One of the problems with centering decriminalization in the sex worker rights movement is that the effects of racialization are not often at the forefront. Despite mountains of data showing that issues of systemic inequality in the West, particularly in the Americasâoften characterized as âpatriarchyâ from a white/female[i] perspectiveâare deeply compounded by blackening (a form of racialization, racializing someone as âblackâ) at every level, on every issueâqueer/feminist gender theory seems to have taken precedent for the past few decades. What does this mean for those who are categorized as nonwhite?
Recently I taught a class on Race for a nonprofit program Iâm co-leading that is targeted towards people involved in the American sex trade. We discussed Katerina Deliovskyâs essay âWhite Femininity, Black Masculinity, Sex/Romance Tourism, and the Politics of Feminist Theoryâ from the anthology Appealing Because He is Appalling: Black Masculinities, Colonialism, and Erotic Racism and the Chicago Magazine article âDispatches From the Rap Wars: My 18 months inside one of Chicagoâs most notorious gangsâ by Forrest Stuart (as told to Elly Fishman). My goal in assigning these readings was to de-emphasize the white/feminine perspectives that tend to dominate in sex worker rights spaces. For this, bringing up black womenâs and/or trans womenâs issues is not enough. Often white/nonwhite women seize upon the notion of a shared womanhood or femininity to emphasize our similarities and thus humanity. This is not viewed as (bio)essentialist.
What often emerges during these conversations is that black females tend to implicitly or explicitly compare and contrast themselves to white females on the basis of shared sex/gender while often distancing themselves from black males on that same basis, accusing the latter of mimeticism under the assumption that black menâs shared sex/gender (here I use âmenâ in the trans-inclusive sense, since this is often claimed about black transmen as well) will, more often than not, subsume or triumph over their racial identity. This makes no logical sense. It has become very common for black feminists to assertâbased on critical legal theorist KimberlĂŠ Crenshawâs rendition of intersectional theory (styled âintersectionalityâ)âthat black men possess similar positioning to white women based on the perceived balance of both groups particular racial-sexual categorizations. However, research and data contradict this tendency to present these two groups as an analogous pair. Ascribing the violence that black males experience to race/racialization while omitting the effects of sex/gender only gives us a partial view of black male racial-sexual oppression. Likewise for black females. This also should not be taken to mean that white women possess unequivocal âpower overâ in all cases, nor does it erase the violence that white females experience to sex/sexualization. However, white female bodies, like white male bodies, are made legible under Anglo-American law due to their whiteness, and white women have access to realms of power that black people can only dream of, even as they sometimes experience sex/gender subjugation under anglocratic legal systems as subdominant or co-leads with white men.[ii] In contrast, black male and female bodies, regardless of gender aesthetic or identity, are consistently dysgendered/misgendered, consequently made illegible under the eyes of Anglo-American law.
Deliovsky writes:
The gender/feminism approach to white womenâs transactional intimacies abstracts the women out of racialized power relations and structures. Doing so obscures the positional superiority of white women relative to the racialized Other and colludes with white womenâs self-construction as either, or at one and the same time, innocent or ignorant. Implicit or explicit, this results in pathological constructions of local heterosexual black men whose commodity is their complicity in selling back to white women the fantasies and mythologies white culture produces of them.
