This article was originally shared by the National Center on Sexual Exploitation and reposted here with permission from the author. It has been edited for content.
Disclaimer: Fight the New Drug is a non-religious and non-legislative awareness and education organization. Some of the issues discussed in the following article are legislatively-affiliated. Including links and discussions about these legislative matters does not constitute an endorsement by Fight the New Drug. Though our organization is non-legislative, we fully support the regulation of already illegal forms of pornography and sexual exploitation, including the fight against sex trafficking.
Trigger warning: This article contains descriptions of abuse and exploitation, and includes graphic porn titles. Reader discretion advised.
The Long Racism of the Sex Industry
By Christen Price, Esq.
The sex trade is a haven for racial violence in this country. It violates the most basic human rights of women and girls of color, largely with impunity, as it has for centuries.
Under chattel slavery in the antebellum South, enslaved black women were commonly raped by their owners and owners’ friends. Sometimes they were abused so that their forced reproductive labor would produce children that the owner wouldn’t have to bother to buy.
Some women, particularly those who were light-skinned, were sold as sex slaves to white men in the euphemistically-named “fancy” trade. Just outside Washington, DC, Isaac Franklin and John Armfield had the largest, wealthiest slave trading firm in the United States in the 1820s and 1830s. Franklin was one of the main pimps for the New Orleans sex trafficking market.
Both men joked in their letters to each other about the women they routinely raped.
Race-based sexual exploitation
This pervasive sexual violence was not only admitted by the perpetrators, but decried by numerous abolitionists. Harriet Jacobs, a formerly enslaved woman, wrote that as a 15-year-old she was subjected to daily sexual abuse at the hands of her owner.
Frederick Douglass called slave owners legalized brothel keepers, and averred that at least a million enslaved women were “consigned to a life of revolting prostitution” in the South.
Abolitionist Fanny Kemble, who eventually divorced her slave-owning husband, wrote after observing his plantation that “almost every Southern planter” had a family of color from sexual abuse of enslaved women. In other words, American slavery’s sexual exploitation was well known and not disputed, even if it is not prominent in contemporary memory.
And race-based sexual exploitation did not end with slavery.
During the Jim Crow era, red light districts were placed in black neighborhoods and segregation did not stop white men from frequenting them. A similar story played out in the North, with Southern black women being promised big city factory jobs and then forced into prostitution when they arrived.
This sex trafficking was legal, as black women were unprotected by early anti-prostitution laws.
In fact, race-based sexual exploitation and violence continues today.
The enduring crisis of marginalized exploitation
Those sold in prostitution are disproportionately women and girls of color, and those buying prostituted people are disproportionately white men.
Survivor-leader Vednita Carter notes that strip clubs and massage parlors are “typically zoned in Black neighborhoods” and white men still go to them to buy sex.
According to Rights4Girls, 52% of children trafficked for sex in King County, Washington are black and 84% are girls—even though “Black girls only comprise 1.1% of the general population.” Similarly, in South Dakota, Native people comprise 8% of the population, yet 40% of sex trafficking victims are Native women. And in Louisiana, 49% of sex trafficking victims are black girls (who only make up 19% of the state’s youth).
Relatedly, girls of color are disproportionately represented in the criminal justice system, often as a direct result of sexual abuse. Girls of color are often arrested because someone is prostituting them when they should be treated like child sex trafficking victims. They are also charged with truancy after running away from abusive homes.
In South Carolina, 81% of girls in the juvenile justice system are victims of sexual violence. The same is true for 76% of girls in Oregon’s juvenile justice system.
And race-based sexual exploitation and violence flourishes online.
How the porn industry profits from racist stereotypes
The pornography industry traffics in racist themes, including racial stereotypes and verbal abuse directed at black women, on top of the violence that is already present in pornography.
There is no form of degradation, humiliation, torture, or abuse that pornography hasn’t sexualized, and racism is no exception.
For example, in the days following the terrible police-perpetrated murder of George Floyd in 2020, Pornhub—a massive mainstream site—reportedly hosted and monetized George Floyd and police-brutality-themed pornography.
Pornhub reportedly also, at one point, featured Holocaust pornography and slavery role play targeting black women, such as these videos:
Screenshot of porn titles on Pornhub
Note that since the original publish date of this article, Pornhub has removed millions of videos from the site and so it cannot be guaranteed the site continues to host these videos. However, the fact that it once did is problematic enough.
When racism is labeled “sex,” it apparently becomes politically invisible.
Private violence—including when it is commercialized, and especially when it is sexual—is still violence. The American sex industry is rife with sexual and racial violence, human rights abuses with roots deep in American slavery. Black women continue be sold, tortured, used, and sometimes killed.
To echo anti-trafficking advocate Vednita Carter’s cry from thirty years ago: when will we be outraged about it?
Read the original version of this article on NCOSE’s site by clicking here.
About the Author
Christen Price is Senior Legal Counsel at National Center on Sexual Exploitation.
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