The myth of the “bad” Black woman is rooted in the historical assumption that Black women possess an elevated level of sexuality beyond other women, that they are eager for sexual exploits, or that they are “loose in their morals.” Therefore they are perceived, as they have been historically, as deserving “none of the considerations and respect granted to White women.”9 The sexual terrorism to which Black women were subjected as enslaved women was justified by casting them as immoral and sexually insatiable.
This sentiment was memorialized by an anonymous article written in 1902 for The Independent, in which the author, a self-described “colored woman, wife and mother,” wrote, “There is a feeling of unrest, insecurity, almost panic among the best class of negroes in the South. . . . A colored woman, however respectable, is lower than the white prostitute. . . . We are neither ‘ladies’ nor ‘gents,’ but ‘colored.’”10 Two years later, Fannie Barrier Williams, a northern Black educator and activist, advocated for a fully integrated women’s rights movement. This, she argued, would include the need to address the myth of innate Black female promiscuity—which in turn affected social and policy responses to the victimization of Black women. In an article published by The Independent in 1904, Williams wrote the following:
I think it but just to say that we must look to American slavery as the source of every imperfection that mars the character of the colored American. It ought not to be necessary to remind a Southern woman that less than 50 years ago the ill-starred mothers of this ransomed race were not allowed to be modest . . . and there was no living man to whom they could cry for protection against the men who not only owned them, body and soul, but also the souls of their husbands, their brothers, and alas, their sons. Slavery made her the only woman in America for whom virtue was not an ornament and a necessity.11
Such long-held, deeply ingrained stereotypes have had a lasting imprint on society’s understanding of Black feminine sexuality. Iterations of the “jezebel” remain a part of our contemporary narrative about Black femininity.12 We see her not only in the presentation of hypersexualized “vixens” in hip-hop videos but also in social discourses that produce public policy responses to child welfare, health, and criminalization or incarceration.
The educational domain today is infused with the prevailing stigma of “jezebel”—primarily in the form of concerns among school officials about the moral decency of girls. The regulation of this so-called decency often happens through dress codes and other comments and behaviors that sexualize Black girls in schools. But it is most apparent in school responses to girls who have been sexually exploited. Teen girls who wear tight or revealing clothing, who are parenting, who are “slut-shamed” and bullied, who express gender along a continuum, and/or who are sexually assaulted are all living under the cloak of jezebel.
The Real
“I was involved in sex work for a very long time,” Paris, who is now a community organizer in her early twenties, admitted. “And was forced into sex work, not by a [pimp] . . . We talk about trafficking, but we don’t talk about it in terms of how society traffics individuals. Because society could traffic you, especially transwomen. And what I mean by society, I’m talking about not having any job opportunities, not having any housing opportunities, not having so many different opportunities that y’all may have that we don’t. So I had to get it how I did . . . but one thing I did do was go to school. I didn’t care how long I was on that corner for, or how long I was up the next night, I made it to school. I graduated. That’s one thing I did not play with, was my schooling. To each his own, though . . . again, I didn’t have a [pimp], I didn’t have anybody making me stay home, and a lot of these girls that are trafficked deal with not only the abuse, but they deal with being raped.
“Those men have to train those girls to be scared of them, to make them not want to leave,” Paris continued. “We be like, ‘Girl, child, we’ll leave, we’ll go on the block one night and we’ll disappear.’ But a lot of them men store fear into those women, to where they feel like wherever [they] go, [they’ll] always have somebody watching . . . so they keep tabs on you and stuff like that. Some of those girls . . . before they are actually put out on the streets, they’re held hostage in houses for months at a time getting raped, getting drugs injected into their veins, and coke forced up their nose, just to get them hooked on these addictions just to drag them through the mud. Basically, beat them down, then put them on the stroll because now you’re dealing with addiction, you’re dealing with so much other stuff. ‘If you want your drugs, I’m going to supply them to you, but you have to bring me the money first.’ So, those girls . . . I know for sure have to meet a quota. Those girls have to go out. . . . If he got twelve girls out there working for him, he expects at the end of the night to have all twelve of those girls to bring in $100. You know that’s $1,200 he just made at the end of the day. . . . If you don’t meet that quota, he will either have one of the other girls assault you, or he will assault you himself. So, I mean, it’s a whole lot. This is real. School-to-prison pipeline or school pushouts . . . all these things are real and sex work has a big part to play in it.
“A lot of girls are performing sex work and don’t even know that they are performing sex work,” Paris pointed out. “[He might say], ‘Give me a little head or give me a little tail and I’ll buy you something.’ Hell, what you think you doing? Sex work. You are providing services for materialistic stuff.”
In my conversations with other young women who were involved in sex work, many did not identify as “sexually exploited” or “sex-trafficked” girls, nor did they believe themselves to be “prostitutes.” Like Diamond, they might say instead that they have an older “boyfriend” (rather than a pimp) or “bust dates” to indicate a casual participation in the sex trade without fully committing to the idea that they were or are selling sex. These girls are vulnerable—very vulnerable—because they are often clawing their way out of some intense situations, without the supports of advocates or trained professionals who know how to respond to the needs of sexually exploited children. The men in their lives know that. These girls, who are often in foster care or come from unstable homes, become invisible in efforts to dismantle school-to-confinement pathways. With little understanding of how they’re being pulled out, we call them dropouts. We—educators, neighbors, and other community members—fail to include their stories and experiences in our understanding of how and why girls may not be attending school, or how the jezebel stigma affects their ability to go to school.
