Introduction: Subject to Respectability

Both Prince and Mohammad Ali died in the spring of 2016. Their passing marked a moment in the history of struggle over black respect and the role of black respectability politics in America’s cultural memory. As transcendent global figures, their passing ushered in global celebrations and tributes praising both men for boldly asserting expressions of blackness heretofore unseen in their respective fields. With blackness at the center, neither man let the politics of black respectability limit his self-expression. Instead, both men in their own fashion routinely asserted black love, as well as stretched to global, even cosmic proportions the boundless possibility of blackness. In other words, from gender and sexual politics to global citizenship, Ali and Prince gave form and voice to a myriad of ways of being black.

Prince and Ali’s struggle with the prescribed notion of black respectability politics invites us to reckon with technologies of mediations, circulation, and visibility that offer ever more complex and public renderings of blackness. As a result, we also have to reckon with the multiple scales, intensities, and differences within our renderings of blackness. Critically reckoning with respectability politics through the moment of Prince and Ali’s passing means doing so as the conditions of possibility for negotiating black visibility, recognition, and respect in civil society are dramatically shaped by renewed black vitality and commitment to social change. The core of our 21st-century conjuncture is generated by social movements and cultural expressions that affirm black life and challenge systematic imposition of black death, incarceration, and vulnerability.

No doubt, the conditions that shaped the discourse of “racial uplift” have changed significantly since the late 19th- and early 20th-century debates over the most effective means for black Americans to gain access to middle-class respectability and social mobility. For some, “black uplift” turned on the leadership role of black middle-class elites, which W.E.B. Dubois famously called “The Talented Tenth,” as well as the relationship between black elites and the black poor and working class. A particularly vexed point of contention in the discourse of racial uplift in the first quarter of the 20th century was the purportedly excessive pleasures (carnal and otherwise), moral transgressions, behavioral liberties, and vernacular cultures of black working-class Americans, a culture seen by many black upper-class urban elites as connected to a peasant rural southern past.¹

Black women’s clubs, fraternal and civic organizations, black colleges, artists and writers, churches and members of the black business community weighed in on appropriate routes to social inclusion and cultural acceptance. These disputes often turned on how the black working class and poor should comport themselves and which routes to follow to secure economic and social mobility.² As Aptheker’s discussion of Shirley Graham Dubois in this issue shows, the idea of appropriate social comportment was not only confined to public life, but also reached into the private domain of individual morality and personal etiquette. The pages of black newspapers, civil rights publications, and literature were rife with civic instruction about appropriate black behavior, comportment, and aspirations that were congealed into normative assumptions about the appropriate and preferred blackness necessary to confer “respectability.”³ As Joseph in this issue suggests, history animates the questions and reflections explored in this anthology about the afterlife of respectability politics in the age of the nation’s first Black president and the proliferation of black representation. Most pressing among these is what is the significance of respectability politics in the wake of #BlackLivesMatter on the political imaginations of black youth, the simultaneous criticisms of Hollywood for its lack of diversity, the proliferation of diversity on television, as well as the eight-year presidency of Barack Obama? Does a cultural discourse and its related social practices that began in the early 20th century still find traction in the context of a complex black social and cultural ecosystem where claims on the importance of black differences and a host of others longing for attachment, identification, and belonging operate?

Since the social goal of racial uplift initially drove the cultural politics of respectability, the bid on black uplift and social recognition turned on black Americans collectively putting forward an imagined best black self. In this formulation the critique of racism takes the form of the class interest and social anxiety expressed by black elites, movement leaders, celebrities, and moral guardians who in the name of challenging white racism and representing blackness put forward for public consumption an idealized notion of blackness. As Rhodes and Díaz indicate, in order to protect a particular set of class interests, this idealized and normative notion of blackness resulted in policing the moral and representational boundaries of black difference. Such policing is often enforced by high profile black elites all too willing to regulate working-class, often poor, and socially disenfranchised members of the black community. Take for example the case of disgraced actor and comedian Bill Cosby’s admonishment of black youth for wearing their pants below the waist, and even on occasion by President Obama.⁴ This desire also takes moral form in the stance of some black churches and congregations that enforce the boundaries of hetero-normative sexualities, gender, and heterosexual marriage by refusing to recognize and condone black lesbian, bisexual, gay, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) members.

This social commitment to racial uplift politically links representational justice and black America’s control of their image with legal recognition and cultural visibility as routes to racial improvement. Given the impact of black cultural politics of difference today, the technological means to circulate them, as well as black claims on behalf of such difference, finding agreement on this “best collective black self” is especially challenging. In many respects the link between racial uplift and representational justice has been severed so that representation is the point. West contends that the history of black cultural struggles over difference and representation in the last quarter of the 20th century suggests that waging claims on behalf of a singular and homogenous best collective black self is fraught with all sorts of potential for erasure, marginalization, and repression in the name if unity and sameness. The discourse of black respectability routed through a politics of identity and race, where black difference and antiracism are posed as binary oppositions, may no longer hold.

