Black is the Color of American Sex Trafficker: Racially Selective Identification and Prosecution of Sex-Trafficking in the United States

• In Event: Third-Party Sex Work and Pimps in the Age of Anti-Trafficking

Abstract

Over the last half decade researchers have begun to gather, in situ, empirical data on the relationships between sex workers and their third parties. What remains unexplored is the dyad linking pimps/third parties and law enforcement in the age of anti-trafficking. This paper provides a prolegomena to the empirical and cultural study of anti-trafficking prosecution, contested popular racial and gender stereotypes, and institutional racism as it impacts American domestic black male pimps. Drawing on deep ethnographic participant-observation, survey data, open ended interviews, and two anthropologically oriented panelists’ professional experiences as a criminal defense attorney and an expert witness in anti-trafficking trials, we describe how governmental discourses and practices selectively arrest, prosecute, and disproportionately sentence domestic black male pimps under the terms of anti-trafficking laws and media campaigns, yielding a situation in which low national estimates by the FBI “confirm” 62% of sex-traffickers as black, but local research often produces much higher estimates. In the District of Oregon, for instance, with 1.8% of the population, blacks represented 85% of the trafficking indictments. These outcomes strongly indicate a legal regime built on stereotyped notions of black masculinity and white femininity, in which black is the color of the American sex trafficker.

Authors

• Kathleen Williamson, Williamson and Young / University of Arizona

• Anthony Marcus, John Jay College of Criminal Justice