What's So Bad About Respectability Politics?

The difference between strategy and shame.

Respectability politics is a term we can’t escape from these days. Even Chris Rock has since quit his famous Niggas VS Black People routine. Black Americans are taught since childhood that if you want to be seen as human, you have to go above and beyond with manners. If not you deserve to be treated as you are–a nigga. It’s a scary sentiment.

In March 1955 a fifteen-year-old Claudette Colvin rode the bus home from school in Montgomery. When the driver demanded that she and her schoolmates give up their seats for a White passenger, she refused. Negro History Month had just ended and the teenager insisted on her right to stay seated. Claudette was violently arrested and thrown into jail, ultimately sentenced to indefinite probation. This was the first time in Montgomery someone had been arrested for this particular act of dissent.  Nine months later Rosa Parks famously did the same which sparked the Montgomery Bus Boycott. The movement was a year-long campaign that had a negative impact on profit and garnered national media attention to segregation laws that plagued the South. While we’re often taught about this time in history from an emotional perspective. Martin Luther King Jr. did speeches, people cried, whites & blacks held hands and sang Kumbaya. 

We must not forget how strategy and long-term thinking were what led the Civil Rights Movement to such success. Rosa Parks and Claudette Colvin knew one another. In fact, Claudette was a member of the NAACP’s youth program and Rosa acted as their long time secretary. The absurdity of a small fair skinned, middle-aged soft-spoken married seamstress in her famous mugshot, was planned. Most people–Black and White alike don’t care too much about dark-skinned teenagers from fatherless homes. We all know that they ought to, but in reality, they don’t. In 1955 they most certainly didn’t.

Now as social movements progress the conversation about “respectability politics” has seeped its way even outside of the Black community. There’s the camp that says that trans people need to pass to get respect or that Black women need to wear their hair chemically straightened to be able to get a job–which I disagree with. Each and every human being deserves the basic right to life and liberty no matter how “respectable” they are. 

However – movements need to be strategic. When the 2020 uprisings after the murder of George Floyd spread across the world I saw a conversation on Twitter between White “allies”. One woman asserted that White women should wear dresses, pearls, and traditionally feminine attire. I agreed. The thinking behind this is that social media would be bombarded with images and videos of police using excessive force on women which evoked a need for protection. Like videos of school children being fire hosed in the 60s, the most conservative Americans would not be comfortable with the optics of feminine White women being attacked by cops. This was denounced by commenters for being “respectability politics” which is…absurd. 

The world ought to care about George Floyd being murdered on video while the cop killing him laughed. Of course, most who saw the video were upset but in reality, many people don’t feel that much empathy for drug users. That ought to not be true, but it is. 

We are living in turbulent times. A movement without a strategy cannot last. Do you value intellectual masturbation in the form of defending ideology until death or is making real change more important to you? What’s so wrong with topping from the bottom every now and then?