myths

“Your hair feels like pubic hair.” That was one of the first insults that someone hurled at my hair. She was a junior at my school. She would touch my hair and repeat this sentence to all present. I had to threaten her with violence to get her to stop touching my hair and comparing it to her pubes. This is one of the first dilemmas that black people face: do I let people touch my hair and under what circumstances? The question, “can I touch it?” becomes one of the most awkward social moments and can break relationships before they even start. This fascination with the texture of black hair (please don’t call it “ethnic”), is not new. In slave societies, white women would often hack off the hair of their enslaved female servants because it supposedly “confused white men” . Today, black w...

Corinne Schwarz, Oklahoma State University The idea that sex trafficking is an urgent social problem is woven into American media stories, from reports of Republican U.S. Rep. Matt Gaetz’s alleged trafficking of teenage girls to debunked QAnon conspiracy theories about a sexual slavery ring run through online retailer Wayfair. The common perception of sex trafficking involves a young, passive woman captured by an aggressive trafficker. The woman is hidden and waiting to be rescued by law enforcement. She is probably white, because, as the legal scholar Jayashri Srikantiah writes, the “iconic victim” of trafficking usually is depicted this way. This is essentially the plot of the “Taken” movies, in which teenage Americans are kidnapped abroad and sold into sexual slavery. Such concerns f...

Tag: myths

A History Of Myths About Black Hair: From Slavery To Colonialism And School Rules

1 real-world way to prevent sexual exploitation – 4 myths debunked – Sex trafficking isn’t what you think