To make a case against a color-blind perspective, I want first to illustrate, in terms of race issues, the historical-social moment in which we can locate the “Sexuality and Space” symposium. In doing so, the absence of race as a central factor seems all the more striking, for in the years and months leading up to March 1990, the media (and here I am specifically thinking of that of the New York area) declared  race the most explosive issue in the nation. As case after case of racial violence occurred, racial difference and racism became increasingly reinforced—by the events themselves and by the media—in terms of space, as volatile issues manifesting, involving, and intimately subject to the politics of space. 

I begin by going back to October 29, 1984. On this day, seven white police officers “burst into the private space” of Eleanor Bumpurs’s Bronx apartment—she a sixty-seven-year-old black woman—and “while attempting an illegal eviction, shot and killed her.”⁵  As Patricia Williams notes, the issues involved in such an incident played themselves out in January 1987, when the case finally came to trial. The lawyer for the officer who fired the shots requested a nonjury trial, stating, “Because of the climate now in the city, I don’t want people perceiving this as a racial case.”⁶ 

In January 1987, the tense climate in the city can most immediately be traced to the Howard Beach incident. On December 20, 1986, in Howard Beach, a group of white youths chased three black men for approximately three miles, severely beating them along the way; one of the black men, Michael Griffith, died when he was struck by a car as he tried to flee across a highway; another suffered permanent blindness in one eye.⁷  “In the heated public controversy that ensued, as much of the attention centered on the community of Howard Beach. . .as on the assaulters themselves” (Williams, 58). 

In relation to the media coverage and public response to this incident, Williams notes the public assumption that 

black people (and I have never heard the same public assumption about white people) need documented reasons for excursioning into neighborhoods where they do not live, for venturing beyond the bounds of the zones to which they are supposedly confined. (Ibid., 68) 

In other words, although black space is privatized in a segregative way, it has no privacy from the impending white community. (Consider the justification of Eleanor Bumpurs’s murder in her own apartment. In February 1987, the white policeman who shot her was found innocent because Eleanor Bumpurs had “waved a knife” and made the officers “fear for their lives” [ibid., 142].) Moreover, this contradictory construction of space is, like race itself, further complicated by gender hierarchy. Gender power and white power interact in a unique way to inform the experience of black women. While continuing to recall media events that attest to an increasingly violent racial/spatial climate, I can begin to address the intersectional subject position of black women in space. 

In November 1987, Tawana Brawley, a fifteen-year-old black girl, was found in a vacant lot some miles from her home in Wappinger Falls, New York, after a four-day disappearance. She was found in a plastic garbage bag, clothed only in a shirt; “she was in a dazed state, not responding to noise, cold or ammonia; there was urine-soaked cotton stuffed in her nose and ears; her hair had been chopped off; there were cigarette burns over a third of her body; ‘KKK’ and ‘Nigger’ had been inscribed on her torso; her body was smeared with dog feces” (Williams, 169). When she was finally able to tell her story, she indicated that she had been kidnapped and raped by six white men. By July 14, 1988, the New York State Attorney General stated that “there may not have been any crime committed here” (Williams, 170); on September 27, the New York Times ran an article entitled “Evidence Points to Deceit by Brawley”; on October 7, 1988, the Times reported the grand jury’s findings: Tawana Brawley had made up the whole thing. 

Outside of the fact that Tawana Brawley was kidnapped, or taken from her space, by force, to a space in which she would be violated, constructions and notions of space do not seem to be so notable in this case; yet the fact that Brawley was kidnapped, or dis-placed/spaced, far from being beside the point, indicates a central aspect of this atrocity. Williams seems to capture what I am getting at when she says, “There is danger everywhere for her, no shelter, no protection” (176). Being removed from her own neighborhood headed off the racist assumption that Tawana Brawley had put herself at risk by venturing “beyond the bounds of the zones” to which she was supposedly confined. Yet the racist construction of black female subjectivity fills in this void of circumstance: as a black woman, she need not venture anywhere to put herself at risk. At the crossroads of race and gender hierarchy, she is, in some sense, always already out of place. 

What I ultimately want to emphasize is how Brawley’s kidnapping can stand for the uniquely precarious position of black women in any space. Like her body, Tawana Brawley’s story was both kidnapped (displaced, appropriated, transported) and violated (disbelieved, dismissed, distorted).  Furthermore, because the legal-social construction of the black woman pronounces her rape an impossibility, a non-event, the question of whether she has brought such an assault upon herself by occupying the wrong space is moot: how can she do something to provoke nothing? Space only counts if what happens counts; whatever happens to black women is “simply life” (Harris, 247). Hence the grand jury’s opinion that “nothing happened” to Tawana Brawley.  

Similarly, judging from press coverage and public concern, it would seem that “nothing happened” to the twenty-eight women—mostly women of color—who were raped during the same week in which the “Central Park jogger” rape occurred. In April 1989, the rape of a privileged white woman in New York City’s Central Park by a group of young black men became an obsessive media focus all over the country. I was living in Berkeley at the time, and I recall the heated discussions that took place over different aspects of this case; in editorials, classrooms, and cafes, people argued over the ways in which this incident spoke of race, gender, and class. Yet when these debates focused on issues of race and racism, they tended to lambast the media for perpetuating racist images of black men. Several black women feminists have since noted how the media’s outrage over the brutality of this crime was relentlessly 

racist—not only because it hyped up racist stereotypes of black men, but because it  demonstrated

Of course, media response to the Central Park rape further marginalized the impact of spatial politics on women of color while (or by) addressing these politics in relation to white women and black men. Even to discuss it, then, perpetuates this marginalization; yet my purpose here is to recount those racial/spatial incidents which, having received enormous media attention, would seem to present the kinds of issues that might in some way be noticed by a “Sexuality and Space” symposium. In the Central Park rape, as in the other cases I have cited, race figures prominently into the construction of space that informs and frames the violence, for considerations of this crime raised questions like: Whose space was this park? Who belonged there? When? Who did not belong? When? Who can be blamed for being out of place? Why? Where is a white woman safe in this city? To raise such questions, whether implicitly or explicitly, is to ask about the interactive dynamics of race, gender, sexualization, and space.