Street harassment is a form of sexual terrorism that reminds women of
their vulnerability to violent assault in public and semipublic spaces.
Black women's experiences of street harassment are complicated by
their race, and by the race of their harasser(s). Black feminists'
political vocabulary of intersectional analysis offers a useful framework
for portraying the indivisibility of race and gender in black women's
lives, but the extension of intersectional criticism to capture black
lesbians' political vulnerability within black politics and civic
life has been neither automatic nor consistent in black feminist theory.
This article invokes the 2003 street harassment and subsequent murder of a
black lesbian teenager by a black male assailant in Newark, NJ, both to
demonstrate black heterosexual women's interest convergence with
black lesbians in black civic life, and to urge black feminists to be less
equivocal in holding black men and women responsible for their
participation in black patriarchy. This requires the retrieval and
redefinition of the political language of culture and behavior from black
conservatives who rightly flag the associational aspects of black
politics, but who fail to question the gender and sexuality dynamics
within these associations and fail to perceive the interplay between civic
behavior and intersecting structural inequalities, such as racism,
patriarchy, homophobia, and spatial poverty.I wish to thank the editors and anonymous reviewers of
Politics & Gender for their helpful critical feedback. Thanks
also to the participants in the Philadelphia Political Theory Workshop,
held at the University of Pennsylvania (September 2005), and to Temple
University's Conference on Black Civil Society in American Life
(September 2005) where I presented an earlier version of this article, as
well as to Reuel Rogers and my research assistant Greg
Graham.