To what extent is the criminalization of prostitution in the U.S. tied into racism? Obviously it’s not hard to trace the connection between the War on Drugs and racism, and the relationship between skin-color and enforcement of prostitution laws is obvious. It’s also easy to notice that prostitution starts to become illegal not long after the Civil War, but to what extent does that relate to race, if at all?
Though the most pernicious form of racism in the modern US is that directed against black people, the country has a long and ugly history of bigotry against others as well (consider, for example, the literally genocidal racism inflicted on American Indians). So while you’re correct that the criminalization of sex work in the US is indeed rooted in racism, the specific culprit which started the ball rolling was racism against Asian people, specifically the Chinese. As I explained in my “Brief History of Prostitution in the US“,
…When Chinese immigrants began to pour into California…white Americans feared these new arrivals whose ways were so different from their own…most female Chinese immigrants of the time were either prostitutes or second wives in polygamous marriages, so in 1875 Congress passed the Page Law, which banned the immigration of women for “lewd and immoral purposes”. In a way, the law backfired; Chinese men flooded into the country anyway (especially into California and New York), and since there was a shortage of Chinese women, many of them either patronized white prostitutes or set up small brothels and hired them; others married or cohabited with working-class white women. The self-appointed guardians of public morality were scandalized, and the seeds of moral panic were sown…
The Page Law was only the first of many federal, state and local “morality” laws inflicted on sex workers, and while many of them were based in the imagined “inferiority” of non-Europeans, full-on criminalization was based in the imagined “superiority” of white Europeans:
…The existence of prostitutes required considerable cognitive gymnastics to reconcile with the Victorian view that women were intrinsically asexual…[most scholars believed] that prostitutes represented regressions to a more “primitive” type of woman. This racist view could be used to explain away non-European sex workers or those of supposedly “degraded” nationalities, but those involved in the increasingly popular “rescue” movement soon discovered to their horror that there were more than a few Anglo-Saxon prostitutes, including some middle-class girls of “good breeding” and education. It was therefore proposed that white prostitutes “had…fallen into the hands of ‘professional seducers’, who had manipulated their sexless victims into submission.” This narrative of helpless young white women forced into a life of exploitation, had tremendous popular appeal; it was heavily promoted from the 1880s on by organizations like the Salvation Army and found especially fertile soil in areas where white prostitutes worked alongside those of other ethnicities or catered to a nonwhite clientele. The myth of “white slavery” (as it was then called) also appealed to middle-class discomfort with female autonomy; if women who traveled large distances and made their way by either casual or professional prostitution could be cast as the victims of evil men, there was no need to rethink the notion of female helplessness…Like all moral panics, the “white slavery” hysteria thus cast a challenge to prevailing social norms as a threat from outside forces to be fought…
Of course, once prohibition of sex work was in place, it was enforced disproportionately against poor people and ethnic minorities, especially black people, just as all prohibitionist laws are (which is why I’ve repeatedly argued that support for any prohibition is a sign of naivety and, though I find it a very flawed term, privilege). The Mann Act of 1910 (or to give it its official name, “The White-Slave Traffic Act”), the first federal anti-prostitution law specifically worded as such, was notorious for its use in persecuting black men involved in relationships with white women. The modern recycling of the old “white slavery” hysteria, the “sex trafficking” panic, has spawned a whole host of laws which are disproportionately employed against young black and Latino men, especially those belonging to what the “authorities” label “gangs”. And just as in the past, interracial relationships are an especial target of busybodies looking for “signs of sex trafficking” or even just plain prostitution.
Finally, racism has played a major role in the spread of “sex trafficking” hysteria in Europe; it’s easy to see how the xenophobia and hysteria grew as the major origin points for emigration to Western Europe shifted from Eastern Europe to the Balkans to the Middle East to Africa. The darker the skin of the migrants, the greater the panic increased and the more those migrants were infantilized and those who assist in their migration demonized. In the US, I feel that the primary driver of the current moral panic is anti-sex hysteria, fueled by reaction to the sexual revolution, the HIV epidemic & gains in rights for sexual minorities rather than ethnic ones (which is why one of the groups disproportionately persecuted under anti-prostitution laws is transwomen). But both the hysteria itself, and the way in which it is enforced by “authorities”, are powerfully shaped by the racism and xenophobia from which criminalization first sprang.
Brilliant and right on target as usual. If this comment box will take it, here’s a transcript of an article from 1904 specifically about the ‘threat’ posed by Chinese restaurants as dens of debauchery. It’s worth noting that this article comes from an avowedly socialist newspaper. I transcribed the article from a microfilm of the paper, in case you are curious about the source.
From the Social-Democratic Herald, Milwaukee, Wisconsin, 17 December 1904.
Chinese Restaurants In Minneapolis.