As the moment marked by the passing of Ali and Prince show, there are, of course, historic challenges, alternative desires, and different routes to recognition, inclusion, and affirmation of blackness rooted in the vernacular practices and sensibilities of the black working-class, poor, and rural southerners. Among these we might include: the early 20th-century social movement of Marcus Garvey, the celebrations of the black vernacular practices during the Harlem Renaissance led by Langston Hughes and Zora Neal Hurston, and the Black Power movements and radical traditions of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and the Black Panther Party. The forms of identification these efforts cultivated and attachment they produced resonated across visual and sonic cultural worlds, aligning alternative forms of desire and visions of black freedom, conviviality, and public expression that both challenged white racism and expressed the richness of black difference.

Not surprisingly creative expressions in black sonic, visual, literary, and cultural criticism challenged many of the regulatory impulses and practices of a black cultural politics of respectability.⁵ For example, the late ‘60s Blaxploitation cycle in cinema and electronic visual cultures ushered in by Melvin Van Peeples’s Sweet Sweetback’s Badd Ass Song challenged the very idea of the white AND black elite gazes with appeals, perhaps for the first time, to the black urban working class and their black affective and bodily sensibilities.⁶ Musicians like Prince, James Brown, Miles Davis, and Nina Simone, and celebrated athletes like Muhammad Ali and Kareem Abdul Jabbar (and more recently Serena Williams) interrupted, if not outright challenged, the normative cultural and aesthetic assumptions on which respectability politics rests while offering a different model of black agency, pleasure, and collective identity. Cultural workers and artists challenged not just the dominant assumptions and controlling gaze of whites, but they also challenged the gaze of black cultural and moral gatekeepers who policed the boundaries of black cultural and moral respectability. These mid-20th century transformations expressed blackness as not just problematic behavior that needed to be brought under control in order to insure racial uplift, but performances of blackness as a powerful sense of belonging that structured attachment; fueled critical challenges to racism, sexism, and homophobia; and imagined ways of being black that flew in the face of pedagogies and commitments to respectability politics.⁷

Respectability Politics and Bio-Politics

Bio-power, that form of power/knowledge exercised at the level of norms and normativity and aimed at the conduct of conduct, is one conceptual approach that helps make sense of power exercised through the politics of respectability.⁸ Normative power regulates by marking the boundaries of appropriate and inappropriate behavior and desire in the realms of morality and comportment. As such, the politics of respectability enlists the subjects (black working class and poor) of its discourse in the truth (racial uplift) of its discourse through techniques and pedagogies targeting morals and manners.⁹ The effect of this is the production of subjects of respectability through pedagogies of cultural instruction and techniques of moral persuasion such as those found today in reality television or the celebrity self-help manuals. Rhodes and Givens show that in the 19th and 20th centuries these instructions were found in civics lessons, character molding organizations, instructional films, advice columns in Black general interest magazines like Ebony Magazine, as well as films and television programs like Guess Whose Coming to Dinner and Julia featuring idealized middle-class blacks.

Disputes over respectability are also waged explicitly over “bad objects” or those potentially disruptive expressions, practices, and behaviors that fall outside of the normative boundaries of respectability. Think of bad objects as transgressions (in this case mass circulated transgressions) that mark the limits of normative rules on which the truth of respectability politics depend.¹⁰ So thinking about the politics of respectability as a form of bio-power aimed at morals and manners directs our attention to subjects of respectability and the normative rules of appropriate morals and manners.

Organized as they are according to normative ideals of respectable black subjects, practices and techniques of black respectability proceed through knowledge(s), pedagogies, and sanctions that underscore the primacy of racial uplift and mobility, appropriate middle-class comportment (i.e., not too loud in public), and black hetero-normativity. For instance, one technique through which respectability operates is the principle of black exceptionalism. As described by Imani Perry, black exceptionalism works by establishing a normative ideal of blackness as the exception that proves the rule.¹¹ The exceptional condition, person, or ideal operates in conjunction with the principle of normalization to showcase appropriate/desirable behavior as well as to mark the boundaries of unacceptable behavior.

