Women in almost every culture and segment of society experience violence—from both individuals and institutions—that is directed specifically at them as women. In the United States, women of color—Hispanic, Afro-American, Asian, and Native American—experience violence that is specifically focused against them because of both their race and their gender. When misogynist violence combines with racism, the result is a unique and deadly threat to women of oppressed races.
Throughout the world, and especially in war, rape has been an instrument of racial conquest and oppression. Groups of men from one race have attacked women of races they deemed inferior. The toll has included Jewish women who were raped by German troops, Chinese women raped by Japanese soldiers, Bengali women raped by Pakistani soldiers, Native American women raped by white settlers, Afro-American women raped and terrorized by the Ku Klux Klan and other groups, and Vietnamese women raped by U.S. soldiers. These systematic attacks on women often included mutilation and murder, and they were part of a general pattern of terrorism against the population involved.
In these cases, the racist underpinnings of the assaults are beyond doubt. The attacks against women represented an extreme humiliation of the race to which they belonged. Women, in the minds of their attackers, were either property to be sabotaged or subhuman because they belonged to an enemy race.
Susan Brownmiller, in her book Against Our Will, quotes a Vietnam war veteran who in a panel discussion described the systematic rapes that were conducted by U.S. troops under the pretext of "searching" Vietnamese women. After the veteran described the mutilation and murder of one particular woman, the moderator asked him, "Did the men in your outfit, or when you witnessed these things, did they seem to think it was all right to do anything to the Vietnamese?" The veteran replied, "It wasn't like they were humans … They were a gook or a Commie and it was okay."
The dehumanization of women of other races in the instances mentioned above has been closely linked to use of pornography and pornographic images. Martha Langelan, in an article on the political economy of pornography, notes that:
In Nazi Germany, the Reich targeted Jewish women in pornography as a means of generating anti-Semitism. In Bangladesh, pornographic movies were shown in the Pakistani army camps during the war in 1971, when hundreds of thousands of Bengali women were being systematically raped by Pakistani troops. In the U.S., pornography gave Asian women special treatment during the war in Vietnam.
The "special treatment" Langelan mentions consisted of images that reinforced stereotypes of Asian women as childlike and submissive.
In the United States, violence against women of color has been consistently linked to the dehumanization, lower status, and degrading images forced upon them by racial structures. During slavery, for example, black women were especially vulnerable and were exploited and abused in every conceivable way. White men could assault black women with impunity, and did. No legal concept of rape of black women existed.
The pattern of exploiting black women did not end with slavery. An anonymous black woman writing in 1912 testifies to the abuse that she and many others suffered:
I remember very well the first and last work place from which I was dismissed. I lost my place because I refused to let the madam's husband kiss me … I was young then, and newly married, and didn't know then what has been a burden to my mind and heart ever since, that a colored woman's virtue in this part of the country has no protection ... I was present at the hearing, and testified on oath to the insult offered me. The white man, of course, denied the charge. The old judge looked up and said: "This court wilt never take the word of a nigger against the word of a white man." ... I believe nearly all white men take, or expect to take, undue liberties with their colored female servants.
Myths and degrading images about Afro-Americans abound, particularly concerning their sexuality. The notions of black sexual savagery and licentiousness grew especially strong during and after Reconstruction, when many whites sought to curtail the political and economic advances that blacks were making. As Andrea Dworkin wrote in Pornography: Men Possessing Women:
This is the paradigm of racist sexual ideology—every racially despised group is invested with a bestial sexual nature. So the force is marshaled and the terror is executed. The men are conquered, castrated, and killed. The women are raped, tortured, sterilized, killed.
The myth of the "bad" black woman that emerged after slavery characterized Afro-American women as morally loose and sexually promiscuous; therefore, they were not seen as deserving of respect. Accordingly no social sanctions again assaulting and exploiting them existed. As Gerda Lerner notes in Black Women in White America:
A wide range of practices reinforced this myth: the laws against intermarriage; the denial of the title "Miss" or "Mrs." to any black woman; ... the refusal to let black women customers try on clothing in stores before making a purchase; the assigning of single toilet facilities to both sexes of Blacks … Black women were very much aware of the interrelatedness of these practices and fought constantly—individually and through their organizations—both the practices and the underlying myth.
It was in this climate that the Ku Klux Klan and other groups used rape and lynching as weapons of terror against the black community.
Black men were also victims of this racist sexual mythology, which pictured them as vicious rapists. This characterization served as a general justification for thousands of lynchings. In addition, 89 percent of the men executed for rape in the United States have been black. Not one white man has ever been executed for raping a black woman.
Stereotyping of black, Latin, and Asian women continues today, as both pornography and mainstream media regularly present warped portrayals of women of color. Asian women are often characterized as submissive and eager to please men—an image taken advantage of by the illicit traffickers in Asian "mail order" brides. Hispanic women are frequently stereotyped as sultry, passionate, and wanton.
