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0:00:08.6 Speaker 1: Welcome to PA Centered, a podcast designed to help listeners be a part of the solution to end sexual harassment, abuse and assault. Each episode, we will take on a topic or current event to help spark conversation and break down barriers to building communities free from sexual violence.

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0:00:32.6 S1: Hi, I'm Jackie Strohm, the Prevention and Resource Coordinator at the Pennsylvania Coalition Against Rape. I'll be your host today as we're joined by Damary Rodriguez to talk about the connection between anti-Blackness and sexual violence. Dee is the Language Access Coordinator for PCAR on the Enhancing Language Access for Survivor Project. Welcome, Dee.

0:00:55.2 Speaker 2: Hey, y'all.

0:00:57.3 S1: I am so excited to have you here to talk about the connection between anti-Blackness and sexual violence, because I know you've presented on this topic before. So before we get started, could you tell us a little bit about that presentation? 

0:01:11.0 S2: Yeah. Actually, it all started as a request that I got. Someone had reached out to me, they were looking for resources around anti-Blackness within the Latinx community, and... I had some resources, but nothing in the format that I think we're used to as advocates in this movement. We often want a workshop or a training or a webinar, and there wasn't really anything like that. But there are people who are talking about it and have been talking about it for quite some time. So I rounded up all these resources and put them together, and we talked about maybe making this into a training. Like, "Let's talk about this." Let's connect this to our work. Because we've been a lot... I think in the past few years, have been talking a lot about the connection between oppression and sexual violence, but to be very explicit about how anti-Blackness is connected to sexual violence and how it impacts Black folks within the movement and also survivors.

0:02:21.3 S2: And so we started putting that together, and one of my colleagues at the Texas Coalition had encouraged me to submit a workshop proposal for their state conference in Spanish. And I was just like, "Oh, that's kind of scary. But okay, sure." So I submitted this topic and I presented on it. And that is kind of how this came to fruition about... And it's called Dismantling Anti-Blackness Within Latinx Communities, but anti-Blackness exists across communities. It's not just within the Latinx community, it's not just within communities of color, it's anybody who is not Black, commits anti-Blackness, perpetuates anti-Blackness.

0:03:11.7 S1: Yeah. So, just so everyone is on the same page, do you think you could start by telling us what is anti-Blackness? 

0:03:20.5 S2: Yeah. So the way that I've defined it is anti-Blackness is racism that's targeted specifically to Black people. So it can be something individual that's done on an individual level. So say... And this is something... I like to use myself as an example very frequently, because... I don't think I mentioned this. I myself am a multiracial Dominican woman. My parents immigrated here to the US in the 1970s. I grew up in New York City. And while I'm multiracial, the Dominican Republic is a largely Black country. So not everyone is necessarily multiracial there or identifies as such. So that's kind of my context for this. And I think it's important to locate yourself in that and how does that look. Where you benefit. Where you may have privilege. But yeah, it can be something on an individual level, such as say a parent telling their child not to date a Black person. That's something that I used to get told quite a bit growing up. It can be something that's systemic, like the over-incarceration of Black folks or racial profiling in policing. It looks different in different ways.

0:04:38.8 S2: I think the biggest case right now that I've seen that is, I think, getting a lot of attention is the... Who... People are calling her the Soho Karen. Although I'm trying to stay away from saying Karen and calling people Karens because it kind of diminishes what it is. So for people who aren't familiar, the Soho Karen case, if you will... So a woman named Miya Ponsetto was in a hotel in New York City, lost her phone and saw a young Black boy in the lobby of the hotel and assumed that he stole her phone and started attacking him. Now, this boy is the son of Keyon Harrold, who's a famous Jazz musician. He was recording what was happening, and this kind of went viral, as it does.

0:05:29.9 S2: And when Miya was confronted by a news person, she said, "Well, I'm Puerto Rican." So essentially trying to say she's a woman of color and she couldn't possibly be racist. And it's like, "Well, you can, actually." And... Specifically she was being anti-Black. She assumed that this young boy, a teenager, a 14-year-old, took her phone and then thought that it was okay to harass him. And then if people haven't seen the interview, I highly recommend checking it out. She had an interview with Gayle King and was very disrespectful towards Gayle King, another example of anti-Blackness, and tried to sort of dodge the question and just insinuate that because she's a woman of color, because she's Puerto Rican that she can't possibly be racist.

