SEX, RACE, AND POLICE POWER
from Segregation to Gentrification
Anne Gray Fischer
March 10th 2022
It began with a poster. The silhouette of a large black cat cast against an orange sun. The flyer announced the “eighth annual Hooker’s Ball” in 1976, hosted by an organisation that shared the name of this feline mascot, PUMA; the Prostitute’s Union of Massachusetts. Dr Anne Gray Fischer first encountered this poster fifteen years ago while working as a labour organiser in Boston. It would go on to galvanize her research journey and see her through a master’s degree, a PhD, an award-winning article in the Journal of American History, multiple other pathbreaking publications, and now the release of her monograph, The Streets Belong to Us: Sex, Race, and Police Power from Segregation to Gentrification–published by the University of North Carolina Press in March 2022. The same poster now adorns her office wall, just visible in the Zoom frame as Anne spoke to the Historical Perspectives on Gendered State Violence research seminar on Thursday 10th March.
Her research began with the historic treatment of criminalised women and the larger movement for sex worker rights in the 1970s, which then led her to write a field-defining history of policing, race, and sexuality in the twentieth-century United States.
Anne’s research trajectory was shaped by PUMA activists and others who theorised sex worker rights, and further driven by recent uprisings against the murder of Black people by police. At the talk, Anne discussed the urgency of presentism in the face of pervasive state violence, pushing back on the expectation of maintaining “objectivity” within historical scholarship. She took inspiration from Sadiya Hartman, who sees historical research as attending to the “as-yet-incomplete project of freedom” and informing the as-yet, unwritten future. As such, Anne approached her project within the context of the work of Kimberlé Crenshaw and the #SayHerName movement that emerged in late 2014 to raise awareness of police violence against Black women, as well as the overrepresentation of Black women in sex worker arrests.
Informed by the present day, Anne noted that she was surprised by the prevalence of criminalised white women in the social, municipal, and cultural archives of the early twentieth century. Just two generations after the abolition of slavery, the narrative of “white slavery” emerged as a means of cracking down on sex work. Political, religious, legal and cultural voices obsessively focused on the young, white woman in new urban environments as a figure of moral alarm, which erased the experiences and sexual vulnerabilities of Black women in the process.
Policing was dedicated to the maintenance of sexual and gender norms, and wore its racist priorities of female redemption clearly. States passed swathes of anti-prostitution statutes, then in 1910 the federal White Slave Traffic Act promised to introduce new controls on female sexuality in a process that catalysed the foundation of the modern FBI, as historian Jessica Pliley has argued. Meanwhile, a generation of middle-class women made pretences to harness these new legal tools as policewomen, female probation officers, and social workers.
Anne’s generative new work enhances this received narrative by connecting early twentieth century racialized moral reform to late century narratives of anti-Black police violence. She deftly argues that the crusade to save white women from sex work transitioned into a systematic attack on Black women. Anne also drew on the theoretical insights of Black sex workers and their allies in the 1970s and 1980s who protested the murders of Black women as demonstrative of a wider system of “violent neglect” in the United States.
In turn, The Streets Belong to Us traces how the benefits of mid-century sexual liberalism, which supposedly engendered new freedoms for all women, were confined in reality to white women. The emergent hands-off approach to white women’s sexuality in this era coincided with the targeted policing of black women, through the establishment of urban borders that were politically and economically profitable. Sexual policing became governance by other means.
For graduate students, Anne’s reflections on the research and writing process were informative and heartening. She spoke about her three case studies of LA, Boston, and Atlanta, which mapped onto her own personal geography: she emphasised that “research is shaped by contingency.” For those writing in the time of COVID, her words rang true; she identified the hope that can be found in this moment, recognising the potential of digital archives, and the creation and democratisation of material.
Anne’s book The Streets Belong To Us, is now available to read. She is also co-editing a forthcoming special issue of the Radical History Review entitled "Feminists Confront State Violence ” alongside Marisol LeBrón and Sara Matthiesen. The deadline for abstracts is June 1, 2022. The issue will draw upon many of the themes that were explored in her talk.