Can someone help me get my head around this?

Good points Peckhampearlz I also went and read all the comments in the article and a couple of them also made those same points and in a way that I hadn't got from the article.

I think basically I wasn't seeing the wider scope because it felt like (to me) the the author was seeing this woman as privileged in her actual interactions with the men in each individual situation. Which I disagree with.. I don't think you can be privileged when you're scared of real violence.

But I can see now that intentionally or unintentionally (and I'm sure it probably was unintentional) she was perpetuating stereotypes about "scary black" guys going after white women which the media does love. Part of the problem is stuff goes viral now when people least expect it..and a pet project to tell men to stop being dicks is suddenly picked up by every media outlet.

Sorry I'm coming back to this late - I just don't seem to get any time to enjoy myself contribute to the important debates on MN...

FuckOffGroundhog - So how do you think we get fundamental change?

No idea - wish I knew. Our society seems desperate to just gloss over difficult problems. Change the words used and everything will be OK.

But then I look at something like smoking.

It seems to me that these days everybody really does believe that smoking is bad. Even die-hard smokers genuinely seem to be ashamed of their habit. That's the sort of fundamental change we need.

but of course it's not quite the same - smoking kills smokers. Misogyny doesn't kill misogyinists...

Do you disagree with the woman from cards against harassment's approach? Personally I think her "here is a little card to say you've hurt me" and also the tiny little needling fear that they will be shamed on social media seems an excellent approach.

For me there are two parts to this -

1. Handing out the cards. No problem at all with this, she can hand them out all day as far as I'm concerned.

1. The videos and Publicising the'experiment'. This is where I think you have to engage your brain and think about the point you are trying to put across and how to make sure you succeed in that. Sure, I completely believe that in the locations where she filmed, she was only harrased by black and latino men. So I think she should have then gone to somewhere else where there were a majority of white men and filmed some more interactions before publishing them on the web.

Then it would be very clear - men (of all colours) harrassing women rather than being perceived as just black and latino men.

Love the Jessica Williams clips btw.

If anyone wants to see another (funnier) take on the catcalling phenomena, this is Jessica Williams from the Daily Show (you guys might not know her. not sure how many people watch it over here)

The location is a big thing here, it's the US that is about and the article which has it's own race problems ditto the UK. But the point is here this is global it has nothing to do with race country wealth anything. Go to Jamaica and teh street harrassment will be mainly perpetrated by black men, go to India and it will mainly be Asian men, go to a non urban town in Russia or Sweden or Germany or England and it will be white men etc and so on

To try and make this about anything other than sex is a massive diversion.

YY and the point that while things are shit for women generally they are often shitter for minority women (whether the minority item is colour, nationality, wealth, disability etc etc etc intersecionality innit).

Thing is as a white woman I can get angry about sexism misognyny on my own behalf right, then I can get angry about stuff that I am not the target of eg Met treatment of black men but it's down to the people directly affected to say how it is and what needs doing and me to support, talk about, call for change etc but not to try and lay down any terms or say "yeah i really get it" because I don't do I and I never will.

Which is why men need to STFU about issues around how women are treated quite frankly.

Sorry I seem to be in tangential rant mode on this thread!

You know what though anti-feminists making items that are racist and saying they are feminist would be a great way of discrediting us. Much better than the current idea of saying "but men have it bad too". Hope they aren't reading this

I do believe that the police in some areas (UK also obviously) will use laws to harrass non white people esp males but that for me is not a reason not to have the laws it's a reason to sort the bloody police out. Which we should be doing anyway the things that have happened in the UK around racism esp with the Met - and continue to happen - are a fucking OUTRAGE.

And yes to this. I'm American and there are a disproportionately high rate of black men being arrested over white men.

This should mean: Stop arresting black men for being black and having the temerity to walk through a white neighborhood.

This shouldn't mean don't make violent crimes illegal: it means start arresting and prosecuting all the white men who are committing violent crimes.. stop letting them off! Don't railroad black men in situations where you have little evidence. That's how you handle it. Not ignore the victims and don't have laws against things..