0:06:19.9 S2: And this is a constant thing that we see with people across demographics. It's not just... I don't know how Miya identifies other than to say that she's Puerto Rican. And that doesn't mean anything. You can be Puerto Rican and be White, you can be Puerto Rican and be Black or indigenous. But she is not immune to this. I've seen US White folks or Anglo-White folks, as I like to call them, say things like, "I have a Black friend, so I couldn't possibly be racist." And it's like, "Well, maybe you're not racist per se, maybe that's not the term you wanna use, but maybe your anti-Black is actually... " Let's be more precise about it. And being close to Black folks or having Black folks as friends or even family does not excuse anti-Blackness. This was something that happened not too long ago when Governor Ralph Northam from Virginia, he was caught doing black face and he sort of gave that excuse. So this is something we see across communities. So that is what anti-Blackness is, and also some examples of anti-Blackness.

0:07:31.0 S1: Thank you for sharing those examples. I think it really helped to illustrate, especially with a recent event that's in the news right now, for people to understand that this is really common and happening more than people realize.

0:07:47.2 S2: Yeah.

0:07:47.5 S1: So since our focus and our work is talking about sexual violence, I thought we could explore the connection between anti-Blackness and sexual violence. So could you talk a little bit about that? 

0:08:01.5 S2: Definitely. So I think one of the ways in which anti-Blackness really shows up in our movement is that anybody who is not White is grouped into a category of people of color. And while that was originally a term that was created to build solidarity amongst people of color across communities, it's actually now become a thing where it's used to erase Black people from their own narratives and try to make all of our experiences as folks of color as they're all the same, and they're not. My experience as a multiracial Dominican woman is not gonna be the same as someone who is Black, or someone who is Asian, or anyone who's even darker skinned than me. There's all these contexts that come into play.

0:08:55.1 S2: And when I had mentioned earlier that when I started putting together a presentation, and there weren't a lot of resources in a format, one of the things that I forgot to mention is that I did come across a group of people that were doing training, and they were including that in their training. They were anti-racism educators. But they were doing it from a US context. Which is cool, we are in the US, but not everybody that's in the US is from here. And... Like, that's not necessarily my full context.

0:09:27.5 S2: So my parents... Like I said, my parents immigrated here, so I'm also bringing in the Latin American perspective and how slavery and racism played out there. And it looks a little bit different from the way it happened in the US. So what I often find is that these anti-racism courses are geared towards White people and not... Often go... Do not address the issues that are going on within communities of color, like colorism and specifically anti-Blackness. And how non-Black people of color can perpetuate, as I said earlier, anti-Blackness.

0:10:09.3 S2: Another thing too is that we often... When we talk about sexual violence, we often talk about it from a feminist philosophy. A lot of our codes of ethics and who we are as organizations is built on this feminist philosophy. And that is wonderful. However, this feminist philosophy was created by White women, for White women, and it often excludes Black, indigenous and other people of color in ending sexual violence. So how can you possibly address the issues that survivors, BIPOC, Black, indigenous and people of color survivors, are experiencing if the foundation of the philosophy is coming from this perspective that doesn't include these folks? And then... So that then means that you can't be culturally responsive. And then... I don't think people intend to cause harm, but then you end up causing harm because you've been given this framework that doesn't include folks, certain groups of folks, so now you're causing harm unintentionally as you serve survivors.

0:11:24.6 S1: Right. And we know that it doesn't matter what our intentions were, it's all about the impact, which really leads me to a follow-up question here. Which is, how does this all impact survivors and how does that impact service provision? 

0:11:40.1 S2: So what that means is... I think, I kind of said it but to elaborate more on it, is that it excludes Black folks in particular. And also within... So in service provision, what could happen... Some ways that this might show up, is that your brochures might not include Black folks on them. You may not have services that are available in languages other than English, assuming that Black folks are a monolith and that all of them speak English. That's not the case. Black folks are everywhere and speak many different languages, for example. And I have... Of course, I have to bring up language access because I'm the Language Access Coordinator, so that's kind of my jam.