During class I asserted that white/American activistsâin this case white/Western feministsâhave a history of co-opting language and strategies from black liberation activists and emancipated/freed peoples, utilizing them to produce gains that appear to benefit everyone, but end up mainly benefiting diverse groups of white people. I borrowed the term âreasoning from raceâ from Serena Mayeri, who wrote:
In the American legal system, analogical reasoning often justifies applying accepted principles to new circumstances; analogies to race have therefore held particular salience to those who demand changes in the law. âThe African American struggle for social equality... has provided the deep structure, social resonance, and primary referent for legal equality,â the feminist legal theorist Catharine MacKinnon observed in 1991. By the twentieth century's end, the use of race as a template for other rights claims had become routine. In the words of legal scholar Janet Halley, "asking the advocates of gay, women's, or disabled peoples' rights to give up 'like race' similes would be like asking them to write their speeches and briefs without using the word the.â
[âŚ] Feminists also promoted parallels between race and sex as legal categories. Litigators argued that sex, like race, should be a âsuspect classificationâ under the Fourteenth Amendment's equal protection clause. Supporters of the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) insisted that women, like African Americans, needed constitutional protection of their rights. Feminists sought to codify race-sex analogies in employment discrimination statutes, educational equity laws, and affirmative action policies by listing sex alongside race as a prohibited category of discrimination and as a basis for remedies.[iii]
I am far from the first person to critique white womenâs  usage of ârace-sex analogies.â White womenâs exploitation of black civil rights triumphs was famously criticized by black feminists, the most prominent example being the acclaimed 1982 anthology All the Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men, But Some of Us Are Brave. Subsequent to mentioning this anthology, Mayeri claims that â[t]he modern origins of the legal race-sex analogy could not have been further removed from the parasitic and marginalizing tendencies decried by this new generation of feminists.â I disagree. White supremacist culture is parasitic and cannibalistic at its core. This is not about intellectual or ideological purity. These analogies are not harmless. We cannot ignore the history behind these sociopolitical maneuvers which have allowed white womenâs average income to reach near-parity with white menâs while they continue to discuss a âgender wage gapâ that is no longer a widespread problem (for them). Meanwhile most people are unaware of the fact that the racial wage gap has steadily increased for most nonwhite groups. A good example of this was the framing of the COVID-19 as a âshe-cession,â even as data rolled in that black and brown communities were disproportionately affected by the disease, either because they were laid off, had to continue working in subpar conditions, or because the men in these communities were already experiencing higher levels of unemployment, homelessness, disability and illness. This is not accidental, but reflects a pattern of white women using nonwhite womenâs (racialized) conditions to their advantage while ignoring the material effects that high unemployment rates for black and brown men has on their partners, households, co-dependents, etc.
Helen Hackerâs 1951 essay âWomen as a Minority Groupâ compares âwomenâ to Negroes to test whether or not women could be considered a distinct minority group. In it she presents a list entitled âThe Castelike Status of Women and Negroesâ where she compares and contrasts the qualities of Negroes with Women, making no effort to distinguish between the sexes or gender aesthetics of Negroes. In her 1999 book White Womenâs Rights: The Racial Origins of Feminism in the United States, Louise Michelle Newman describes feminism as a âracialized theory of gender oppressionâ and discusses at length how âwhite women have responded to and manipulated racial ideologies in their quest for gender ideologyâ:[iv]
The national romance with colorblindness, and its corollary, gender sameness, is a fundamentally misguided strategy (metaphorically, a two-headed ostrich with both heads in the sand)âan ineffective way to address the real discursive effects of social hierarchies intricately structured along the multiple axes of race, class, gender. The favored approach of the U.S. legal system in questions of legal equality-treating similarly situated individuals similarly-works only when individuals are indeed similarly situated. But what if they are differently situated? In the context of American political culture in power is already aligned along gendered, racialized, and class lines, people of races, classes, and genders are always already situated differently. To assert "sameness" is to purposefully ignore the material and ideological effects that race (gender, class, sexuality) have had in creating oppression, inequity, and injustice.[v]
American law is the root of many of these limitations. For all intents and purposes, American law is British/English law.[vi] In Bonds of Empire: The English Origins of Slave Law in South Carolina and British Plantation America, Wilson wrote that âAmerican slave owners were participants in a wider legal culture, one in which settlers harnessed English lawâs astonishing flexibility to establish their societies at the expense of enslaved people and indigenous populations.â[vii] I believe that, in order to move beyond âreasoning from race,â we must abolish the American legal system. We must become ungovernable. This is a threatening prospect, not just for white/European peoples, but to black people as well because it requires us to begin anew rather than chasing âharm reduction,â piecemeal justice, and legal legibility under a system which endeavored to accommodate slavery, genocide, and oppression. Slotting black bodies into white humanist formations such as âwomanâ and âmanâ and comparing black females to white females on the basis of sex without accounting for racialization, is a grievous miscalculation. To continue pursuing justice within this framework without seriously interrogating the Anglo-American racial-sexual caste system is folly at best, genocidal at worst.