Agree sardines and also I loved that video, and I'm angry that because the marketing guy who edited it chose to edit so there were no white males that it has kind of voided it's message. People now just see it racist propaganda and it should just show that any one with a penis thinks they have a right to have a go. I don't know if it was intentional or not.. my guess is unintentional bias (he saw black men as scarier and white men like himself as being no threatening )

With the Cards Against A Harassment woman I don't think she is editing out white males so I think the comments in the article that are being made about her are unfair. They comment that she uses areas that are more likely to be inhabited by men of color. But it also sounds like those are just the places she is.. In her life. So I'm not sure how she could do this in any other way? I have no doubt that if she spent her time walking past building sites full of white men and or wandering around Wall St that she would get equal abuse. And I doubt that she would be OK with it because they are white. I've never found anything thrown out at me by a white male on a street to be particularly enticing

I'd like to hear more about black feminists perspectives about being a black woman and I do try and listen and share things I think are interesting.. But I don't think anyone should be policing women should be policing how another woman deals with a harasser (that she should have listened to a man (Jared) after he catcalled her- she owed him no time). It just always makes me feel a bit "what about the menz".

Interesting.

Reminds me of the video where the woman walks through and gets loads of hassle. I watched it and saw a woman getting loads of hassle. Others watched it (mainly men?) and noticed that the men hassling were mainly (all?) non white and so the video was racist and should be disregarded.

Well yes it was racist if they did that BUT women like me watching it didn't notice that it was non white men but that it was MEN and this chimed with our experience.

I live in London which is fairly diverse and if asked who I have been hassled by I would say MEN I wouldn't even think of what race / nationality / other subset they were. They have one thing in common, all of them.

For this example I think that I don't know the US well enough to fully comment. Race issues are different / bigger / etc than here. Making videos / posts on the net showing only one type of man harrassing is inflammatory obviously. And I would question why. All men do it. Is it just that the person making the video lives in an area where there are predominantly a certain type of man?

Because the FACT is that all men all over the world do this and worse irrespective of race, class, wealth, country, anything.

I do believe that the police in some areas (UK also obviously) will use laws to harrass non white people esp males but that for me is not a reason not to have the laws it's a reason to sort the bloody police out. Which we should be doing anyway the things that have happened in the UK around racism esp with the Met - and continue to happen - are a fucking OUTRAGE.

Rant over!

Right now, sexism is out in the open. You can see it, hear it, fight it. For me the big risk is, if we succeed in achieving superficial change without a fundamental change in underlying attitudes, then we'll not have the catcalls and page 3 (which many people will be grateful for), but we'll not really be any better off.

So how do you think we get fundamental change? Do you disagree with the woman from cards against harassment's approach? Personally I think her "here is a little card to say you've hurt me" and also the tiny little needling fear that they will be shamed on social media seems an excellent approach.

How are women supposed to stop the attitudes that objectify women? I feel like the onus is always on the woman to find a "nice way" to ask men to just leave her the fuck alone. Smile more/ask nicely/ "educate" those that don't want to be educated.

And to clarify when I said:

I'm pretty sure I've only recognised a small % of the racism that exists out there
and
I don't believe I 'get' how racism is for those on the receiving end of it

I mean I'm pretty sure I'm ignorant of most of it. Not that I think the little bit I believe I can see (tiniest tip of iceberg) is all there is.

Apologies for any offence.

I like the numbers too - they are harder to manipulate than words.

I was surprised to see that the only recent-ish numbers I could find for the judiciary appear to show the same issue (missing people at the higher eschalons) impacting equally between sexism and racism when compared the totals in the population.

E.g. from the Guardian in 2012, on the make-up of the judiciary

It has changed: in 1998, 10.3% of judges were women, and 1.6% from black, Asian and minority ethnic backgrounds; by 2011 the figures had increased to 22.3% and 5.1% respectively.

The population of England and Wales is very different. According to the latest data from the Office for National Statistics, the non-white population is 12.1% - and 50.8% of the total population are women.

Both just under half of the number that would be expected without the invisible forces you mention in place.

(As an aside, I did not realise Linda Dobbs QC was also the first black member of the judiciary and now intend to read up a bit about her, she must be amazing)

There is a fundamental problem with identifying racism here - the block of text given above lumps together several 'backgrounds' under the banner 'non-white' . Besides making it impossible to tell which background is most badly impacted by racism in the judiciary, I'm not sure how much more 'othering' it could be than that. At least the category 'non-man' doesn't exist (I've always had my suspicions about the origins of woman 'womb-man?' though)

I agree with the prevalence of 'black people who have done something wrong' in the media particularly the penchant for the thuggish police mugshots that never seem to be used for white criminals (the distant cctv blurry image or courtroom artists drawing of them looking crestfallen seems to be preferred) but I would compare this treatment to the 'women as objects of decoration but rarely action' in almost every daily paper. I don't think either racism or sexism is out in the open yet.