0:12:31.1 S2: But another way that this shows up, and I think we often forget, a lot of us that work in this movement are survivors. So if this is showing up... We're often thinking about survivors, just the clients that walk in, but we're often forgetting about Black folks that work in the organization who are survivors. And if you're not... If you haven't unpacked anti-Blackness and tried to dismantle it within yourself, how are you interacting with your colleagues? How are you interacting with survivors? Like I said. You have to remember that. This is a survivor... Has often been a survivor-led movement. It started off survivor-led, so we need to make sure that when we're talking about survivors we're not just thinking about survivors that come in the door. And if you don't treat your colleagues well, how will you treat folks that come in for services? So yeah, it's really important that you're thinking about how all those things intersect.

0:13:30.7 S2: I think another way that it might impact service provision is what are the racial demographics of your organization? Who in your organization is... Are Black folks only front-line staff, or are they in executive leadership roles? Are they on your board? Do they make meaningful decisions and have a meaningful impact within the organization, or are you tokenizing? And I think tokenizing is brought up a lot, but we don't always understand what it means. So it's often like when you have someone and they're there but they don't maybe have a meaningful impact, they don't really make any meaningful decisions, or they're the only one. So they may have a meaningful impact on the organization, but they're the only person, so that means that they may get asked to do all the things that are related to this particular group of people. And that is kind of unfair because you're asking one person to represent a very diverse group of people. So yeah, I think those are the ways that it impacts survivors and impacts service provision.

0:14:42.1 S1: We've also had conversations on previous episodes too, I think, about how sexual violence was used as a tool of oppression both during and after slavery, and how this still today impacts survivors and service provision. So could you talk a little bit more about that? 

0:15:00.7 S2: Yeah. This shows up a couple of ways. So one, I think we've been given some missing history about the anti-rape movement. I think a lot of us think that it kinda started in the '70s, and that is not completely accurate. The rape crisis center movement started in the '70s, but when you think about the anti-rape movement as a whole it really started back during and post-slavery era when we're talking about anti-lynching coalitions that were created. Because one of the things that was happening was that Black men were being falsely accused of rape, and that's how those things are linked. I think a lot more we've learned about Rosa Parks in particular, that a lot of folks really just think about her as not getting up from the bus, but she was actually... Had a huge role in anti-rape movements and again, defending people on their behalf when they were falsely accused of rape.

0:16:08.6 S2: Another thing that comes up too... And I think we know this, but I think it's important to really be explicit about that rape was used as a tool of oppression during and after slavery. So we just talked about some of the anti-lynching coalitions that were happening, but during slavery... And this happened in the US, and my context, of course, Latin America, is that slave... Actually, I don't wanna say slave masters. That's actually incorrect language. We're trying to get away from that. So some people are using the term human traffickers for people that enslaved folks... Would force enslaved peoples to rape each other essentially to breed more enslaved people. This was something that happened in the US. In Latin America it happened very frequently because while slavery may have been abolished in some countries as early as 1804 and 1807, emancipation did not happen until much later. We're talking like maybe 30, 40, 50 years later.

0:17:21.2 S2: And so in that time, enslaved peoples were not being trafficked into Latin America, but people were still enslaved. So in order to continue to have enslaved people to work land and have capital, they were also forcing slaves to rape each other to continue to build wealth. So when you talk about the way that our countries were established, it has been established on violence. So it's really important when we talk about how this has played out throughout history to think about that and not forget that this has been happening for a long time, and that it has... How that impacts people today is a really big deal.

0:18:15.7 S1: Right... It might be playing out in different or new ways today, but it's still happening.

0:18:20.7 S2: Exactly.

0:18:23.8 S1: Right.

0:18:26.2 S2: Yeah.

0:18:26.2 S1: So I thought we could end by talking about what are some ways to dismantle anti-Blackness in your life, in your organization and in your community? 

0:18:37.7 S2: There are so many ways. I think the first way is to learn history. We've been given a lot of misinformation, false information, missing information about the history of our countries. It's really important to learn how we got to where we are today. So I think learning about why... If you do something like black face, for example, why that's really problematic, because that has a history of dehumanizing Black folks. So that's one way to start. Another way is to listen. I think we talk more than we listen as a society.

0:19:24.5 S1: I'm definitely guilty of that.