âŚthe early modern English law that colonists brought with them to North America was a law of procedures and forms, of categories and catchphrases. It provided a vocabulary and a meta-language that seems at first glance to be inflexible but in practice was highly adaptable. As long as colonists could fit slaves into this preexisting linguistic framework, they could access a legal system that had evolved over time to suit the needs of a rapidly commercializing society. In fact, the logic of English law made it necessary for colonists to insert slaves into English legal categories and to deploy older procedural formulae if they hoped to maximize the value of their human property. In this sense, legal procedure functioned instrumentally in plantation America, giving colonists access to particular ways of proceeding at law that suited their desire to build wealth, accrue political power, and fashion themselves as elites within the broader British Empire. As was the case for nineteenth-century slave owners, legal procedure gave them practical access to different registers of empire-building, allowing them to treat slaves as capital investments while also constructing themselves through the buying and selling of human beings.[viii]
We, among other Othered groups, simply do not possess the same legal protections that white/European people expect. White feminists argued into the mid-twentieth century that marriage transformed white women into ânonpersonsâ in a similar manner that slavery did to black women, even though â[b]lack women gave birth to children by enslaved black men whom neither mother nor father possessed according to law and white society,â[ix] â[s]lave men did not have final authority over their familiesâŚâ[x], and â[s]laves typically could not testify in court against whites, nor could they seek redress in colonial courts.â[xi] White women who married were subject to coverture which made them legally dependent on their husbands and merged their identities. However, for black people â[m]arriage rights invited new forms of racial subjugation.â[xii] Michele Goodwin wrote: âSlavery became a critical part of white women articulating independence through law. By suing their husbands for âseparation of property,â white women secured paraphernal rights in their slaves. [âŚ] a close reading of legal archives also reveals the lengths to which slaveholding white women would exercise agency and dominion over enslaved Black people, including committing fraud, in order to preserve their claims to slaves. This included white women making false claims of ownership for slaves they did not legally possess or that their husbands un-willingly relinquished through means of seizure and bankruptcy due to un-paid debts.â[xiii]
Blackness, better put as âblackeningâ--racialization-as-black or other-than-white-- ensures that where all types of inequality and oppression are concerned, those who are nonwhite and black fare the worst, regardless of sex/gender, sexual orientation, or gender identity. Black and American Indian peoples have a disproportionately high rate of homicide, debility, disability imprisonment, criminalization, maternal death, fetal death, childhood injury, hypertension, diabetes, poverty, and drug use. This can be difficult to hear for white people who consider themselves part of marginalized communities, because the way that many identities are conceptualized under white supremacy imply a sort of racial transcendence.[xiv] It can also be hard to hear for nonwhite people who subscribe to white supremacist modes of thinking, such as âbootstrapping,â meritocracy, European religions, and liberal humanism.[xv] This is why I critique terms such as âmarginalized gendersâ which implicitly excludes men of color based on their (presumed) sexual orientation. Colorblind mechanisms have long been obfuscated (concealed) through various logological (in linguistics this refers to conceptual patterns or mental categories of words and their referents) maneuvers. Put simply: whiteness is constantly reconstituting itself through the co-optation of liberatory language and frameworks, and feminism is not immune to this fact.
Read them endnotes, yâall.
[i] On my usage of the terms âmaleâ and âfemaleâ: Recently there has been a push from various coalitions to use the terms assigned male at birth (AMAB) and assigned female at birth (AFAB) in an attempt to point out that gender is assigned. Some go even further to make the claim that all sexual assignments are coercive and use the terms coercively assigned male/female at birth (CAMAB/CAFAB). At the same time, the usage of descriptive terms to describe transsexuals such as male-to-female (MTF) and female-to-male (FTM) have noticeably decreased in usage. This leads to a linguistic and conceptual conundrum: When we say female/male are we naming sex (genitalia) or are we naming gender? The answer is complex. Sex and gender are deeply entangled. The term sex has been gradually replaced by gender in certain contexts. âSexâ began to refer to the act of copulation (fucking). Gender then became a way to discuss gendered aesthetics that were once thought to be expressions of oneâs innate sex or sexual nature (as in female -> femininity , male ->masculinity ). However, sexual nature is both separate from and entangled with sexuality (sexual orientation). The terms AFAB/AMAB and CAMAB/CAFAB are of no use to me in most instances unless I am specifically discussing someone who is intersex. I am wary of deferring to pop science around sexual chromosomes in any case. So when I say male or female, I am referring to the âtypicalâ sexes, the average. Typical simply means that these two sexes possess certain qualities that are associated with members of these particular groups/kinds. To be even more specific I will quote from a Joan Roughgarden excerpt from the Transgender Studies Reader 2 (Routledge: Taylor and Francis, 2013), 148: When speaking about humans, I find it's helpful to distinguish between social categories and biological categories. "Men" and "women" are social categories. "Male" and "female" are biological categories⌠To a biologist, "male" means making small gametes, and "female" means making large gametes Period! By definition, the smaller of the two gametes is called a sperm, and the larger an egg. Beyond gamete size, biologists don't recognize any other universal difference between male and female. Of course, indirect markers of gamete size may exist in some species. In mammals, males usually have a Y chromosome. But whether an individual is male or not comes down to making sperm, and the males in some mammalian species don't have a Y chromosome.