“If you haven’t eaten in a week because there’s no food in your house,” Bobbie in New Orleans said to a group of us discussing life in trafficking, “and someone pulls up to you on the street and says, ‘If you do this for me, I will feed you’ . . . you’re going to do it.”
“And if someone feeds you and they do have sex with you,” I continued, “they may make you feel like the most special person in the world.”
“Or the most nastiest person,” Paris said. “Because at the end of the day, like again, as a person who was involved in sex work, those types of men have the mentality of like, ‘I can do whatever I want to you because I’m paying to do this to you.’ So . . . you have some men who want the GF experience, and by that I mean that ‘girlfriend’ experience. They not going to treat you like, you know, any type of way. They’ll treat you like it’s some type of relationship there. Then you have those men that want to talk to you crazy, want to talk to you reckless. . . . ‘Put this in your mouth, put that in your mouth, touch this, grab that . . . and then at the end of the day, it makes you feel like, so degraded, like so low. . . . That was my problem with sex work. Although I was doing it for survival. . . . At the end of the day, I had a roof to provide. I had to put food in my stomach. Not only that, but I had a transition I had to keep up with, so it was a lot. . . . For those that are forced to deal with each and every man they come into contact with . . . these men auction them off. They will sit there and be like, the younger
you are, the better, because you’re young. You know, you haven’t really been tampered with. So, a lot of men will pay a lot more for a younger girl.”
Child exploitation isn’t free, and the girls who survive these experiences pay the highest price. Despite U.S. law that requires courts to order convicted traffickers to pay trafficking victims lost wages, they are much less likely than those who are labor-exploited to receive a monetary award for their suffering.13 This payment, which rarely if ever comes, could never compensate for the deep damage and losses that have little do with finances.
Nola Brantley is co-founder and former executive director of Motivating, Inspiring, Supporting and Serving Sexually Exploited Youth (MISSSEY), an organization that predominantly serves African American young women who have been sex-trafficked in the Bay Area. She says that the public’s failure to embrace Black girls as trafficked may also be a function of how Black girls present to the public when they are still under the watchful eye of their predator, pimp, and/or gang. Brantley argues that sexually exploited Black girls are not choosing to participate in the sex trade; they are in the traumatic throes of a “domino effect” of choices made for them. “Did they choose to grow up in poverty?” she asks. “Did they choose sexual abuse? Did they choose to get raped, some of them before they could walk? Did they choose to grow up in a world where women and girls are not safe? . . . As women and girls become more sexualized in the world, the more they are seen as property.”14
Black girls have been our forgotten daughters in responses to the global convergence of racial and gender inequality. Black girls are fully human—they are more than “hos” or a “thing” to break and/or take.15 For many girls, unwanted sexual attention in their early years sometimes leads to premature sexual behaviors. When a little girl who has been sexually assaulted is told and taught through children’s rhymes passed through generations to “shake it to the East, shake it to the West, shake it to the one that she loves the best” and is routinely singing lyrics from songs that objectify Black girls’ and women’s bodies, her spirit is further fed with ideas that affect her understanding of relationships and her perception of herself. For many girls who have survived sexual victimization, these revelations may not come right away in part because of the ways their social world reinforces the idea that they are their sexuality—rather than the idea that they own and control their sexuality. Their personal acknowledgment of their true potential is further obscured when sexual victimization goes unchallenged, or worse, is embedded in schools.
Too Sexy for School
From fourth through sixth grade my friends and I, like many others our age, played a game during recess called Hide and Go Get It. It was a variation of hide-and-seek in which boys would chase the girls and then “go get it.”
“Go get what?” I remember asking a classmate one day during recess.
“You know what,” she said to me with a smirk.
I remember feeling helpless. In this game, in which girls had to literally hide to avoid sexual encounters with the boys, I felt a complete lack of control. There were some girls who were rumored to “like” being “caught” by the boys. Why would a girl “like” that attention at such a young age? What was this attention providing for her? For me, as a survivor of sexual abuse, the idea was terrifying. I ran fast to avoid being caught in those games. Some days I wondered why I was even playing, but I had learned that this was the game that the “popular” girls played. In this case, “popularity” came with being subjected to ridicule and speculation by boys, other girls, and the many ways all children mimic the adult policing of girls’ sexuality. Experiences like this, which are seen as nothing more than normal and harmless child’s play, leave very young girls with the impossible task of trying to negotiate their own sexuality within ever-present gender and racial stereotypes. It’s the tip of the iceberg when it comes to understanding the dynamics of more tangible victimization.
