Mapping the Intersections of Violence on Black Women's Sexual Health within the Jim Crow Geographies of Cincinnati Neighborhoods

Who will revere the Black woman? Who will keep our neighborhoods safe for Black innocent womanhood? Black womanhood is outraged and humiliated. Black womanhood cries for dignity and restitution and salvation. Black womanhood wants and needs protection, and keeping, and holding. Who will assuage her indignation? Who will keep her precious and pure? Who will glorify and proclaim her beautiful image? To whom will she cry rape?

Abbey Lincoln, 1970

Though written almost fifty years ago, Lincoln's essay still resonates today.¹ This eloquent prose still eerily reflects the struggles that many Black women must navigate, especially those residing in the neighborhoods Jim Crow built. In urban Jim Crow, violence is the mortar that lies between the brick and stone constructing this space. Violence is a daily reality that seems to exist just about everywhere. For a woman living within the confines of Jim Crow, violence resides in and outside of home: the bed where she sleeps, the space in which she strolls, the environment where she works, and even the places where she goes for recreation. Jim Crow has left a legacy of regulating property through racial zoning policy, then restrictive covenants, and later, through the practice of redlining and racial steering policy (1877–1960s), creating what I call Jim Crow geographies. In the post-1970s or the "new" Jim Crow era, these spaces continued to be created by policy, as noted by Richard Rothstein, in addition to the custom of white flight.² Today many of Cincinnati city's forty-eight neighborhoods still reflect the zoning policies that created homogeneous communities on the basis of race and social class.

This study contextualizes Jim Crow, as a definitive form of structural violence, as the architect of spatial violence, and as the predicate of direct violence. Structural violence refers to social arrangements, actions, and policies that bring harm to social groups or individuals by unevenly distributing or restricting access to the basic goods, services, and resources needed to sustain human life. Reciprocal to structural violence is direct violence, which occurs between individuals through direct contact and results in either physical or psychological harm. Significantly, the relationship between structural and interpersonal violence is mediated by spatial violence, which refers to the aggregate or totality of direct and indirect violence occurring within community boundaries or physical geographical space, regardless of whether a given individual has direct knowledge of this violence.

These forms of violence precipitated by Jim Crow have left a legacy of psychological trauma and damage. From slavery to Jim Crow, the Black female body has been brutally and routinely compromised in the absence of legal protection.³ Controlling tropes of hypersexuality continue to cultivate the perception of Black women as being unvictimizable.⁴ Such historical controlling images silence Black women, who are thus less likely to disclose their having been assaulted compared to other US women.⁵ The sexual trauma inflicted onto Black women's bodies and the imposed silence and stigma continue to shape the lives of Black women; particularly those still residing in the confines of Jim Crow geographies.

Concurrently, these forms of violence and trauma cultivate disparate sexual health outcomes for Black women in Cincinnati. This qualitative study explores the ways Black women navigate daily life within the confines of Cincinnati's urban Jim Crow neighborhoods and the impact of this confinement on their sexual health.

The structural violence of jim crow cincinnati

The city of Cincinnati has a long history of inflicting structural violence on its Black residents. Though the term "Jim Crow" can be traced back to 1830, the practice of Jim Crow began much earlier with the ratification of Black Codes in Ohio in 1804. And though Jim Crow is often singularly presented as a southern and rural phenomenon, truth be told, the strange career of Jim Crow originated in practice in the North.⁶ Ohio was among the first US territories to implement it.⁷ When Ohio adopted Black Codes in 1804 (two years after gaining statehood) in lieu of slavery, it opted to regulate Blacks...