The Politics of Respectability

You may have seen African American intellectual leaders on television who oppose something called "the politics of respectability."  I'm thinking of Michael Eric Dyson, Melissa Harris Perry and Ta Nehisi Coates, three professors. The first two have earned doctorates, and all three are as groomed and as handsome as President Obama, who happens to be the epitome of the politics of respectability. The denouncers of respectability are themselves respectable.

Now I reckon that there have long been movements in the black community for and against respectability. Think of MLK and the Black Panthers. The arguments for respectability were (1) if African Americans are solidly respectable, others will begin to grasp that they are human and (2) fewer respectable African Americans will be lynched or left to die.

The argument against respectability is that it doesn't work.

The politics of respectability works to a degree, right? Many black people now vote. They play major league baseball. A black woman became a senator from Illinois. A black man became secretary of state. But today unarmed African American men are being shot down by the police at a rate of about one a week. Millions of black lives are stunted by underfunded educational systems, closed economic doors and so on. That's why certain respectable African Americans argue against respectability and in favor of a different approach that will lead to solutions. That's what Black Lives Matter is about, rejecting respectable behavior.  But what exactly is the movement's strategy?

 The Black Panthers had a strategy that ranged from programs to feed children to armed defiance.  The strategy failed, but it was a strategy. Rudeness to old people, the hallmark of Black Lives Matter so far, is not a plan but an adolescent reaction.

How the larger African American community divides on this issue, I don't know. Coates, Perry and Dyson are powerful intellectual thinkers. In some sense they straddle the issues, opposed to respectability while safely living deeply respectable lives. I'm counting on them to explain a new strategy, which I hope to support.