United States: Racial and misogynistic remarks towards Journalist Brianna Hamblin are harassment which need to be addressed. CFWIJ condemns the incident and extends support

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July 24, 2021, Rochester- Spectrum News 1 reporter Brianna Hamblin, was harassed by multiple men while on assignment, while she was covering a story on access to healthy nutrition in the city. The journalist was targeted with deeply misogynist remarks which exoticized her race and ethnicity. Brianna took to Twitter in the aftermath to register her disgust at her experience highlighting the everyday sexism that women journalists, especially women journalists of colour, have to face while doing their jobs.

While preparing for a televised report on the access to nutritious food in Rochester, Brianna was complimented by a passerby on her looks, to which Brianna responded with polite acknowledgment. However, the situation spiralled quickly out of control when other men piled on the moment with deeply sexualized and racist remarks about her appearance. After a short discussion about her work, one of the men commented, “See that’s why I can’t be left alone with a Black woman. Or a mulatto, s---. Cause I can’t stand these f---ing white girls.”

When Brianna attempted to shut this conversation down, a man insisted on pushing this reprehensible behaviour even further, “You are sexy as f---,” he went on to say.

Brianna took to her social media account to speak about her experience and record her anger at the incident. She shared the footage on her Twitter profile, claiming, “There are A LOT of things wrong with this.”

In the thread that followed this tweet, Brianna not only called out the entitlement men feel towards femme bodies, she also emphasized on how exoticizing and fetishizing her race is not a compliment, but in fact a disgusting manifestation of racism. 

The Coalition For Women In Journalism condemns the incident in the strongest possible terms. We are aware of the challenges women of colour have to face in the field of journalism, and we would like to acknowledge that this attack was not merely sexist but it was also deeply, deeply racist. Sexualizing women of an entire race is not a compliment and is indicative of the dehumanization of that particular group in the mind of the harasser. We extend our solidarity to Brianna.