0:19:27.4 S2: Right? Aren't we all? But yeah, when folks tell you that what you're doing is problematic or that it hurts or what have you, instead of jumping immediately to being defensive, listen to what folks are telling you. There's a reason. And it's hard for someone to tell you, "Hey, the thing that you just said was really harmful." And it may not be harmful to me, or it may not be harmful to another person, but it may be harmful to someone else. So listening is really, really important. Who do you listen to also... Just in terms of consuming media, what TV shows are you watching? What musicians do you listen to? What does your friend circle look like? So that you're not just listening and looking at the same things all the time.

0:20:27.1 S2: Another way is to support. You can do this in a number of ways. Kind of like what I just mentioned. What are you consuming? What media are you consuming? One of the things that's really awesome about living in the now is that you can consume art without having to be rich. People have Patreons. You don't have to go to a museum to consume art. You can consume art on social media, on Facebook or Instagram, for example. People post their art, you could purchase their art. People have Patreons. If you're not familiar with Patreon is a platform where artists can upload content that they create and then you pay. They have scales sometimes like $1, $5, $10 or more, and you can support that way. I do that. I have Patreons that I support on a monthly basis.

0:21:23.9 S2: Yeah, there's... Sometimes on a lot of things that I've been seeing lately, especially after the protests of last summer, after the murder of George Floyd, there was a lot of mutual aid being shared. People will post their Cash App or Venmo, and you can support people in that way. Sometimes people are doing fundraisers, like GoFundMes for whatever reason. That's another way to support people. There's lots of tangible ways. You can share people's art or their posts or like, share, post, that sort of thing on social media. Especially if you're not a person who has a lot of money. It doesn't always have to be with money. But if you are in that position, I highly recommend showing your support financially.

0:22:10.8 S2: Another way is to hire people. Hiring Black folks to be in your organization is extremely important for many, many reasons, but the biggest one is that we're here to help survivors. You wanna make sure that your organization reflects your community. But you also wanna do that intentionally. You don't wanna do that in just like a, "Oh, we're filling a quota here." Or this is a diversity hire type of situation. It needs to be intentional, and it needs to be thought out really well. So if you need to work with a consultant, which is another way to hire folks, that's always an option. You also want to... The biggest thing is, after you've hired people, you really want to... Or even before you hire people, you wanna think about your policies.

0:23:07.8 S2: What do your policies look like? Are your policies anti-Black in any particular way? You may not know that, you may not realize that, it could be... And sometimes it's... Again, it's not intentional. It's this bias that we have because we've all been indoctrinated into the system. So you may not realize the way that it plays out. Or sometimes it's not even so much about the policy itself, it's the way that it's enforced.

0:23:35.4 S2: So you wanna... When you are looking at organizational policies, you also wanna think about how is it being enforced. Because one of the biggest things... So earlier I had mentioned the different types of ways that anti-Blackness shows up in our movement, it also shows up outside of our movement, obviously. We would be foolish to think that the things that happen in other institutions don't happen in our organization. So I think the biggest example that I can think of is Black Girl Pushout. And there'll be links to this after the podcast. But Black Girl Pushout is the adultification of young Black girls where they are often punished at higher rates than White students, which is... This is how the studies were done. Is they were doing it versus White students.

0:24:23.4 S2: So we don't know what it looks like for other folks. But there is an over-punishment of young Black girls. So how does this show up in other places? If this is happening in schools, it's happening in other institutions. So does that mean that Black women, for example, are being written up more frequently at work, or are being put on... I used to work in a place where we used a lot of the term of coaching and being written up in that way. So there was a process where you would write someone up verbally and then you would get a coaching. Does that happen more frequently for Black folks in your organization? Your policies of like, "Oh, we can't have... " I know... I've worked in places where they say you can't have an unnatural hair color, and that is really open to interpretation. And how does that get enforced? Are Black folks allowed to have their natural hair in its natural state? There may not be policies that are specific to that, but the way that they're enforced means that they can be anti-Black. So really thinking about that.

0:25:47.8 S2: Also, when you're doing this work, it is extremely important that you're doing this on multiple levels. It's not enough that you maybe hired a consultant and had a training. What are you doing on an individual level? What are you doing on a community level? Because that's how you impact institutions and systems. You cannot expect to just read a book, and now you know all the things. I've been doing this work myself, learning about anti-Blackness, for probably about five or six years now. Honestly, if I think about it, it's been happening over a lifetime. But when I think about tangibly, how long I've been doing it, where I've been learning from specific people that talk on this topic, it's been about five or six years. So it doesn't happen overnight.

