smile for me daddy: a response to hollabacknyc

Hollabacknyc.blogspot is a new blog dedicated to raising consciousness around street harassment in New York City. It encourages women to post stories and cell phone pictures of their harassers with the idea of creating a web archive that empowers women. Yet, in their initial stages, they found themselves in a bit of a racial quandary. At first, their policy was to publish submissions unedited, until activists of color complained that quite a few submissions had racial undertones and that this subsequently reinforced the notion of men of color as “sexual predators.” The editors then decided to delete any statements regarding the race of the offender and asked that new contributors not include race in their accounts. In the stories that followed, explicit mentioning of race was left out, but a number of racial signifiers still managed to find their way into the texts .

Yet, what’s most interesting about the whole scenario is that rather than deal with the racial and class implications of their “evidence of experience” approach, they quietly sidestepped the issue. In giving the accounts primacy without any kind of analysis, they ignored the ways in which ideologies affect our version of “truth.” In some respects, the possibility that any type of unwanted attention, even without aggression or disrespect, of a white woman by a man of color can and most often times will be deemed harassment by the nature of ideological circumstance. For example, in one account, a woman charged that a black man flashing his grill of gold teeth at her from across the room was harassment. Now, who’s to say whether it was truly a leer or if the spatial location and other factors contributed to making her feel uncomfortable, but we can’t ignore both the racial and class factors that allow this to be classified as harassment under the helm of “evidential experience.”

Joan Scott warns:

"When experience is taken as the origin of knowledge, the vision of individual subject (the person who had the experience or the historian who recounts it) becomes the bedrock of evidence on which explanation is built. Questions about the constructed nature of experience, about how subjects are constituted as different in the first place, about how one’s vision is structured—about language (or discourse) and history—are left aside."

As such, hollabacknyc reproduces the same old trope, with white women as primary victims and men of color as the primary victimizers, without any interrogation of the 'excess' that surrounds these exchanges.