The exceptional case and the normative boundaries that it marks enclose black subjects of respectability, protecting them from potential class and racial confusion (and contamination) with practices that might paint respectable blackness in broad strokes of suspicions of criminality, immorality, and irresponsibility that so easily attach to members of the black community who exist in isolation from the normative borders of social class, professional pedigrees, or social networks. One especially telling example is the case of young black men who it appears are perpetually regarded as suspicious by whites, the police, and the black middle class. Respectability politics purportedly provides a measure of class distinction to members of the black affluent classes (including males) from the non-normative practices of the working class and poor. At the same time the pervasiveness of social media, cable and streaming television content, and digitally based web platforms, intensify the visibility and speed of the circulation of black difference. This intensification renders the production and enforcement of 19th- and 20th-century models of black normativity increasingly precarious. Indeed, as the powerful #BlackLivesMatter slogan of “Hands Up, Don’t Shoot” (and their attention to the loss of black life at the hands of police) intimates, regardless of social station this very idea offers little insulation. The black professional and affluent class remains the preferred site of social investment in a discourse aimed at securing black recognition, visibility, and respect where the black poor and socially marginal are also hyper visible and the objects of suspicion for criminality, immorality, and dependence.¹² In other words, the discourse of respectability establishes normative desire and sets the preferred terms of social engagement and access to the dominant culture. It is through the discursive alignment of respectability, normativity, visibility, and the commitment to uplift that some 19th- and 20th-century blacks hoped to be civically recognized and culturally included.

21st-Century Conditions, 20th-Century Subjects

Unlike the late 19th- and 20th-century conditions of Jim Crow and pre–civil rights racism to which the politics of black respectability responded, 21st-century respectability produces truth and crafts subjects through racial recognition and identity politics, the cultural politics of black difference, intense media visibility, a bi-furcated black social class structure, and a racialized carceral state. Furthermore, the white gaze is no longer the primary interlocutor and source of affirmation for black knowledge, the main source of desire for acceptance and uplift, or the authority to set the normative terms of acceptable and unacceptable morals and manners for black subjects. The proliferation of social media, the re-articulation of traditional media with new digital technologies and platforms make it possible for black image-makers, cultural workers, and critical commentators to engage immediately and directly with black audiences on a scale perhaps never seen before. These conditions suggest new scenes where 21st-century practices and struggles over respectability politics might play out in television (especially black reality genre), social media—Facebook, black list serves, and cinema. Finally, the lasting impact of racial, sexual, and gender differences within the black cultural politics of difference challenges hetero-normativity as the primary organizing discourse of black desire for visibility, recognition, and respect.

And yet, as contributors like Lee and Hicken show, the politics of respectability continues to find traction and a reason to exist. Moreover, techniques and practices aimed at normalizing and containing black social and cultural transgressions produce respectability as the truth of post civil rights and post racial black inclusion and recognition in civil society. Surely for black people, by his very presence as an expression of the culmination of racial uplift, President Obama condenses and inscribes respect as the truth of the discourse of respectability politics for black aspiration and accomplishment. Not surprisingly, from the very beginning of his terms, respect for his blackness as a truth of President Obama’s presidency has itself been assailed, insulted, and dismissed by right wing alliances of political, evangelical, and social conservative politicians and public figures.¹³

In the wake of the Obama presidency the relationship between the aspirational, regulatory, and productive work of respectability politics in forging ideal subjects of its discourse is not as clear as it was in the early and mid-20th century when the aim of such politics was to forge a blackness acceptable to the cause of racial uplift and black inclusion. This lack of a clear and clean cut account and judgment is in no small part because of the emergence of social media, the market fragmentation of television, and the ways they stage, link, and circulate questions of belonging, respect, and disrespect to (and within) blackness.¹⁴

As the contributions to this collection suggest, the objects over which disputes about respectability are waged are no longer simply animated by concerns with the burdens of representation, normative boundaries of blackness, and the gaze of whiteness. Rather they are shaped by the changing historical conditions that animate the practice of respectability politics from 19th- and 20th-century concerns with legal and civic recognition and uplift, to the 21st-century questions of assaults on black voting rights, disrespect for black life evident in police killings of black people with impunity, and the systematic prison incarceration of black men.

The cultural and social objects over which (black) disputes about respectability are waged and circulated correspond to an expanding and more complex rendering of blackness—especially representations that recognize black differences of race, ethnicity, sexuality, gender, class, and geography. Take for example sexual practices and sex play across differences of sexuality, sex, gender, and race. The politics of respectability remains vigilant in trying to protect the middle-class virtue of black (especially middle-class professional) women against corruptions of sexually loose and promiscuous notions of black womanhood. Díaz and Cruz show that there is no question but that with the growing cultural visibility and political claims on blackness by members of black LBGTQ communities, hetero-normative disapproval of nonconforming sexual practices that aimed at protecting heteronormative definitions of black womanhood and family remains highly contentious.¹⁵

Managing normative boundaries and moral judgment and regulating social cultural, social, and sexual practices (e.g., accused sexual offender and celebrity Bill Cosby excoriating young black men to pull up their sagging pants) of black youth culture and working-class vernacular practices give us a glimpse into the conditions of black subjection to the discourse of respectability politics. That is to say that the politics of respectability affectively structures and rationalizes the claim that something in the black cultural, moral, social, and political community requires regulation and policing in order to realize black advancement, recognition, and inclusion. The historic function of the politics of respectability to manage social impressions of blackness so as to impact the chances, experiences, meanings, and impressions of black people seems in need of revision. The cultural work of impression management applies 19th- and 20th-century practices to 21st-century circumstances of black life where the impact on black cultural and political imagination that respectability once secured is increasingly rendered ineffective and, as Collins et. al suggest, precarious in the current conjuncture of media technology, black difference and post racial discourse.