0:26:41.2 S2: Also another way... And I talked about policy change. Strategic plans are a big thing that I think a lot of our organizations do. What does your strategic plan look like? Do you have things about anti-racism in there? If you do, I would encourage to go one step beyond and really be explicit and name anti-Blackness. Because, again... When I had said earlier, when we talk about people of color, we often lump everyone's experiences into one. And we do that sometimes... That is weaponizing that term. That term was used to build solidarity and now it's being used to erase Black people from their own narratives and from issues that deeply impact them. You wanna be really explicit because that is some... Some of the ways in which that shows up is like, "Oh, well, we'll hire more people of color," but then not hiring Black folks.

0:27:39.5 S2: Yeah. And also part of the reason too, as we started off, we said that racism and sexual violence are linked. There are other forms of oppression... All forms of repression are linked. So if you wanna be really specific, how ableism is connected to anti-blackness and fat phobia and other forms of oppression, they're often going to impact Black folks much more intensely than other communities. So it is really important to be explicit in that way.

0:28:14.6 S1: This is really making me think about how all the different roles at rape crisis centers, whether you're a prevention educator, and you're going into schools and community groups and helping them understand what their harmful policies are. I love to talk about dress codes. You brought up some examples of that and how that plays out in terms of anti-Blackness. So not only is it thinking about the folks who are responsible for hiring and making sure that the environment that people are working in is safe or as safe as possible for people of color, Black people in particular, to come work there and are in decision-making roles, and also for counselors who are needing to look at their own bias that they might have when they're trying to work with survivors.

0:29:08.6 S1: But just thinking about the multitude of roles and how, like you said, we have to be doing this individually, but also looking at it institutionally. And in all of our roles, we've worked with those institutions, so it's our responsibility to challenge those institutions and help them also think about it outside of just our own place of work.

0:29:31.9 S2: Exactly, that's really it right there. I think the last thing too that I wanted to say that's kind of connected to how can you dismantle anti-Blackness is that you're probably gonna screw up. That is the reality of this work. So the biggest thing is to... Don't get... Like I mentioned earlier, do not get defensive. Which is hard. I think sometimes that's kind of our natural reaction. But the biggest thing is how you respond after you screw up. If you dig in your heels, you're probably breaking the relationship, if you do that. If you are reflective and acknowledging what you did and learning to do better, there's an opportunity there to repair a relationship and potentially your community and your organization.

0:30:32.8 S2: I think a lot about... So I'm a big fan of Sonya Renee Taylor, I think, I talk about her at least once a week. If folks aren't familiar with her, she wrote the Body is Not an Apology. And one of the things that she talks about is that in order to... Like if you love yourself... Radical self-love will help you change the world. So if you... And basically, if you kind of dismantle these systems within yourself, you are actually able to dismantle them within your community and in your organization. But if you're still doing that, if you're still invested in white supremacy and you're invested in anti-Blackness, you're not gonna be able to dismantle it within your organization. It's really hard work, but it is possible. So... Yeah.

0:31:19.5 S1: Well, Dee, thank you so much for joining us today to talk about the connection between anti-Blackness and sexual violence.

0:31:30.5 S2: Thank you so much for having me, Jackie. I really enjoyed talking about this. And there are lots of resources that are mentioned today. They'll be in the description of the podcast. There's also some resources that weren't mentioned, including the ones that I created for the presentation that I did last year, and those resources are actually bilingual. They're mostly geared towards the Latinx community, but if you're not part of the Latinx community, don't feel like you can't look at those resources, 'cause they're really great. I've also found resources for communities of... Non-Black communities of color and for White folks. So just because this conversation is... We kinda started talking about the Latinx community, it doesn't mean that there aren't resources there for you.

0:32:22.0 S1: Awesome. So that's all the time we have today. And we wanna thank everyone for listening to this episode of PA Centered. As Dee said, make sure that you check out the description of the episode to access all of the resources that Dee has compiled on this topic.

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0:32:44.2 S1: If you or a loved one needs help, a local sexual assault center is available 24/7. Call 1-888-772-7227 for more information, or find your local center online at pcar.org. Together, we can end sexual violence. Any views or opinions expressed on PA Centered by staff or their guests are solely their own and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of PCAR or PCAR's funders.