A while back I was at the birthday party of a white woman. We were talking about families when I mentioned my father’s mother, whom we called “Big Mama.” Her response? “Oh, they do have Big Mamas!” In one ejaculated sentence I became other. It was not an unfamiliar feeling. As an African American* (AA) I was taught that what I do, all I do, is a reflection on my people as a whole. Individualism was not for people like me. It can be a responsibility and a burden, being AA in this world.
Dealing with these perceptions and stereotypes, that’s where respectability politics come into play. I grew up immersed in the idea of respectability politics but, the term itself is relatively new. It appears for the first time in the 1993 book Righteous Discontent: The Women’s Movement in the Black Baptist Church, 1880-1920 by author and professor Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham.
Wikipedia defines respectability politics as “attempts by marginalised groups to police their own members and show their social values as being continuous and compatible with mainstream values rather than challenging the mainstream for what they see as its failure to accept difference”. It is both a tactic of resistance and assimilation.
In the African American community in the late nineteenth century the progress of Reconstruction was being reversed by the inaction of an increasingly conservative Republican party, an actively racist Democratic party, and a complicit Supreme Court. Respectability Politics was an idea put forth by the “Talented Tenth” of Black elites to uplift the race. Intellectual giants from Booker T. Washington in his “Atlanta Compromise” speech to W.E.B. Du Bois calling for “respectability” in the fight for integration spoke down to Black people in lower classes tellimg them to pull themselves up.
Because of this most people in the US familiar with the term associate it with the AA community. In fact it’s an idea told to and held by many marginalized groups: including immigrants, the lower classes, the LGBTQ community, and women. It’s the pernicious belief that we just need to behave better. That if we dress the right way; if we speak the right way; that in a land full of opportunity; if we just bootstrap it up, the groups in power will finally give us the respect, the equality, the access, that we deserve.
It’s “salir adelante” or get ahead. It’s assimilating. It’s denying our Latiness, our Blackness, our Asianess, our queerness, and even our gender. It’s accepting “She’s not like other _. She’s different.” as a compliment instead of the cloaked (and bigoted) insult it is. Respectability politics can be enforced against marginalized communities or within them.
People in marginalized groups do not have the luxury of being seen as individuals. While the “good” behavior of the one is seen as an exception, a transcending of race/class/gender, the “bad” behavior of the one is seen as an example of what the rest of us are. A prejudice confirmed repeatedly in American media and politics. Basically, people within oppressed groups will police each other in the hope of circumventing bad experiences for ourselves.
To the white girl in the opening paragraph when I revealed an adherence to stereotype I stopped being a person and became a member of the Black collective. One of “them.” Not being seen as people makes finding the right victim of the systemic injustice faced by marginalized communities paramount. One whose humanity can be shoved into the faces of the oppressors. Where the oppressed can say, this is what your perverse policies are doing to good people.
This why when Claudette Colvin refused to stand for a white person on a segregated bus in Atlanta in 1955, only nine months before Rosa Parks did the same, the NAACP was quiet. Colvin was a fifteen year old whose actions could be dismissed as mere teen rebellion. She was dark in a time when colorism in the AA community, particularly towards women, was even stronger than it is now. And she became pregnant shortly after her arrest.
Rosa Parks was a pillar of not just the AA community but had strong connections to the white elites of Alabama as well. Her position as a seamstress meant she had worked with many of the mothers and daughters on dresses for parties, cotillions, and even weddings. A personal connection made during pinnacle moments in the life of a southern white woman of the mid-twentieth century. She was a lifelong activist and branch secretary to the NAACP but also a church matron with a sterling reputation. Rosa Parks was the perfect victim.
And it worked. Sort of. For a while. In a way. The young men and women who sat at lunch counters in their Sunday best while angry white authority attacked them with words, with fire hoses, with dogs. With violence. Those photographs in newspapers throughout America and the world ignited elemental emotion in people that helped propel the Civil Rights movement of the fifties and sixties. But, as with everything, that progress came at a cost.