In pornography, the use of slave images reinforces the degradation of women that is common throughout the industry. For example, one writer on pornography noted in 1980 that "a popular Berkeley theater recently featured a pornographic movie titled Slaves of Love. Its advertisement portrayed two black women, naked, (kneeling) in chains, and a white man standing over them with a whip." The poster created only scant outcry in the surrounding community.
Few positive images in popular culture can be found to offset these pervasive characterizations. Black women's roles are usually limited to variations on a narrow range of caricatures: the overweight, loyal "mammy" figure (80 percent of the obese women on television are black); the temperamental, emasculating, often matriarchal character; or the sophisticated seductress.
Aside from the psychological damage these images inflict, and the climate they both reflect and create, distortions of the character of women of color obscure the realities of their lives, including the violence they face. For example, black women are 18 times more likely to be victims of rape than are white women. Furthermore, such stereotyping affects the public and institutional response to that violence.
Black and other women of color in the movement to end violence against women attest to the indifference of police and other institutions toward their plight. The experience of the black community in Boston in 1979 is often cited as an example. Eleven Afro-American women were raped and murdered over a period of months. The twelfth victim was white. Only after she was found did the police respond with seminars and films about rape—a good response, but one that by its timing failed to address the needs of the black community.
But rape, assault, and murder are not the only forms of violence directed specifically at women of color. Sterilization abuse is another insidious example of how the lives of these women have been devalued. Angela Davis discusses it at length in her book Women, Race, and Class.
The eugenics movement, with its pseudoscientific theories, encouraged sterilization as a means of controlling populations and "purifying" the human race. "By 1932," Davis writes, "the Eugenics Society could boast that at least 26 states had passed compulsory sterilization laws and that thousands of 'unfit' persons had already been surgically prevented from reproducing."
Davis includes several quotes in which these early proponents of population control reveal the racist underpinnings of their programs. The director of the American Eugenics Society advocated birth control to "prevent the American people from being replaced by an alien or Negro stock, whether it be by immigration or by overly high birth rates among others in this country."
Population control strategies have focused on poor women, particularly poor Native American, black, and Hispanic women. In 1939, the Birth Control Federation of America planned a "Negro Project," saying that "the mass of Negroes, particularly in the South, still breed carelessly and disastrously." It should be noted that these programs were not designed simply to advocate the right to individual birth control, but instead were a means of controlling specific populations.
Federal and local government programs also actively promoted—and funded—sterilizations among women of color and poor white women. Coercive measures, such as the threat of cutting off welfare payments, have been employed to force women to submit to sterilization. To this day, the U.S. government continues to fund and promote sterilization for target populations of women.
The percentages of Native American, black, and Hispanic women who have been sterilized reflect the effectiveness of the targeted programs. According to Dr. Connie Uri's testimony before a Senate committee, about 24 percent of all Native American women of childbearing age had been surgically rendered infertile by 1976. A 1970 National Fertility Study found that approximately 20 percent of all married black women and about the same percentage of childbearing-age Chicana women had been sterilized. Furthermore, Davis notes that ''43 percent of the women sterilized through federally subsidized programs were black."
The U.S. government has directed sterilization campaigns against Puerto Rican women for decades. By the 1970s more than 35 percent of all Puerto Rican women of childbearing age had been sterilized.
More recently, U.S. Agency for International Development money has funded and promoted sterilizations of Salvadoran women. According to an article by journalist Chris Hedges, 30,000 women were sterilized in El Salvador during 1983. This was the result of both the promotional campaign and of the policy of sterilizing women at hospitals after they give birth. A similar policy has been used in the United States, against Native American women in particular.
Sterilization abuse has been a hidden problem in the United States. The magnitude of the situation is best understood through a comparison. The director of the then Department of Health, Education, and Welfare's Population Affairs Office estimated that the federal government funded between 100,000 and 200,000 sterilizations in 1972. The Nazis, during Hitler's entire reign, performed 250,000 sterilizations under their Hereditary Health Law.
Whatever form it takes, violence against women of color in this society has its own unique deadliness. But the common denominator in the violence experienced by all women is suffering, which knows no boundaries.
Women of different races and economic backgrounds have begun to join together in a movement to end the violence that endangers them all. The women of color who are involved in this movement, however, bear witness to the barriers that hinder such cooperation. Prominent among them is the misunderstanding or ignorance of the particular ways that both individuals and institutions perpetrate violence focused against women of color.
It is clear from the historical and current experiences of women of color that racism is an inextricable factor in this violence. They reject, therefore, analyses that blame only sexism and patriarchal structures for violence against women. The problem of misogynist violence can only be fully addressed when the experiences of all women are incorporated into the perspective of the movement for change. Both racist and anti-women stereotypes and attitudes must be overcome before society can become a safe place for all women.
Liane Rozzell was an editorial assistant of Sojourners magazine when this article appeared.

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