Four years ago, Maureen Evans Arthurs had her first experience of being mistaken for a prostitute as a result of being married to a white man.
She first wrote about that harrowing experience in The Washington Post, where she recalled:
“The first time I was mistaken for a sex worker I was on my husband’s arm at an event in California four years ago. A man approached me, asking if he could buy me a drink. I declined, and he proceeded to whisper to me, ‘How Much?'”
Arthurs recounted this experience to HuffPost Live’s Marc Lamont Hill on Monday and shared that this belief is not uncommon among black women in interracial relationships.
“It’s going to continue to keep happening, and I think there should be a lot of emphasis on why it continues to happen, and we have to have that conversation about how we treat women in public spaces,” Arthurs said.
Arthurs explained how similar street harassment disproportionally affects black women, as proven by a study conducted by Stop Street Harassment, an organization in which she is a board member.
“[Stop Street Harassment] actually did a representative nationwide study, and over 48 percent of women, African American women in particular, experience street harassment at rates that are much higher than their counterparts,” she explained.
Watch the video above to hear more on Maureen’s story and click here to watch the full segment on the issue some black women face when they’re assumed to be prostitutes.