One of the problems with respectability politics is it makes the people in power comfortable by reinforcing negative stereotypes about marginalized communities. More it allows the powers that be, in this case the mostly white and male political and economic powers in the US, to deny their culpability in maintaining a racial and economic caste system. This thereby alleviates any responsibility to do anything about it. It places the responsibility on the marginalized to adjust our appearance or behavior to earn respect from those unjustly withholding it.
For women, especially for those of us at the intersection of other marginalized populations, this is a particularly precarious position. As women we are judged not only on the virtue of our class and race, but also on how virtuous we are as women. We are told that the unwanted attention, from catcalling to rape, we receive is our fault because of what we were wearing, where we were, or even how we are built. Shifting the focus and blame from systemic societal issues restrictions are placed on how we express ourselves, particularly in our dress and our sexuality. Our self-determination is prescribed by how “respectable” are our individual choices.
It’s victim blaming for all of the same reasons discussed in Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me, and more. Like a lot of victim-blaming respectability politics has its basis in fear. We hold victims responsible for their misfortune as a partial way to avoid admitting that even if we do everything “right” something just as unbearable could happen to us. In our fear we doubly assault victims by blaming them for their own violation. That fear is in “the talk” Black parents give to our children on how to interact with the police. How we tell them, as we were told, to be polite, use titles. Do as you are ordered and don’t ask questions. Obey even when you know your rights are being violated. Stay docile, keep your hands in sight, show them the fear they want to see. What’s a little shame when the alternative is death?
This is one of the many problems with respectability politics. The victim blaming denies justice to those of us who are not virtuous, noncontroversial, above suspicion, or beyond reproach. We who are not perfect victims. Respectability politics say “if you dress like us, walk like us, talk like us, we will treat you as one of us.” Meanwhile, this mainstream culture that demands our assimilation by punishing us for clinging to who we are skims elements from our cultures to use for its own benefit.
Perhaps more dangerously it provides a false sense of security for those who believe in it. Because, as has been proven over and over again, on an individual basis respectability politics don’t work. We all know this because for those of us in marginalized communities regardless of our diction, our dress, or our degrees, prejudice, whether it be against class, race, ethnicity, or gender fogs our days and endangers our nights.
It can be daily microaggressions, white supremacists rioting in Charlottesville, or some murderous asshole mowing down people in his car because the women he wants to fuck won’t fuck him. You can be Oprah Winfrey and be turned away from Hermes because the staff don’t think you can afford it. You can be LeBron James and someone will still cover your property in racial slurs. You can be Tamir Rice, a twelve year old boy playing in a park with a toy gun in an open carry state and be shot to death by those supposedly committed to protecting and serving you. You can be one of thousands of indigenous women who have simply disappeared.
The politics of respectability are often portrayed as a path to freeing ourselves from victimhood. Among many other things they completely bypass the structural barriers placed by government and society. They belittle the often enormous challenges of existing day to day while being poor. They not only ignore the need for political struggle to bring down these barriers they can actually agitate against the struggle. Indeed, in his speech Booker T Washington chastised AA people of the turn of the twentieth century for focusing on gaining political, rather than economic, power.
Instead of requiring institutions and the people behind them to change, respectability politics asks the people harmed by the actions of the institutions to change in order to stop being harmed. It’s no wonder that this century has given us a hard pushback against respectability politics. A quick Google will link to article after article, from the Black media to feminist essays to the New Yorker, about how destructive respectability politics are. Black Lives Matter argues that all Black lives matter. Angry women in pink pussy hats are marching in the streets. Beyoncé is out there being all Beyoncé all the time.
During “Advancing the Dream,” a live show MSNBC aired to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom Michael Eric Dyson, in contrast to a show full of bootstrap stories said, “I don’t damn young people for having low-slung drawers. Raise up their dreams and their drawers will follow.” As long as the standards of respectability are defined by the group in power that group will never have to own the barriers and prejudices it puts into place. Worse it can redefine the terms at its whim. The further we are from that power the more tightly bound are the restrictions on our existence.
