Sickening: Anti-Black Racism and Health Disparities in the United States by Anne Pollock

Author:Anne Pollock [Pollock, Anne]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: SOC031000 Social Science / Discrimination & Race Relations, SOC057000 Social Science / Disease & Health Issues, MED039000 Medical / History, MED078000 Medical / Public Health
ISBN: 9781452966175
Publisher: University of Minnesota Press
Published: 2021-08-17T00:00:00+00:00

Sexual Terrorism Enacted by the Man in the Police Uniform against the Girl in the Bikini

The racialized control of space in pools is inseparable from control of gendered space, and technologies of race are also technologies of gender. Until the turn of the twentieth century, pools were segregated by sex, but as pools increasingly allowed men, women, and children to swim together, there was a more prominent impetus for racial segregation—part of a broader panic over interracial intimacies and miscegenation.24

Swimsuits are blatantly technologies of gender, sorting and performing bodies that are on display, in ways that present normative bodies that are necessarily simultaneously gendered and racialized.25 Even as the Miss America pageant has recently ended its swimsuit competition,26 and “body-shaming” advertising featuring women in swimsuits has become increasingly marginalized,27 the imposition and defiance of bans on burkinis in France underscores the stakes of swimsuits as sites of control over women’s bodies.28

And yet bikinis can also be experienced as a site of fleeting freedom, as Black feminist historian of fashion Tanisha Ford highlights in her “Black Girl Song for Dajerria.”29 Ford describes Becton’s suit as an “eye-catching” “multicolored neon bikini with a long fringe that hung from its top” and speculates about how Becton might have felt upon trying it on and deciding that it was “the one.”30 The suit would allow her to “stand out from the crowd,” receive compliments from her friends, and even embody the affirmation “I am black girl magic.”31

In the images at McKinney, we see the juxtaposition of the bikini and a radically different type of clothing: the police uniform, arguably a technology of racial terrorism insofar as it represents a key armed wing of the structurally racist state. Ford also highlights the contrast, arguing, “The very material restrictions and weight of the oppressive uniform against Casebolt’s skin serves as a symbol of state violence. His words communicate a rage shrouded in envy of the black teens who frolicked around in more heat-appropriate attire, who dared to take pleasure in their own black leisure.”32

Many Black feminists have put the McKinney incident into the context of sexual terrorism. How can we tell that the terrorism is both racial and sexual? One way is by considering what a different response there would have been if a Black police officer had pinned down a white teenage girl in this way—as Sikivu Hutchison has point out, “little black girls can never occupy the space of carefree, feminine innocence that little white girls expect as their birthright.”33 Black girls don’t get the chance to be children. This is connected to one of the many elements that Ruth Nicole Brown, a leading voice in Black girl studies, describes as creating barriers to the freedom of Black girls: they are “routinely disciplined into taking up less and less space.”34

The smallness of Becton’s body calls our attention to the ways that racialized fantasies of Black dangerousness operate in police logics. What can explain the act of an officer throwing a child in a bathing

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