Introduction: In Search of Pimps and Other Varieties

Abstract

In the United States, the pimp represents one of the key tropes of black masculinity, alternately representing the lowest form of racialized degradation and the highest expression of masculine power. In the mid-twentieth century, bestselling novelists like Jack Kerouac, Donald Goines, and Robert Beck publicly enshrined the black pimp in the pantheon of ghetto personalities, while towering figures of civil rights like Malcolm X and Huey Newton, copped to, boasted about, and struggled against their autobiographical pimp narratives. However, very little empirical research ever emerged on the topic. By the 1980s the pimp was being declared dead. Instead, there was a focus on the victim of improved employment opportunities and expanded legal rights for women according to some scholars and the victim of the crack epidemic and dropping commercial sex prices according to others. However, the international coordination against human trafficking that came to be a key part of post-cold war governance revived interest in this colorful and largely forgotten troglodyte among scholars, policy-makers and law enforcement officials, leading to numerous anti-pimp tracts. This lead to increased prosecution and much longer prison sentences in the United States. Globally, the proliferation of anti-trafficking laws, practices, institutions, and compliance instruments also produced a renewed concern about the presence of male third party facilitators in commercial sex markets, but with a continued absence of rigorous empirical social science research. However, the past half-decade has seen the emergence of a small group of researchers who together and independently have begun to address this lacuna. The following essay introduces their contributions and some key themes taken up in the first book to anthologize.