This is especially true for those of us at the cross section of race and gender. There is a disproportionate focus on the choices (and overall existence) of women, especially Black women. Men are taught that women who do not put ourselves forth as virtuous, noncontroversial, above suspicion, or beyond reproach, are ‘asking for it’. This is not defence of men who catcall or worse, or for that matter, of people who are judgmental about sagging britches. It is acknowledging that this is both a problem and a reality.
We should all be able to wear and do whatever the hell we want with our bodies. But we need to acknowledge that our clothing makes a statement. We need to know what our clothing choices say about us with a full understanding of the oppressive structures working against us. And, obviously, men need to realize that cleavage is not consent.
The bigger issue I have with the backlash against respectability politics is in embracing the stereotypes that respectability politics reject we still shove people into boxes defining racial, ethnic, sexual, or gender norms. In my nerd groups it is routine even now in the twenty-teens for people of color to proclaim how grateful they are to find a place where their ethnicity won’t be challenged, where they won’t be called Oreos, coconuts, or Twinkies, because of the way or language they speak (or don’t speak) or because of their love of anything from anime to academics.
We humans have a tendency toward the extreme. We disavow something and consign the whole thing to the trash heap. And there is a lot to disavow about respectability politics. But the other end of eschewing anything with the taint of respectability is equally divisive. Instead of being policed for our righteous morality we are being policed for our adherence to some media defined category of how we’re supposed to be. Instead we need to embrace all the ways of being. All the ways of being women, of being queer, of being Latinx, of being Asian, of being Muslim, of being Black, of being working class, of being indigenous, of being a part of any marginalized group. We need to be allowed, we need to allow ourselves, to just fucking be.
Sources
http://gal-dem.com/respectability-politics-and-dress-code-advice/
https://bigthink.com/alicia-wallace/everyday-respectability-politics
https://www.theroot.com/the-definition-danger-and-disease-of-respectability-po-1790854699
https://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/the-rise-of-respectability-politics
https://medium.com/@TheReclaimed/7-reasons-why-respectability-politics-are-bs-1c97041ccfe2
https://truthout.org/articles/respectability-politics-is-losing-ground-in-black-liberation-struggles/
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/made-by-history/wp/2018/04/28/bill-cosby-played-respectability-politics-it-blew-up-in-his-face/?utm_term=.c166a57a6efa
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/no-quiero-salir-adelante_b_9662472
Scholarly articles
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/43088/pdf
https://academic.oup.com/jcmc/article/23/3/163/4962541
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-race-ethnicity-and-politics/article/do-all-black-lives-matter-equally-to-black-people-respectability-politics-and-the-limitations-of-linked-fate/CBC842CABC6F8FAA6C892B08327B09DA
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/ps-political-science-and-politics/article/respectability-antirespectability-and-intersectionally-responsible-representation/F4E89D1C582EDBB573E2BE37D75D3B64
*I use African American for Black Americans like myself who can’t pin down our ethnic ancestry beyond a general Africa due to slavery. It’s not just about slavery. Many people of the African diaspora are the descendants of Black people caught up in the dehumanizing machine that was the transatlantic slave trade. Including plenty of Black Americans who are not African Americans but are direct descendants of people who were forced into chattel slavery in other colonies.
It’s not about racism. Unless they live in fully isolated areas even Black people brought up in Blackness experience the sting of white supremacy, the harsh after effects of European colonialism. If you are Black in a white dominated country then racism is something you encounter regularly. If you are Black in the Americas, where state sponsored racism historically and into the present economically and violently targets its Black citizens, then racism is an almost daily barrier to overcome.
It’s not about who is more authentically Black. Other Black people are Black unless I know their ancestry to be something in particular or they prefer a particular moniker. It’s about the fact that African Americans are not immigrants. In the US if you have an immigrant story, even if you don’t know it, you have a foundation that African Americans don’t have. If I, as an African American, immigrate somewhere else my descendants will gain that foundation.