[The views expressed here are not necessarily those of the Alligator]
Last week, the website Hollaback published a video on New York City street harassment that quickly went viral. The video featured a woman, who appeared to be white, walking around New York City while a hidden camera captured all of the harassment she endured for 10 hours. The problem with the video, as many viewers online have already pointed out, is that it strangely leaves out almost all of the harassment perpetrated by white men.
The final scene of the video is a text presentation that stated the street harassment involved “people of all backgrounds.” But it seems that the only instances that made the cut during the video-editing process were times when the woman was being bothered by young men of color — black and Latino men, specifically.
This video took the very serious issues of street harassment and women’s inability to exist in peace publically and added a racial element to them. Rob Bliss Creative, the firm that worked on the video with Hollaback, responded to the criticism that only people of color were made to appear as street harassers. A representative stated even though “a fair amount of white guys” also made unwanted passes at the woman in the video, they don’t appear in the video because “a lot of what they said was in passing or off camera.”
A majority of women in our society experience street harassment at the hands of men of all backgrounds. A few weeks ago, I went out with friends, and six members in our group of eight people were women. As we walked down West University Avenue to and from our destination, our group was catcalled from people in passing cars a whopping six times. And each time, the car was full of young, white men.
The issue with that Hollaback video is because white men were left off camera, white men are being left out of the street harassment narrative. I’m not sure how difficult it would have been to turn the camera so that more examples of those white men ended up on the video, but my gut tells me it couldn’t have been all that hard.
Meanwhile, because young men of color are the ones shown in the video, they will continue to be seen as the main perpetrators of this behavior. The Hollaback video added to a collection of media that has been growing for centuries that tells women to fear men of color. It is why women don their most disinterested face — commonly called “resting bitch face” — when they walk by men of color. For years, they have been receiving the message that they will be harassed and need to brace themselves.
This narrative that tells women to fear men of color does a disservice to almost all parties involved. Black and Latino men are stereotyped and feared. Women leave themselves vulnerable to harassment and attacks by white men because they’re conditioned to keep a watchful eye on men of color, not white men.
The truth is that men of all kinds can be street harassers. A video showing primarily men of color in plainclothes as the guilty party, when in reality white men and men in business suits engage in just as much harassment, is either a poorly done video or a video with a racial agenda. If we want to see a society without street harassment, we need to stop thinking of perpetrators as a single group of men and understand that all men need to be educated on the role they play in ending this epidemic.
For starters, men could take a stand when they witness street harassment happening. If you feel comfortable and safe enough in the moment to do so, letting other men know that street harassment is not OK is a small step in the right direction.
TehQuin Forbes is a UF sociology junior. His columns appear on Mondays.
[A version of this story ran on page 6 on 11/1/2014]
