What’s the Relationship Between Sex Education, Consent Education and Race?
A conversation with Dr. Nadine Thornhill
In honor of Black History Month, I’m speaking to three incredible Black sex educators. This conversation with Dr. Nadine Thornhill is the first of three.
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It’s Black History Month!
There are lots of nationally recognized months and I certainly won’t invest time on all of them, but this one is, in my view, the most important to acknowledge and give voice to. Why? Because of the close relationship between race and sex education in general and consent education in particular.
To explain in more detail, I had a conversation with Nadine Thornhill, Ed.D., sex educator and creator of “Make It About Race!” a training that applies the principles of consent education. What do sex education in general and consent education in particular have to do with race?
Both are rooted in the body and in our embodied experiences—and a lot of us never learn how to translate our embodied experiences into words or something we can communicate to others.
Both are aspects of humanity that, broadly speaking, we don’t have a lot of practice and skill discussing; we don’t have a lot of great communication skills even to articulate our own experiences of sexuality and of race and definitely when we’re trying to communicate in relationships with people how those aspects of our humanity are impacting those relationships—all kinds of relationships, not just romantic. There are aspects that are present in all those relationships, but they’re both really gnarly. That makes them intimidating and some people’s instinct is to back and away and make it not a thing, and others try to make it simpler than it is.
And above all, “Consent culture can’t exist in a racist culture. Racism is antithetical to consent culture, because racism is in and of itself a consent violation.”
Racism is, in and of itself, a consent violation.
“Highly quotable,” you say, “I could turn that into a pretty IG post (with proper attribution to Dr. Thornhill), but what does it actually mean?”
Well, let’s use a comparatively benign example (benign insofar as no one dies): Black people’s hair.
Touching a Black person’s hair without their consent is what Dr Thornhill calls a “race-based consent violation.” Some of you might not be able to believe that a stranger in a grocery store might literally put their hand on or in a total stranger’s hair, but many, many Black people have experienced this unwelcome kind of touch.
I know, right? When I describe it you’re like, “Heck no, it’s not okay to touch a stranger’s body without their permission, and a person’s hair is part of their body!”
Easy, right? Sure.
So why does it happen? And how can we use an understanding of this dynamic to dismantle white supremacy or rape culture or MAYBE EVEN BOTH?
Dr. Thornhill’s “Make It about Race!” consent ed training uses this example to explore the internal experience of a person who touches someone’s hair or starts asking a stranger questions about their hair or other body parts. As she puts it, “It's okay to be internally curious, like, ‘That person is different from me,’ and it’s okay to even desire to touch their hair, that’s just you having a reaction and a response to another human. But as soon as you feel entitled to touch me or even ask questions that I’m just supposed to answer for you, that’s just no.”
The pause between your internal curiosity and any action that imposes your curiosity on someone else’s life is the difference between being a regular person who is interested in people… and a consent violation that, at best, could ruin someone’s day and, at worst, could do long-term harm to their wellbeing.
It’s generally not helpful to draw a direct parallel between gender issues and race issues, but sometimes we can use one as an incomplete analogy to explore the other. For example, white women may be familiar with the experience of feeling like they are required to be (as Amelia and I put it in Burnout) pretty, happy, calm, generous, and attentive to the needs of men. We may even feel so obliged that if we fall short, we believe we deserve to be punished. This is what Amelia and I call “Human Giver Syndrome,” and it’s difficult and dangerous enough in a workplace or in a domestic setting, but when we put this dynamic in an erotic setting, it gets really dangerous, really fast.
Nadine says, “It feels real gross when you’re on the receiving end of someone else’s entitlement,” whether it is entitlement based on gender or entitlement based on race.
She says, “I would like to disabuse us all of the notion that consent is some kind of technicality, that it’s about the specific words that are spoken. If that feeling of ‘I don’t want this’ is what’s happening in your body, I don’t care what you said, you didn’t consent.” To make that principle into a reality, she says, “You have to care about what everybody in a sexual situation wants, before you care about what they’re saying. You need to give a shit about that person and whether or not they’re okay. If you can’t do that, then like, go home, masturbate, do what you need to do, but don’t engage another person.”