At nearly 19 percent, the rate of sexual victimization for Black girls and young women is among the highest for any group in the nation.16 Girls experience sexual assault, objectification, or being seen as hypersexual in many places—including their homes, in the street, on buses and subway systems, in their places of worship, and in schools. It’s a web that not only entangles Black girls’ bodies but can also ensnare their minds. In the hallways, in the classrooms, on the yard, and in the bathrooms, Black girls describe conditions in which their bodies are scrutinized, touched (often without permission), and objectified in ways that make them feel self-conscious and constantly defensive.
In Chicago, a national hub for sex trafficking, young women were keenly aware of the ways in which assumptions about their sexuality and sexual behaviors were influencing their interactions with others: with other girls, but particularly with the men and boys in their schools and communities.17 Discussing this sexualization of Black femininity with a group of Chicago girls, Leila explained how she sees the role of mentorship.
“That’s why we have so many THOTy bodies,” she said. “Do you know what a THOTy body is? A THOT is someone who is promiscuous.* And to me, someone who is promiscuous is when you have multiple partners in a short amount of time . . . so I feel like the fathers being absent connects to the mother and it also connects to the daughter. . . . These mamas [are] THOTy bodies, too, so I’m trying to figure out where it started. . . . My mama is very promiscuous and [she’s] like forty-plus . . . yeah, it’s hard for today’s females.
Urban Dictionary and other pop culture sources define “THOT” as a slang acronym meaning “that ho over there.”
“Like, I was trying to talk to this guy, and he was like, ‘You want to kick it?’ I was like, ‘I don’t kick it. I don’t go in people’s crib or whatever.’ Why leave my crib to go to his? He was like, ‘So what you want to do?’ I was like, ‘I like to go to the movies, and I like to go on dates.’ He was like, ‘You a goofy.’ That’s what I feel like we have to deal with.”
In other words, this boy wanted Leila to come over to his place to have sex, but he thought it was ridiculous that she might actually be interested in going on a date.
“So if my self-esteem wasn’t high enough,” Leila continued, shaking her head, “if anybody steady getting [told] ‘You a goofy’ for respecting themselves or ‘You don’t look as pretty ’cause your titties not out’ . . . you got a group of females at school that’s not even focused on school, but more focused on being accepted. . . . You could act proud of yourself, but every time you try to display that, you’re getting knocked down. You doing something wrong. He told me that I was crazy! But luckily I know that I’m not crazy. . . . To me, that’s a big struggle for females, and it has to do with sexuality.”
“TV plays a role, too,” Michelle chimed in. “And I seen something on Facebook yesterday.”
“I’m not going to lie,” Nala said. “I do engage that VH-1 Love and Hip-Hop or whatever. . . .”
The group laughed. For many in the group, watching reality television was a guilty pleasure.
“But,” Nala said. “I don’t have the same mindset. I’ve gotten to the point where I’m okay doing things for me. Like, I don’t have to do extra for other people’s attention. If I get it, I get it. If I don’t, I wasn’t supposed to, you know? But it has gone from like, The Cosby Show, Family Matters, [and shows] that actually had like . . . families and everything to ‘Oh, this chick is just trying to have a baby by me and take my money.’ We have that to look forward to on television.”
“I know a lot of people,” Leila chimed in, “girls [who] pop mollies.* And people don’t know the effects of mollies yet. Now, think about what that’s going to do to your education. You don’t even know the effects of it . . . and a lot of them are getting into gangs as well because it’s becoming so hard out here. There’s no jobs. There’s no structure. There’s no role models. When you get that, you got young people ruling the world, and without structure, young people can’t rule the world because life is what gives you that
experience. They learning . . . and a female is going to be a THOT to get a guy’s attention or be a gang banger to get a guy’s attention. It’s hard to just be a lady and get a guy’s attention nowadays.”
The National Institute on Drug Abuse defines molly as ecstasy, a synthetic psychoactive drug that has similarities to both the stimulant amphetamine and the hallucinogen mescaline.
Black girls, like other girls, want to be appreciated for who they are, not solely what they look like. In the summer of 2014, I observed girls in a media program write signs that read “I am not my booty” and other signs that declared their desire to be seen for more than their bodies. Throughout years of talking with girls, they have consistently, in both quiet and robust ways, inquired about why their bodies are objectified and their minds dismissed.
Across the country, nearly half of public schools (49 percent) have implemented a formal uniform policy or dress code designed to regulate the presentation of clothing in school or establish norms for student dress as a part of the school culture.18 Uniforms provide a structure to the way students arrive in school and are associated with having a positive impact on classroom discipline, image in the community, student safety, and pride.19 There is less peer scrutiny, critique of a young person’s socioeconomic status, and emphasis on the “fashion show” because everyone is wearing the same thing. However, there are two sides to this coin. As discussed in Chapter 2, enforcement of uniform or dress code rules can lead to different battles, ones that result in girls being asked to leave the school. Dress codes, for all of their benefits, have become a tool of oppression.
School structures often fail to recognize their role in facilitating the punishment—and policing—of Black girls’ sexuality. Marcus, the same high school dean who noted that Black girls were “not docile,” felt that dress codes are an important part of establishing the school climate.
Pushout Page 13