I am getting an awful lot of blowback on writing about my recent discovery that Black women are far more likely to be prostitutes or quasi-prostitutes than other races of women. This is something that finally dawned on me after six decades of living. It has been suggested that my observation, admittedly not made on a scientific basis but instead on intuition, is simply false.
Well, here are some facts.
Black girls are 13% of all girls in the US. However, 55% of girls arrested for prostitution are Black. So Black girls are 13% of the population but 55% of the girl prostitutes. That’s almost as bad as the outsized homicide rate, where Blacks are 13% of the population but commit 53% of the homicides. The homicide rate is starkly elevated and caused many to sit up and take notice with shock in part because it confirms what they always suspected anyway. The prostitution rate is even more elevated and once again confirms what people suspected based on intuition.
The linked article offers many possible reasons. 49% of Black minors do not graduate from high school. That is an extremely high dropout rate of almost half of all Black minors. However, 75% of Black girls arrested for prostitution dropped out of high school. So the Black girl prostitute population is a population of school dropouts who grew up without significant parental figures.
The article also said that 75% of Black girls arrested for prostitution grew up in homes without either a mother or a father.
From the article:
The fact that more than half of girls who end up turning to lives of prostitution have grown up without fathers, suggests a need for male attention and acceptance. Additionally, the fact that more than ¾ of the girls who end up selling themselves grow up missing one of their parents is a sign that we need to rally behind our children as a community and support our single-parent families, remembering the notion that “it takes a village to raise a child….We need to teach our girls to value themselves and create a culture that supports that value.
Another possible reason for the high numbers of Black females working as prostitutes is the possibility that prostitution is tolerated in the Black community as no big deal. However else they feel about it, prostitution is definitely not tolerated or considered a legitimate job in White, Hispanic, and Asian communities. It is considered a shameful and lowly way to make a living. If prostitution is seen as a legitimate way to earn a living in Black communities, it should be no surprise that Black women are so over-represented among prostitutes.
From the linked study above:
For example, in their study, Carmen and Moody intimate tolerance of prostitution by
the Black community:Prostitution was no alien thing to black women, who have been sexually exploited since slavery. In every Southern city in the 1920’s and ’30’s, the red-light district was on the other side of the tracks in the black ghetto, and young white boys “discovered their manhood” with the help of the two dollar whore.” Prostitutes were integrating blacks and whites long before there was a civil rights movement.
Arlene Carmen and Howard Moody, “Working Women: The Subterranean World of Prostitution.”
Pimping may also be seen as no big deal or as a reasonable way to make a living in the Black community. This is suggested by anecdotal evidence that almost 100% of street pimps are Black, and these Black street pimps are some of the most horrible human beings you will ever meet.
From New York City. In Brooklyn, Black women make up 1/3 of all women in the borough, but they are 94% of the women arrested for prostitution. This shows how few non-Black women wish to work as prostitutes. Non-Black women make up 2/3 of the population of Brooklyn, an area where prostitution is rife, yet make up almost none of the very common prostitutes on the street, almost all of whom are Black.
One reason that Black women are so commonly arrested for prostitution is that they are far more likely to be streetwalkers than other races of women where women tend to see streetwalking as the lowest of the low.
Here a Black woman who traveled around Europe and Africa as a single traveler was mistaken as a prostitute everywhere she went in Europe. In Barcelona, she was told that there were certain streets she should not walk down after 8 PM because everyone would think she was a prostitute. She goes walking down a street in Barcelona, and every hundred feet there is a new Black woman prostituting herself on the corner. They are all from Africa. How many people in Spain are Black? The number must be very low, maybe 2%. Yet they are 100% of the prostitutes on a major street in Barcelona. A Black female commenter discusses how she was walking down a street in Greece at night, a street filled with African prostitutes glaring at her as if she was one of them.
Twelve women on a tour in Dubai try to get into a bar. They are all barred except for two of them. Later we find out that the other ten were barred on the grounds that they were suspected prostitutes.
As you can see this problem of Black women being seen as prostitutes is related to the fact that so many of them are just that. Among other reasons why this is bad is that Black female travelers get mistaken for whores everywhere they go, much to their consternation. So this harms the Black women who are not prostitutes too.