Well I'm a middle-aged coloured woman**, but I don't think even I understand the full extent and complexity of racism in modern Britain...

It used to be so simple - "No dogs! No Blacks! No Irish!"

On the surface, everything looks fine - racial abuse and descrimination are outlawed, racism is genuinely socially unacceptable, to the extent that even outright bigots feel obliged to say "I'm not racist, but..." before saying something flagrantly racist.

Yep, everything looks dandy, until you start counting things...

• Like how many black high court judges there are (don't even ask about black, female high court judges - that's just silly)

• How many black senior police officers

• How many black bosses of major companies

• How many black senior managers - err - anywhere.

• The composition of the prison population

• The comprehensive media coverage of black people who do something wrong (city traders, judges etc) as opposed to everybody else.

And so on.

Then you start to think that there's something going on - something hidden, unspoken, pernicious. Not so much 'tip of the iceberg' as 'completely hidden iceberg'.

We used to get the mantra that "you just need to educate yourselves more!" - but I believe that now black and ethnic minority students are getting better grades and more degrees than ever before. There's still that invisible force, keeping us all in our place.

I must admit, generally racism is a much bigger thing for me than sexism. I can see plenty of successful white women.

Right now, sexism is out in the open. You can see it, hear it, fight it. For me the big risk is, if we succeed in achieving superficial change without a fundamental change in underlying attitudes, then we'll not have the catcalls and page 3 (which many people will be grateful for), but we'll not really be any better off.

** I used to say 'woman of colour', which I really like as a term, but it's clearly an Americanism, so now (thanks in part to the Cumberbatch nonsense) I've decided to change to something simpler, more straightforward and British.

Can I make it clear my post is about the writer of the article, not Toffee? I seem to have posted in the middle of a discussion of something else.

I guess you're male, subjugateddad? I am white female and was raised to be far more sensitive/aware of racism than of sexism. Still not briliantly aware, but racism was a (n almost) universally regarded Bad Thing (even if we often didn't see it) whereas sexism was barely recognised. Maybe because racism affects men, too, so it's possible to get a balanced, non-hysterical account of it? ;-)

She seems to be talking in part about issues of what is and is not legal, and I think that is hard to understand when we have a completely different culture and set of laws around freedom of speech, hate speech etc from the US.

I think there is a difference between recording people and putting it up on the Internet, and saying anything at all to a person harassing you. There is criticism there of making any kind of response at all to someone harassing you in case the police come over and behave in a racist way.

On reading the thread again, I think I should clarify my point.

Everyone has been clear in adding the disclaimer that they don't fully understand racism.

But at the same time, there seems to be a bit of 'but racism is more obvious than sexism, isn't it: kinda thing going on. And all I'm saying is, that I don't think its possible for white people to talk about racial discrimination with any kind of credibility.

Toffeepenny. I would imagine that a black person might take offence to your claim to see racist issues clearly, much in the same way it might irritate a woman if I explained that I totally get their oppression.

I've been told be black people that racism is much more complex, deep rooted and prevalent than I had thought (and I had previously had a similar attitude to yourself). So now, as a white person, I err on the side of caution and assume that what I think I 'get' is just the tip of the iceberg.

I'm not meaning to be harsh, but I feel that a white person claiming they 'get' racism or that they see racist issues in a clear/obvious way is....arrogant?

Told you I was saying it badly . You both understood me despite myself though. I don't believe I 'get' how racism is for those on the receiving end (coming from the privileged side I would be surprised if anyone really could) but for some reason when I see racism, I feel more certain of what I am seeing (and of it being so obviously wrong) than when I see sexism (despite actively being on the receiving end of it).

This seems to also be the case in my peer group - I find myself having to explain the reasons for my feelings, 'argue my case' rather than simply be listened to and believed. In my lazier brain moments and when frustrated I have done the switch from sex to race on the situation in question and it is surprising how quickly it makes people abandon their former stance.

Perhaps acquiring the 'shutting up and listening with a default setting of believing' approach is the silver lining to the cloud of experiencing being the 'other'. As Buffy says, because it pisses us off we try not to do it to other people.

By that logic though black men should be more empathetic than white men and so in an area where the population is balanced (unlike mine) I would expect more white men to be filmed receiving cards.