[ii] Goodwin, A Different Type of Property: White Women and the Human Property They Kept (Michigan Law Review, 2021), 1083: âTo be clear, not all white women possessed the economic capacity or desire to enslave Black people. Equally, however, it would be historically inaccurate to suggest that poor whites were more closely aligned with abolitionists simply because they did not own slaves. To the contrary, antebellum poverty and hardship, though often cruel, did not align with social and political opposition to slavery. [âŚ] As diaries, other empirical records, and legal cases show, slaveholding white women, particularly (although not exclusively) of the South, strategically fought to maintain slavery, engaging in litigation with banks, siblings, and others when ownership of their âpropertyâ came under threat. And while most common depictions of Black human bondage involved sprawling plantations, slavery also included more modest acquisitions of Black people. Importantly, as owners and traffickers in enslaved Black people, white women were not passive participants in slaveryânor were they silent allies to the Black women whom they enslaved.â
[iii] Serena Mayeri, Reasoning From Race: Feminism, Law, and the Civil Rights Revolution (Harvard University Press, 2014), 2-3
[iv] Louise Michele Newman, White Womenâs Rights: The Racial Origins of Feminism in the United States (Oxford University Press, 1999), 17
[v] Newman, White Womenâs Rights: The Racial Origins of Feminism in the United States (Oxford University Press, 1999), 20
[vi] More examples: Hindu law evolved during British rule, and British/English law replaced the Mughal court system in India. They adopted the English legal system and replaced all existing Indian laws, minus family laws and laws related to property, marriage, and inheritance. âThe concept of the judicial precedent and âreview by the courtsâ is one of the key components of British law upon which Indian law is based.â (Wikipedia, Law of India); South African law is a hybrid system composed of Roman Dutch civil law, English common law, customary law, and religious law. The English influence is strong where procedural law is concerned; Alex C. Castles, The Reception and Status of English Law in Australia (Adelaide Law Review, 1963): âEnglish law [is] the foundation of the Australian legal system.â
[vii] Lee B. Wilson, Bonds of Empire: The English Origins of Slave Law in South Carolina and British Plantation America (Cambridge University Press, 2021), 5
[viii] Wilson, Bonds of Empire: The English Origins of Slave Law in South Carolina and British Plantation America (Cambridge University Press, 2021), 22
[ix] Tera W. Hunter, Bound in Wedlock: Slave and Free Black Marriage in the Nineteenth Century (Harvard University Press, 2017), 4
[x] Hunter, Bound in Wedlock: Slave and Free Black Marriage in the Nineteenth Century (Harvard University Press, 2017), 14
[xi] Wilson, Bonds of Empire: The English Origins of Slave Law in South Carolina and British Plantation America (Cambridge University Press, 2021), 40
[xii] Hunter, Bound in Wedlock: Slave and Free Black Marriage in the Nineteenth Century (Harvard University Press, 2017), 15
[xiii] Michele Goodwin, A Different Type of Property: White Women and the Human Property They Kept (Michigan Law Review, 2021
[xiv] For a more in-depth analysis of black (in)humanity and parahumanism I recommend: Monique Allewaert, Arielâs Ecology: Plantations, Personhood, and Colonialism in the American Tropics; BĂŠnĂŠdicte Boisseron, Afro-Dog: Blackness and the Animal Question; Mel Y. Chen, Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering, and Queer Affect; Saidiya V. Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America; Zakiyyah Iman Jackson, Becoming Human: Matter and Meaning in an Antiblack World; Claire Jean Kim, Dangerous Crossings: Race, Species, and Nature in a Multicultural Age; Aph Ko, Racism as Zoological Witchcraft: A Guide to Getting Out; Sylvia Wynter: On Being Human as Praxis (edited by Katherine McKittrick); Alexander G. Weheliye, Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human; George Yancey, Black Bodies, White Gazes: The Continuing Significance of Race in America.
[xv] See: Marimba Ani, Yurugu: An Afrikan-Centered Critique of European Cultural Thought and Behavior; see also: Robert P. Jones, White Too Long: The Legacy of White Supremacy in American Christianity; see also: James W. Perkinson, Shamanism, Racism, and Hip Hop Culture: Essays on White Supremacy and Black Subversion; see also: Vegas Tenold, Everything You Love Will Burn: Inside the Rebirth of White Nationalism in America; see also: Jemar Tisby, The Color of Compromise: The Truth about the American Churchâs Complicity in Racism.
Your writing is always so illuminating, thank you