Tonight, adult industry heavyweights Lotus Lain and Ana Foxxx will be taking over Playboy’s Instagram Live platform to talk about race, an issue that’s been at the forefront of everyone’s mind for the past several weeks (assuming you’re white, of course—a reminder that black people think about race their entire lives). Porn is a billion-dollar industry with countless consumers, and yet so much of what happens in the industry is under-examined due to our society’s skittish attitude toward sex.

That means racism, along with sexism and a lot of other ‘isms,’ has been allowed to fester unchecked. In the wake of the Black Lives Matter protests sweeping the globe, many industries from tech to publishing are facing a well-deserved reckoning, and the adult space has been no different. First it was a trickle of stories from black performers about navigating discrimination and marginalization in the industry. Then that trickle turned into a flood as black performer after black performer started calling out the industry’s shortcomings when it came to addressing anti-black racism. In advance of the panel we’re hosting with Lain and Foxxx, we wanted to give you five reasons why you should be paying attention to what the porn industry does in this moment.

1. Racial hierarchies in porn help to perpetuate racial hierarchies in our daily lives through the politics of desirability.

Black features have long stood outside of society’s accepted definition of beauty, and most of the narratives that we’ve constructed around what is attractive or desirable center whiteness. Psychological studies have proven that from a young age, we’re all programmed by our environment to see lighter skin as more favorable and see darker skin as “the other.” The common practice of prominent white actresses in porn being paid significantly more than their usual rate to do an “interracial” scene with a black man or refusing to work with black men at all is a prime example of this. “Interracial” in the adult industry almost always refers to a white or white-adjacent female actress doing a scene with a black man, setting up a spectrum of value that places a premium on being a white woman and dehumanizes blackness.

2. When porn is such an economic and cultural behemoth and gets a free pass to be racist, it encourages other industries to follow suit.

Part of the reason that racist tropes in adult content are overlooked is that the entire industry markets itself on the taboo. Whatever your kink is, there will likely be a couple thousand results that pop up when you type it into Pornhub’s search bar. Into toes? Slapping? Felching? There’s a scene for you. And though there’s nothing wrong with having sexual kinks, there is something wrong when racism is your sexual kink. Not just porn producers but porn consumers have to bear responsibility for the glut of racially offensively porn. Consumers decide the market, and the porn market should be treated no different from other markets. If your favorite television show started spewing out racist jokes or scenes that played into stereotypes, you would likely stop watching that show. When porn consumers accept and thereby normalize racism in the industry, we give up our power to impact change in how capitalistic industries operate.

3. Racism in porn serves to keep black performers underpaid and siloed into limiting categories.

When a black performer does any type of scene, it can be guaranteed that the marketing copy will heavily emphasize their race, often in crass ways. When white women perform an anal scene, it gets to just be called an anal scene. But when a black woman does it, suddenly it’s an all-caps “big booty ebony whore begs for anal” or some other equally demeaning caption that capitalizes on harmful stereotypes about black women’s sexuality. Whiteness gets to be the sexual default, while blackness is siloed into a fetishized subcategory. This dichotomy makes it easy for studios to tokenize or outright reject black performers due to their race or compensate them less than their white counterparts.

4. It also puts black female performers at a heightened risk for sexual harassment or exploitation.

As a direct result of centuries of racially supremacist conditioning, white women are inherently seen as delicate, innocent and worthier of protection. Black women have been socio-historically robbed of their femininity or womanhood, and are often expected to be “stronger” or more tolerant of abuse. This can create a hostile professional environment for black actresses who often walk onto porn sets with less negotiating power and more vulnerability. A predatory producer might feel more comfortable crossing boundaries with a black actress that they would never try with a white actress. This isn’t to say that white women don’t encounter discrimination or sexual violence in the porn industry, but when they do, it’s not because of their race.

5. We should fundamentally care about all sex workers because sex worker rights are human rights.

Sex workers are already devalued in society, and mistreatment of them is often characterized as an “occupational hazard” that they should just accept. It’s why anti-sex worker legislation like SESTA-FOSTA is able to pass with no one batting an eyelash even though it disproportionately puts sex workers of color, LGBT sex workers and trans sex workers in greater danger. When we say black lives matter, it doesn’t just mean the black lives that society finds respectable, it means black lives period, and that includes black sex workers.

To hear more about the important conversations happening in the adult industry right now, tune in to Playboy Instagram Live tonight at 5pm PDT.