You have to care what people want.
And look, we can all tell the difference between someone who is enthusiastically pleased to be in a sexual scenario, a person who is chillax and casually curious in a sexual scenario, and someone who’s uncertain or reluctant in a sexual scenario. We can imagine how a person might behave, many of us can hear differences in the way a person would use their voice, we might even be able to feel it in the way they touch us. We can tell.
Being able to tell is not the problem. The problem is believing the other person’s experience and wellbeing are important enough to tune our attention to those cues and being honest about what they mean.
There are two reasons this can be difficult to do or even difficult to teach others.
First, Nadine told me, “It forces us to confront the part of us that is just selfish, and when we show up in sexual situations. I might feel like I have to work at the ‘care and compassion’ piece, and that doesn’t make me feel like a good person.” We assume that “good” people have entirely pure, unselfish instincts with no urge to ignore inconvenient signs that what we want is not what someone else wants. But we’re all human.
Second? It confronts us with times when maybe we didn’t pay enough attention, when maybe we did harm. And that feels… real bad. Your first instinct might be denial and defensiveness — “That’s not what that situation was!” — or total avoidance of those memories, so that you never have to confront any behaviors that aren’t congruent with how you identify.
This stuff isn’t easy, but you can feel how important it is, right?
Solutions? Nadine has solutions! I mean, I facetiously asked, “So how do we fix this deeply rooted and complex culture problem?” And she was like, “Well here’s four things everyone can do right now.” And I was like, “Oh damn, there’s stuff we can all do right now!!!”
Here are her four things:
Start with young people, since, as they say, “an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.” Raise your babies with lots of love and let them have space when they’re in their baby toddler kid feelings, so that new humans, as they grow into adults, are able to tolerate uncomfortable feelings.
Find every opportunity to be kind and gentle, and that includes being as nice to ourselves as possible, instead of being harshly self-critical, we allow ourselves to be kind to ourselves especially with our difficult feelings. Nadine says, “Practicing this hasn’t made me soft or weak. I feel more steady in myself, being gentle with myself.” People have all kinds of resistance to self-compassion and self-kindness, but just try it for a month or six months or a year, regardless of your fears, and you’ll find that you only grow stronger, more compassionate with others, healthier, and happier.
Take a pause whenever you find yourself thinking in binaries. Like “there are racist people and not-racist people.” It’s not that simple. Another uncomfortable nonbinary: the incorrect idea that if someone’s actions were wrong, then someone felt harmed, or if someone feels harmed, then someone’s actions were wrong. “Someone can do something wrong and the other person doesn’t feel harmed.” As a dark example, if a person drugs someone into unconsciousness and sexually assaults them, and the person remembers nothing of it and thus doesn’t feel harmed, the lack of experienced harm doesn’t make the first person’s actions not wrong. And if a person of color explains to a white person something kinda, ya know, racist the white person did and the white person feels hurt, defensive, angry, and harmed by this information, that doesn’t mean that the person of color who explained the racism did anything wrong.
And finally, maybe the most difficult solution: Accept people’s stories about their experience and their life. “It’s hard for me sometimes like when I talk to another Black person,” Nadine says, “and they say, ‘I’ve never experienced racism.’ But I don’t have to feel comfortable with it or understand it, I just have to listen and believe them.” The same can be true with people’s experience of gender identity and sexual orientation. Another example from Nadine: “I remember the first time I met someone who identified as a lesbian and ended up married to a cisgender man and still identified as a lesbian and, like, okay!” Maybe you don’t feel comfortable with the language of different identities, like the way someone else is using a word doesn’t match how you were taught to use a word, or you don’t feel like you could explain someone’s identity or experience to someone else, but you don’t have to. You just have to listen and believe them.
Again, as Nadine says, “Consent culture can’t exist in a racist culture. Racism is antithetical to consent culture, because racism is in and of itself a consent violation.”
The starting place for consent culture — which is also anti-racist culture — is: caring.
Illustrations for this series are by the incredible Derrick Dent.
You can follow them on Instagram or check out their portfolio on their website!
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