Watts’ insistence on simply having experienced pleasure while fully clothed does nothing really to advance a more complicated idea of what counts as pleasure in public.
When the news about Danièle Watts and Brian Lucas broke, it quickly became a flashpoint in a discussion about race and gender. Women of colour with white men are always objects of suspicion, seen as either sexually rapacious creatures stealing white men away from white women, or hookers off to a hotel room to make a quick buck.
Black women in particular are always cast as suspicious, and the criminalisation they face comes with the added violence and hatred of centuries of plantation racism that endures. The Black woman’s body in public is never hers, whether she is a sex worker or not; it is always already owned by the gaze and the force of anyone who chooses to own or consume her, whether individuals or cops and other representatives of the state who stop and question her right to simply exist.1 The sexual harassment and/or rapes of black women in public are relatively unreported simply because the black woman’s body remains fixed as a piece of property, to be used and abused at will.
As a culture, we have internalised this logic of dispossession; our cultural consumption of black women, even as fetish obects, bears the imprint of centuries of slave ownership. This is simply the reality that black women in this country face on a daily level and it’s unlike anything faced by white women. As Elizabeth Nolan Brown points out, “There’s the fact that in my decade of living, working, walking, loitering, and sometimes breaking the law in cities [as a white woman], no one has ever called the cops on me.”
The problem with the Watts story is that it was, from the start, bound up in notions of sexual respectability and did little to actually further a conversation about the real issues at stake.
To start with, the initial report was that Watts had been engaged in a show of public affection with her husband (he has since been identified as her boyfriend) and, according to her, misidentified as a prostitute (in fact, the cops approached her because they had been informed of “lewd acts”, a no less problematic category, but it’s Watts who alleged they thought she was a prostitute).2 And that caused the most ire: Her husband! How dare they detain someone who was kissing and cuddling her husband, of all people!
Much of the shock registered by commenters also emphasised that Watts was not a prostitute: How dare they! This was a decent woman, an actor in a well-known film, she was no hooker!
But the question that remained for me was: What if in fact she had been an unmarried woman and/or a prostitute? Would her detainment then have somehow been okay? Or, as my friend and comrade Liza Featherstone put it on her Facebook wall, “It’s one of those things where the racism is what we focus on, rather than the, why bother anyone at all? Why does it matter that she is a somewhat famous actress and not a prostitute?”
I have always maintained that there are huge costs to pay when we rely upon the politics of exceptionalism and respectability. In immigration, we rely upon the narrative of the good immigrant. The mainstream gay movement has long relied on the respectability of good gays and lesbians who just want to wed.
In the end, all this tells anyone interested in any social movement is: Look to the good ones, let the others rot in hell. In the long run, this means that our movements ultimately benefit only the very few. At times, as with Watts, the politics of respectability hurts the very people who used it to make their point.
In an interview, where Lucas is identified as her boyfriend of fifteen months (emphasising that theirs was no one-night stand), Watts demonstrates how she was straddling him and asks, “You think that deserves being in handcuffs? Fully clothed?”
Shortly thereafter, TMZ published grainy photos supposedly showing Watts actually fucking in the car. Supposedly, passersby and employees in a nearby office saw her exposed breasts and called the police.
As this goes online, Watts has not yet responded to these photos, but the damage is already done. If the photos and the allegations turn out to be real, her credibility and her insistence that it was a racially-motivated incident will have been shot down (with little discussion of the fact that a white couple would, in all likelihood, never have been approached). If the photos turn out to not be of her or to not indicate any sexual acts, damage will still have been done because attention will have been deflected from the more important issue: that black women are held to standards of respectability that they will never pass.
As the matter escalates, and as doubt about Watts’s “fully-clothed” innocence begin to arise, her supporters are now accusing Lucas of having “shoved her under the bus.” As evidence, they point to a newly-released audio record, which features a nervous-sounding Lucas talking to the cop in charge.
The exchange clearly demonstrates, again, the racial bind in which black women find themselves. From the outset, the cop and Lucas establish the kind of bond possible when white men are in control over black women. At one point, the cop persistently asks about their relationship, a tactic that Lucas has described to the media as a ploy to discover whether they were indeed john and hooker. At another, the cop tells a second cop to pick up Watts who is walking away, describing her as wearing really short shorts when, clearly, as photos indicate, they are anything but.
All of this is to indicate that the problems evident on the audio are many, but to paint Lucas as having thrown her under the bus is ridiculous. It’s easy for anyone not in that situation, already a deeply terrifying one, to insist that he was craven, and he is at the least incredibly nervous. But do people criticising him, someone who has already spent years in jail for weed possession, really imagine that they would behave differently? When you’re in a situation like that, with his record, your first impulse is to figure out how to get the hell out of it quickly. That includes, yes, sometimes cosying up to the cops because you only wish is, again, to get the fuck out of that place. He didn’t leave her there, he stayed with her.
There’s every likelihood that all of us writing against the prison system and cop brutality would, at crucial moments, simply pee in our pants and cry for mercy. There are moments when we can expect people to be brave and to stand up and behave like the hero in a movie. Being accosted by cops with your black girlfriend in a city now famous for race riots is probably not one of them, so let’s lay off Lucas, shall we?
As for throwing people under the bus, perhaps we might look more closely at Watts. There is nothing emancipatory or liberatory about Watts’ insertion into a discourse about race and policing, and she relies upon the fiction of America as the land of the brave and the free, a fiction that is transparent to anyone who is not coded as respectable. In what only appears to be a fierce denunciation, she is merely claiming the rights of every respectable person to not be harassed. Towards the end of her interview with CNN, she points out, “If he’d come to me and said, ‘Excuse me, m’am, like, you seem like a respectable person, but someone made a call, can we just talk to you for a second,’ the whole situation would have been different.”
This is to say: Anyone else, black or white, who does transgress the law, can just go to hell, and they deserve the situation to be different and more horrific.
In other words, Watts employs the implicit discursive stance that it’s okay to surveil, police, and arrest black prostitutes; it’s just not okay to be read as one. Their brush with the law also indicates a more general hypocrisy and piety about public sex. As Liza also pointed out, in an email conversation, “I feel like fucking consensually in public is up to the community, or should be. On Fire Island it has long been fun and acceptable especially for gay dudes. But it’s like having multiple partners — there are a lot of questions of ethics and respect that should be considered and not legislated.” Watts’ insistence on simply having experienced pleasure while fully clothed does nothing really to advance a more complicated idea of what counts as pleasure in public.
Neither Watts nor Lucas come off well. Rather than focus on their innocence and express horror at their respectability being denied to them, we might critique our own investment in and insistence upon such. Let’s not turn them into either heroes against the state or craven capitulators to the same and, instead, use such instances to have more complicated conversations about the role of the state and capitalism in regulating sexuality and our bodies.
1My thanks to Mariame Kaba for reminding me of this point, during her presentation at the Hull House panel, No Selves to Defend, No Rights to Respect: Blackness, Violence, and Self-Defense.
2 Thanks to Diana Salles for pointing this out.
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Image: Ben Jaroslaw