A video depicting a woman walking around New York City and, through no fault of her own, being intermittently approached or cat-called by strangers has become an Internet sensation this week, racking up hits and provoking outrage across the political spectrum. In the course of just a few days, millions upon millions of people have shared the piece, almost all of them appending to the link their own passionate disavowals and earnest calls to action. Initially, its progenitor, a group named “Hollaback,” expressed the hope that the piece “would make an impact.” Quietly, they must be thrilled with the result: In a single week, the spot has had 15 million views, an achievement that places it firmly in the viral hall of fame. Publicly, however, the outfit has been forced to apologize, its victory having turned somewhat sour. What could possibly have happened?
As it has grown in popularity, the video has been transformed into a blank canvas, onto which America’s brave advocates of hyphenated-justice have sought to project their favored social theories. Evidently unwilling to let the spot stand on its own, Purdue’s Roxanne Gay wrote sadly that “it’s difficult and uncomfortable to admit that we have to talk about race/class/gender/sexuality/ability/etc, all at once.” Alas, she was not alone. Soon, the claims of “sexism” had been joined by accusations of “racism” and of “classism,” Hollaback had been forced to acknowledge that it had upset the more delicate among us, and those who had celebrated the video had been denounced as unreconstructed bigots. By this process was its message diluted and appropriated, the country’s most prominent peddlers of grievance and discord electing to squabble and bicker over its meaning, and to strip it of its value in favor of their own, fringe fixations.
“The fact that the video chooses to showcase the experience of a white woman experiencing harassment almost exclusively at the hands of black and Latino men,” Brooklyn Magazine’s Kristin Iverson proposed earlier this week, “is a pretty clear indication of who the audience for this video is supposed to be, namely, those who seek to protect and defend innocent white women, aka the already existing societal power structure.” This theme was picked up in more explicit terms elsewhere, the less direct references to the “power structure” quickly giving way to overt accusations of white supremacy. “Thousands of satisfied racists are sharing that viral catcalling video,” griped Lindy West at the Daily Dot, lamenting that its creators had imposed “manipulative, specific, politicized constraints on the issue of street harassment” and thereby permitted “the bulk of the audience to divorce themselves from the problem.” Yesterday, the Root’s Dion Rabouin dispensed with euphemism entirely, confirming that “some of the video’s intentional choices seem to play on the Birth of a Nation trope that white women simply aren’t safe from sex-crazed black and brown men.” How that’s for a thumb in the eye for the millions who shared the spot on their Facebook pages?
In the exquisitely calibrated judgment of The Nation’s “racial justice” guru, Aura Bogado, the spot was “deeply problematic,” serving not to highlight the frequency with which women are bothered on the street, but instead perpetuating “the myth of the cult of white white womanhood by literally placing this white woman in neighborhoods where men of color will be the ones who catcall (or, in some instances, say hello to) her.” “Doing so,” Bogado writes, “makes it appear as if men of color are the perpetrators of all that is bad on this planet, which can only be balanced with the exigent need to therefore save white women above all else.” The only solution, she says, is to remake the video with a “universalizing” cast: the camera centering on, “say, a black trans woman.”
Quite why there would be nothing “manipulative,” “specific,” or “politicized” inherent to a project such as this is never adequately explained. Indeed, if Bogado got her way, I daresay that we would face a different set of problems. Were a “black trans woman” to be filmed being catcalled or criticized even once by a white construction worker, many of those who are currently twisting themselves into knots would no doubt write four-hour operas on the incident. All told, it is more likely to be the case that Bogado and her fellow travelers are vexed by this video not because there is anything much wrong with it, but because it does not offer a message that is useful to them. Thus must a tool intended to raise awareness about a social ill be destroyed in the name of justice. It’s a funny old world.
Consider how far its critics are stretching to discredit the experiment’s results. On Wednesday, Roxanne Gay suggested with palpable irritation that “the racial politics of the video are f****d up. Like, she didn’t walk through any white neighborhoods?” For her part, Salon’s Emily Gould went full circle, seeking to justify the behavior of the maligned cat-callers by submitting that they had been forced into it by the actions of white people writ large. “This kind of harassment,” Gould wrote, “can be a way marginalized groups talk back to the white gentrifiers taking over their neighborhoods.” In and of itself, this view strikes me as being grotesquely condescending — the perverse cousin, perhaps, of precisely the sort of racial stereotyping that progressives believe they have been divinely called upon to destroy.
To contend that the minorities depicted in the video are mere victims of circumstance and that they have been forced by their conditions into badgering innocent women on the street is to contend that those minorities lack agency, intelligence, sensitivity, and the capacity to reason — that they are child-like figures who act on their base instincts and who need excusing and explaining by their betters. Oddly enough, it is also to contend that the victim was either a “white gentrifier” herself, or a proxy for white gentrifiers, and that she therefore deserved the treatment she received. This presumption, it should go without saying, is typically anathema to the arbiters of feminist thought. One cannot help but wonder whether, weighed down by their own contradictions, the champions of “empowerment” have at last become what they despise themselves?
Certainly, one has to wonder how Gould and her ilk came to their peculiar conclusions in the first instance. As Michael Luciano notes at the Daily Banter, pace Gay’s implication, the woman in the video, Shoshana Roberts, did walk through “white neighborhoods.”
If SoHo and Greenwich Village — two of the neighborhoods in the video — aren’t “white neighborhoods” for New York City, I don’t know what is. Roberts can also be seen near the Port Authority, which is neither a black nor a white neighborhood. It’s just a hellhole.
This episode, Luciano confesses, illustrates neatly why “liberals such as myself are feeling less at home on the Left these days.” “Some liberals,” he grumbles, “simply couldn’t let the video stand as a testament to the bullshit that women go through.” That the racial makeup of the harassers was not perfectly even, Luciano argues, yielded “an unacceptable narrative, even if that narrative is comprised entirely of subtext.” “To criticize this video because it may have captured an uncomfortable reality,” he concludes, “is to entirely miss the point, which is that street harassment is a problem no matter who’s engaging in it.”