The Rise of Respectability Politics

Abstract

This past September, during the first week of school, seven-year old Tiana Parker wore dreadlocks tied in a bright pink bow to her school in Tulsa, Oklahoma. The Deborah Brown Community School, a charter school sponsored by the historically black college Langston University, sent Tiana home and told her parents that their child was in violation of a school policy prohibiting students from wearing “unusual hairstyles” that distract from the school’s “respectful” learning environment. Not only were “dreadlocks, Afros, Mohawks” and other so-called faddish styles banned from the school, the school’s handbook also instructed that girls’ “weaved hair should be no longer than shoulder length” and that boys’ hairstyles are “to be short and neatly trimmed.”

Do All Black Lives Matter Equally to Black People? Respectability Politics and the Limitations of Linked Fate

“…This contemporary version of respectability politics relies on policing individual behavior and attitudes rather than directly addressing structural forces that perpetuate racial inequalities (Aziz 2015;Harris 2014). This accommodates neoliberalism because "the virtues of self-care and selfcorrection are framed as strategies to lift the poor people out of their condition by preparing them for the market economy" (Harris 2014). Cohen (1999; reveals that Black political elites as well as middleclass Blacks are especially likely to rely on notions of individuality and good behavior when dealing with young and poor Black people rather than focus on dismantling the systemic inequalities they face, such as unequal access to quality education or gainful employment.…”

Death by a Thousand Cuts: The Health Implications of Black Respectability Politics

“…Debates have arisen over these behavioral strategies on matters such as: their effectiveness in avoiding prejudice and discrimination; whether adapting to dominant norms results in racial denigration; their effectiveness in eliminating structural and cultural racism or advancing the well-being of the Black community; and their use to morally police one’s own race often based on class, gender, and sexuality lines (Cohen 1999; Cooper 2015; Harris 2003; Harris 2014; Houston 2015; Lebron 2015; Muhammad 2011; Nnebe 2015; Pattillo 2007; Schomburg Center 2016; White 2001). Broadly speaking, the politics of these behaviors – or the “politics of respectability” – involve the regulation of individual behavior to public presentation based on the strong desire to refute negative racial stereotypes and “…presenting one’s self as a citizen worthy of respect as defined by the dominant cultural norms and standards” (Smith 2013).…”

Respectable Families and the Body Politic

“…Respectability politics, as used by historians and political scientists, refers to a strategy developed among African-Americans in the early 20 th century for navigating white supremacy and extreme, violent, and systemic racism by behaving and presenting themselves against white fantasies and stereotypes that had contributed to an understanding of their moral inferiority (Harris 2014). Black Baptist women in the United States, drawing on Victorian values as well as Biblical teachings and Booker T. Washington's philosophy of self-help, countered racism by adhering to respectability as a political resource.…”

“…In contemporary respectability politics across the Atlantic world, the downplaying of sexuality, for example by adhering to particular dress codes, responds to the persistent phantasmagoria of black people as hypersexual, dissolute, and immoral. Widely criticised by academics, civil rights activists, and feminists, respectability politics reaffirms white norms, reinforces the neoliberal undermining of social justice as a political objective, and places the responsibility for emancipation on the victims of oppression: according to the logic of respectability, it is up to black people to behave 'better' so as to 'uplift the race', assimilate, and avoid racism (Gaines 1996;Harris 2014).…”