A couple days ago, a Hollaback! video, showing a woman walking through the streets of New York City and getting harassed by several cat callers, went viral. The point of the video was to bring awareness to the ever-present problem of street harassment of women, who often have to deal with hundreds of cat calls in short spans of time during a simple walk through their neighborhood, but there was something very noticeable about the clip.
The video, which goes on for just under 2 minutes, features a woman by the name of Shoshanna Roberts being gestured at, called out to, followed and more during her silent walk through the city, and most of the cat calling featured comes from African-American and Hispanic people. In fact, there’s only one white man engaging in cat calling in the edited version of the video, and he’s featured dishing one of the lighter forms of harassment: “Nice”.
Rob Bliss Creative, the marketing agency that collaborated with Hollaback! to produce the video, admitted to editing out a lot of white males from the final product, claiming their comments were either inaudible or interrupted too much by background noise. He elaborated on his defense in a series of claims he posted to his Reddit account, and you can read them below.
Forgive me for copying and pasting, getting a lot of similar comments about this, here are three things I think people are missing:
- According to Wikipedia, whites are a minority in NYC, making up 44% of the population. Additionally, blacks/latinos make up 55% of the population. The fact that white people are a minority in this NYC video isn’t abnormal statistically.
- Two guys, the ones that follow her and by chance were black, make up nearly half the video. So two guys represent literally half the video. What if they were Russian? Does that mean we’re saying Russians make up half of cat callers? Which only reinforces number 3…
- This is a very, very small sample size. It’s just 18 scenes. The fact that two guys alone can represent half the video only furthers that. People are acting like we took a survey, and there’s no way a survey of 18 is going to mean anything. That’s why we put at the end that people of all backgrounds catcalled, because that’s the truth, and we knew that just 90 seconds wasn’t going to be able to be a perfect cross section of who cat calls. And by setting a 10 hour time limit, we didn’t have tons of material to create a video with 100% ideal ratios regarding the race of who catcalls.
What do you think of this budding controversy? His excuse that the comments from the white males in the original footage doesn’t seem valid, considering he used closed captioning to help everyone understand every single comment that was made in the edited form of the video, and the same could’ve been done for the more inaudible versions. Head over to our Facebook and let us know what you think.