When comrade Carl D. Thompson was at work in Minneapolis in the recent campaign, there was a dreadful scandal in the city in connection with the Chinese restaurants. It came to light that over twenty young girls under sixteen years of age had been seduced and debauched through the instrumentality of the Chinese restaurants. The daily papers, Humane Societies, Women’s Clubs, and churches were discussing the matter. Comrade Thompson at the time prepared an article on the subject which the capitalistic papers refused to publish. One of the editors returned the manuscript with the following comment appended: –
“I think it mischievous to teach people to rely on anything but their own individual efforts to save their children.” The article was in substance as follows:
“Everyone now knows that these Chinese restaurants are recruiting stations of vice. The working class of this city knew that a year ago. The labor unions understood instinctively that these institutions were a menace to the morality of our people and especially of their class. They reasoned in this way: These institutions will bring a cheap labor into the city. That will compel other restaurants to hire cheap labor. This will demoralize the restaurant workers, compel them to work for low wages and put hundreds of young women into positions of distressing temptation. So the labor unions of Minneapolis withstood the Chinese restaurants. But the so-called business interests of our city insisted that the right of the employer to hire whom he would, at whatever wages he would must be maintained. The courts rendered an injunction that defeated the labor unions and sustained the Chinese restaurants. And so they are here today by consent of the courts.
“And be it understood that this incident is only a symptom of the deeper lying disease of the social life. These restaurants would not be procuring young girls for debauchery if there were not in society a wide spread demand on the part of men who are ready to be parties to the crime. And these men are by no means all Yellow.
“At Owatonna there is a state institution for homeless children. There are on average three hundred children there. And it is notorious that many of them are the illegitimate offsprings of our festering city life. In Milwaukee and St. Louis last winter appalling disclosures were made concerning the ‘Baby Farms’ as they were called, which were simply the sewerage from the respectables down into the wretched and away into the abyss of the under world.
“Why all this immorality? There are many causes but chief of all the economic. Wages are too low. Cost of living too high. Thousands of young men cannot marry and support a family. Therefore thousands of young women must support themselves. But in our present capitalistic system women’s wages are lower even than men’s, thus to them life is a severe strain. In factory, shop, store and elsewhere the way to virtuous success for woman is long, tedious and hard. And then the temptation! The procuress, the ‘friend,’ who are now the agents of those who profit from the ‘traffic in girls,’ are ever present to offer ‘easy money’ in the ways of sin. Hundreds of girls, hundreds of women, some of whom have lost their husbands and bread winners, are frequently driven to these methods in hours of desperation to save their children from hunger and to drive the wolf from the door. For instance it was ascertained in Munich, Germany, that among the registered prostitutes no fewer than 203 were wives of day laborers and artisans.
“Moreover this system is fostered for other economic reasons. There is a ‘Trade of the Underworld’ as one of our editorial writers has it. These women buy groceries, furniture, fuel, rent houses, etc. They are the trade upon which many small merchants depend. And no small merchant can be careless of his trade in the fierce competition of today, and the still fiercer menace of the great monopoly and trust. And again these institutions furnish no small source of income to the political grafters, who cling like leeches to the body politic. The houses of ill fame – as are just now being so astonishingly proven – are the prey of the municipal grafter.
“So then we have a whole array of economic interests involved in this question. To solve this question means to grapple with the whole economic and social system that gives rise to it.” – Carl D. Thompson.
Speaking of racism, you’d be surprised by how many leftists and non-whites were racist. (Gandhi, Guevara, Qaddafi, those who overthrew and killed Qaddafi, Lenin, and Stalin come to mind.) Also worth noting is that there were plenty of anti-communists who supported the criminalization of drugs and prostitution. (McCarthy, Taft, Reza Khan, Nicaraguan Contras, whoever was installed when the CIA and MI6 staged that ’49 coup in Syria, the Duvaliers, those in charge of Singapore, Duke, and The infamous John Birch Society.)
Splitting a hair here; I think it’s not so much racism as tribalism. The women behind this nonsense aren’t worried about the loose morals of women with different skin colors. They’re worried about the loose morals of women who didn’t go to the same kind of Liberal/Progressive schools that they did. They are terrified that if sane men are given a choice between hired sex and putting up with a Modern Feminist, there will be McProstitute brothels on every corner.
Like most of the panics of the Left, Sex Trafficking is based on trying to impose White, Upper-Middle-Class, Psuedo-Intellectual social norms on everbody else.
Dear CSPSchofield,I think your comment is absolutely spot on.
The criminalisation of prostitution is not about race, it is about class. As we all know – nice prostitutes serving wealthy clients have always been given a free pass. However, race and class are intersectional, especially so in the USA.
It is worth noting, however, that Islam does indeed forcibly take sex slaves. This has always been the case, it has always been a “kill the men and rape the women” religion. Mohamed said to do it. They are still doing it now in Sweden and elsewhere. Islam has been attacking the west on and off for 1400 years. Those legendary Arabian harems? They were populated with captured Christians (and also with Hindus) whose husbands and families had been killed in attacks by Muslim pirates on coastal towns on the Mediterranean .
As the old saying goes: just because you are paranoid, doesn’t mean they aren’t out to get you. Islamaphobia is not rooted in racism, but in fact.
[…] prohibition of sex work was in place,” writer Maggie McNeill has noted, “it was enforced disproportionately against poor people and ethnic minorities, especially […]
[…] prohibition of sex work was in place,” writer Maggie McNeill has noted, “it was enforced disproportionately against poor people and ethnic minorities, especially […]