessment of the ways this kind of harassment can be a way marginalized groups talk back to the white gentrifiers taking over their neighborhoods,” Emily Gould wrote at Salon.
Dee Lockett, an African-American Slate writer, went one step further.
In a statement explaining the absence of white guys in the video, Rob Bliss of Rob Bliss Creative, the firm that partnered with Hollaback on the video, said, “We got a fair amount of white guys, but for whatever reason, a lot of what they said was in passing or off camera.” I’d bet this is because, as Bliss gets at in his quote, white men, on average, don’t catcall in the same way that men of color do—and oftentimes, as I’ve learned, they don’t do it at all.
That, of course, is not to say that white men don’t have their own predatory nature—one that is expressed in ways unique to their privilege. As we know from countless court cases, it’s not that white men don’t hassle women (or rich white men, as Joyce Carol Oates implied this week in a tone-deaf tweet), it’s that they do it in a different way.
“Unique to their privilege”. Let’s recap. All men are evil. White men are evil in more subtler ways because of their privilege.
Men of color catcall vocally and visibly on the sidewalk because they have to—not that there’s ever excuse for harassment. They need the “Sexy!” and “Smile!” to create the illusion of dominance in shared public spaces that social constructs and institutional racism have never afforded them control over.
Ah yes, institutional racism. So what do white men do?
Particularly when I’m in a group with other women of color, they circle us, giving off cues to dance in a way that suggests it’s nothing more than a social experiment for them; it’s as if they’re wondering, “what’s it really like to dance with a black girl?”
I ran that sentence through the computer to try and make sense of it and it moved to Quebec and took up mime.
To recap. Black men harass women on the street. White men make Lockett feel like a social experiment in some undefined way. When black men harass women, it’s because they are oppressed and privileged.
To the left, no one ever does anything because they want to. It’s because they’re acting out a set of privileges based on the left’s rules.





















