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By Carolyn M. West, Ph.D., University of Washington
As a Psychology Professor, who has been investigating domestic violence and sexual assault for more than two decades, I never aspired to be a pornography researcher and I never expected to produce something like my documentary,
“Let Me Tell Ya’ll ‘Bout Black Chicks: Images of Black Women in Pornography.” Yet, I became inspired to do this work after reviewing the visual images on more than 4,000 front and back covers of pornographic DVDs featuring Black women performers that had been produced in the past 20 years.
Here’s what I have learned along the way and why I think you should care about racism in porn.
Why does porn get a pass?
As critical consumers of media, we have begun to critique racism in just about every media format—movies, Twitter and Facebook feeds, and even children’s programming.
Despite the financial benefits of its release on the Disney’s streaming site, Bob Iger, the company’s
chief executive wisely concluded that the 1946 film
Song of the South “wouldn’t necessarily sit right or feel right to a number of people today.” In this case, it was probably a good corporate move to apply cancel culture to a movie that featured musical and animated sequences of happy formerly enslaved Black people on a post-Civil War Southern plantation.
Yet, in our same culture, the porn industry appears to get a free pass to promote horrifically racist and abusive content in the name of sexual entertainment to anyone with internet access, even children.
At the time of writing,
PornHub has an average of 115 million daily visits, which is equivalent of the combined populations of Canada, Australia, Poland, and the Netherlands all visiting this popular website in one day. Despite PornHub’s terms and conditions that do not allow “racial slurs or hate speech,” a search for the “n” word turned up thousands of user-loaded videos with the word used in the title, description, or in comments. This should violate the rules by anyone’s measure. Even on professional porn sets the “n” word is frequently hurled at Black men performing with White women.
The racism was so unbearable for one Black performer named Maurice McKnight, who performed under the name Moe the Monster, that he
filed a lawsuit against the director for allowing another performer to call him the n-word, against his wishes, during filming. Talk about a hostile work environment.
It doesn’t take long to stumble upon any number of racist titles that promote offensive and unwarranted racial stereotypes about Black women. Relegated to “gonzo” porn, which are low budget films with little glamor, Black women most often play the role of prostitutes in videos entitled
“Ebony Sex Workers” and
“Black Girls Working the Streets.” Not satisfied to call them the usual gonzo terms of [bless and do not curse][bless and do not curse][bless and do not curse][bless and do not curse]/harlot/cumdumpster, the performers are called
“Black Ghetto Freaks” and
“Inner City [bless and do not curse][bless and do not curse][bless and do not curse][bless and do not curse]s.” To further smear them as lower class, Black women are featured in urban settings, rundown buildings, and trash-filled alleys.
So porn sexualizes everyone, but the combination of racism, sexism, and often classism, since Black women are often shown in distressed communities, leaves Black women both sexualized and dehumanized in different ways than other ethnic groups.
Over the years, thanks in part to the civil rights activists, overt examples of racism that were once commonplace in mainstream media have become less acceptable. Yet, hidden behind the façade of fantasy and fun, porn delivers racist stereotypes that would be considered unacceptable were they in any form of mass-produced media.
We should all care because no multi-billion dollar business should side-step scrutiny after they play on and cash in on racially harmful images."
to read the rest of this post it's on an online advocacy group called "fight the new drug.org"
Why Does the Porn Industry Get Away With Racist Portrayals of Black People?
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