Sexual Racism

Sounds ugly, and it is.

Once we thought that women of color were sexually harassed to the same degree as other women. We have come to learn that because they are often marginalized, less powerful, female minorities are harassed more and with greater severity.

More than the marginalization (lack of power in the workplace) of critical importance is having race/ethnicity and minority group status. Being a minority exerts unique and direct effects upon the likelihood of being sexually harassed or assaulted.

This is why it is called sexual racism. The punishment is sexual, and it is meted out due to race, more-so than gender. The inequalities of race and social class are sexualized in the workplace, and perhaps everywhere else as well, i.e., the family.

The roots reach back to times of slavery, when rape of black women wasn't something to argue about. Perhaps, sick as this sounds, white "masters" thought it welcomed. That and using sex as a way to maintain superiority, hammered in the status quo. Again, a way to hurt, to intimidate. Anything to make a group tremble.

So sexual harassment and assault is a way to hurt people you wanted to hurt anyway.

Audrey J. Murrell, in an early essay on sexual harassment and women of color, reminds us that stereotypes die hard. In the workplace minorities have always occupied powerless positions with unlikely opportunities to change jobs. Mothers, aunts, and the women in the community warned younger black women, for example, about the threat of sexual violence in the world. Even post-slavery, stereotypes persist about the black female as hyper-sexual, wild.

Asian women are still featured in pornography as submissive, tortured, wanting to serve.

Latina women are thought to be "hot-blooded" and passionate, yet submissive, for Latino men are dominating.

Sexual racism is how the stereotype is played out, how myths shape aggressive attitudes and sexual behavior.

Has any of this changed since the eighties when Ms. Murrell wrote her essay?

We can only hope so. But I am confident, based upon the stories women tell me, that sexual racism is alive and well. It is still rationalized by perpetrators and isn't outed or confronted by victims, not nearly enough, for fear of losing employment that is hard to come by.

So nothing new, not really, under the sun.

Linda Freedman, PhD, LCSW, LMFT