Buying into the Premise: The Dignity Problem of Respectability Politics

This essay is part of this blog's Online Symposium in response to Professor Randall Kennedy's essay, "A Progressive Defense of Respectability Politics"

The respectability politics that focus on conforming to the received culture to appeal and survive are ultimately about white supremacy.  They allow for victim blaming and shaming, while ignoring the more pressing question of racial dignity.

Professor Kennedy's essay, goes to great lengths to defend both the personal and public politics of respectability.  These politics serve as a mechanism to encourage members of the African American community to conform to norms of "respectability," of apparently fitting in and showing the world beyond the African American community that African Americans are entitled to respect.  Kennedy argues that such respectability allows one to win allies in the broader causes that the African American community faces, as well as helps African American children to survive.

Professor Kennedy's essay is tied to his generational experience in the civil rights era and to the understandable desire for the African American community to simply survive. One one level, his argument has some persuasive force. Persons, families, and communities ought to be free to determine their own norms of expression. This freedom of self expression promotes autonomy, a core human value.  Within that context of autonomy, families and communities discussion what is and is not appropriate self expression. Such autonomy is a true expression of personhood.

The public rhetoric of respectability that Professor Kennedy defends makes these personal politics open rhetorical ammunition for those on the left and right who wish to utilize them for their ends. The problem with this rhetoric is that "respectability" in the context of race politics can be too easily conflated with (and act as a mechanism to demand and enforce) political submission. Such submission accomplishes the ends of the ideologies of white supremacy and racial subordination, even if the defense is a liberal one.

The original respectability politics began when the white supremacist state demanded that black bodies ought to be bound to their caste. If one looks historically--that is, further back than arguments about sagging pants and feigned disgust over hip hop--the public racialized discussion about respectability was about black people respecting white people, black people conforming to white people's norms, white power crushing black resistance. These norms were enforced by slavery, then black codes, antimiscegenation laws, and mob rule. This form of respectability led to generations gone, survivors shamed, and the roots of mass incarceration.

This is the appropriate starting point for understanding public respectability politics, rather than conflating the myth of the triumphal civil rights movement with a "respectful" respectability politics to provide it legitimacy. This isn't to say that the tactics of the civil rights generation of the 1950s and 60s didn't work; it is to say that those tactics and their results failed to confront the ultimate problem: that white supremacy still defined the norms and the politics that even the civil rights generation encountered.

The modern-day respectability politics that Kennedy and others advocate for fails to confront the underlying premise. They buy into the myths that Black people, or any subordinated people, should and must buy into white respectability in order to be accepted. And whether the standard-setter of such politics is liberal or conservative, or whether such performance of respectability serves an end of the right or the left, such politics deny agency and subtly reassert racial supremacist thinking. And as a result, the cycle of violence and subordination continue while the victims of that cycle are shamed for it because they do not meet the standards of "respectability." It is victim-blaming at its worse, and the evidence about implicit bias and a racist "post-racial" society suggest that the bar is set too high for performances of respectability to save the day.

"Respectability" is the wrong conversation to have. Instead, we need to focus a conversation about racial civil rights in the 21st century on dignity and intrinsic worth. Dignity does not depend on one's subjective assessment of another's "respectability" for moral force. Dignity is intrinsic, and ought to be recognized as the fundamental definition of being human. The ultimate end of our norms of legal and political equality is to insure each person's dignity. It is the failure to live up to this despite our constitutional and political rhetoric of equality that is why one must say #blacklivesmatter.

Respectability politics ultimately are about blaming the victim and denying the victim agency to demand her dignity. That is the end result of a rhetoric of respectability that does not directly confront the lack of dignity for all.