“Did It Happen Because of Your Race or Sex?”: University Sexual Harassment Policies and the Move against Intersectionality

For women of color, sexual harassment is rarely, if ever about sex or sexism alone; it is also about race.

“Why is she so angry?”

This is what some of my “critically oriented” colleagues ask about me.

“What has she become?”

They speak of my “transformation,” individualizing my pain and experience rather than seeing it within a larger matrix of domination. I was made this way by the academy.¹ The first time I remember hearing the term sexual harassment was in the early 1990s, when Anita Hill and Clarence Thomas were everywhere in the media. I was in high school at the time, but I remember being compelled to listen to Hill’s testimony. There was something about it that resonated with me and left me with no doubt about the veracity of Hill’s claims. Little did I know that years later I would find myself in a position similar to Hill’s, my credibility attacked as I told my own story of sexual harassment and racial discrimination. While the coverage of Hill and Thomas in the media led to an increase in studies of sexual harassment in the academy, Richardson and Taylor note, “Ironically, while the accuser in the real-life drama was an African American woman, scholarly research generally does not include race, and particularly the intersections of race and gender, as a critical component of sexual harassment processes and experiences.”² The paucity of literature is even more startling given that women of color report higher rates of sexual harassment than white women, “ranging from 60% to 85%.”³ Following the call for more work that addresses the experiences of women of color who have been sexually harassed, I share my experiences.

It has been some time since that painful period of my academic life, and the post-traumatic stress has calmed, but I still live with the scars and the taint against my reputation. However, in the almost ten years that have passed I have seen some victories. As a result of the charges filed against a senior white male colleague by me and two other women in my former department (one untenured and one tenured), and based on our recommendations regarding the process, my former place of employment is now revisiting their sexual harassment policies to consider how race intersects with sexual harassment.⁴ In my case the charges of sexual harassment and racial discrimination were separated, which worked in the favor of my harasser because a larger pattern of behavior was dispelled. I use my story as a queer Chicana in the academy to explore how gender inequity continues to exist, particularly for women of color, through institutionalized practices such as university sexual harassment and racial discrimination policies. My narratives help to illustrate Crenshaw’s argument that women of color suffer gendered and racialized violence because of policies that don’t take into account their intersectional identities.⁵ As Cho, Crenshaw, and McCall write, intersectionality exposes “how single-axis thinking undermines legal thinking, disciplinary knowledge production, and struggles for social justice.”⁶ Building on this work, Buchanan and Ormerod have argued for the importance of studying what they term “racialized sexual harassment” in the lives of women of color.⁷ They argue, “Sexual and racial harassment may be combined in unique ways for African American women. Specifically, the cultural and historical contexts of slavery and sexualized stereotypes of African American women result in sexual harassment that is perceived as racially motivated.”⁸ Describing examples of racialized sexual harassment from their research, Buchanan and Ormerod write:

The women reported that White coworkers and supervisors often felt free to be sexually explicit or request information about the participants’ sex lives. . . . The women asserted that this behavior reflected an underlying assumption that African American women’s sexual boundaries, both the behaviors they will engage in and their comfort in discussing sex, are looser than those of Caucasians.⁹

Though Buchanan and Ormerod write about African American women, their arguments can similarly be applied to other women of color who must...