The present issue highlights some of the conditions that shaped the 20th-century discourse of respectability politics including the different practices, alliances, and sites within which it operated. Thematically some of the contributors identify the conditions of possibility that shape respectability politics historically (e.g., the racial uplift, eugenics, the talented tenth, industrialization and commercialization, and the desire for legal recognition and the right to vote). Others ponder whether or not there is a continuing need for respectability politics in the early 21st century, and include in their work events and circumstances like digital media capacities, social media platforms, the Obama presidency, post civil rights and black power movements, black difference, and diversity that shape the present conditions.

Following this focus on the social and historical possibilities that condition the afterlife of respectability politics the contributors consider the specific manifestations of respectability discourse and the normative designation and demarcation of personal moral responsibility they take. Taken together the chapters consider the kinds of subjects both produced by respectability politics and the normative terms by which their subjection is realized. In this way, contributors are also thinking about respectability as a form of bio-power that takes hold of the body, morality, sexuality, sex, comportment, and propriety. As Aptheker, Smith-Shomade, Farr, and Drake and Cruz show, the practices and sites where this form of power operates includes religion, education, and sexuality. The contributions by Joseph, di Leonardo, Fackler, and Smith-Shomade focus on surveillance and the role of media, visual culture, and digital technologies. The examples by Means Coleman and Brunton, and Glover show that respectability is not just exercised through its enforcement in a one dimensional sense. With attention to law and culture, they stress disruptions to normative assumptions that target blackness, stressing the conditions of possibility for producing and circulating subjects and practices that have heretofore remained at the margins and buried in the subaltern vernacular worlds of blackness. By considering the historical and contemporary conditions of possibility for social and racial justice the contributors invite us to consider if it’s possible to think about “respect” within a context where many 19th- and 20th-century black desires have been realized while the terms of representational justice remains structured by race and class inequality.

Acknowledgments

Thanks to Ralina Joseph and Jane Rhodes. Thanks also to my research assistant Maya Iverson.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Herman Gray

Herman Gray is Professor and Chair of the Department of Sociology at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He publishes in the area of media studies and black cultural politics.

Notes

Franklin E. Frazier, The Black Bourgeoisie: The Book that brought the Shock to Self-Revelation to Middle-Class Blacks in America (New York: Free Press, 1997); Langston Hughes, “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain,” The Nation, June 23, 1926; Alain Locke, “Enter the New Negro,” Survey Graphic, March 1925.

Most famous among these are disputes between W.E.B. Dubois and Booker T. Washington and Dubois and Marcus Garvey. See: W.E.B. Dubois, The Souls of Black Folk (Mineola: Dover Publications, 1994).

See historically black newspapers such as Chicago Defender, Amsterdam News, and Crisis Magazine.

Michael Eric Dyson, Is Bill Cosby Right? Or has the Black Middle Class Lost its Mind? (New York: Basic Civitas Books, 2006).

Langston Hughes, The Best of Simple (New York: Hill and Wang, 1990); Jacob Lawrence, Migration Series, 1940–1941, tempera on hardboard, Phillips Collection, Washington DC.

See Ed Guerrero, “Framing Blackness: The African-American Image in the Cinema of the Nineties,” Cinéaste 2 (1993): 24–31; bell hooks, Black Looks: Race and Representation (New York: Routledge, 1992); Miles Davis and Quincy Troupe, Miles: The Autobiography (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1989); James McBride, Kill’em and Leave: Searching for James Baldwin and the American Soul (New York: Spiegel and Grau, 2016).

Richard Iton, In Search of the Black Fantastic: Politics and Popular Culture in the Post Civil Rights Era (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008).

Michele Foucault, The History of Sexuality: Vol 1 An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Random House, 1978); The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the College of France, 1978–1979, trans. Graham Burchell (London: Palgrave Macmillan UK, 2008).

Michelle Lamont, Money, Morals, and Manners: Culture of the French and American Upper Middle Class (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992); Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1978).

This idea of the powerful cultural meaning and social force of bad objects is beautifully illustrated in You Tube videos like “People of Wal-Mart,” reality television shows like House Wives of Atlanta and sketch comedy programs like Key and Peale or the Chappelle Show. This idea is also illustrated in reality television images of black folk acting up, airing dirty laundry in social media, or in sketch comedy like Dave Chappelle’s skit about the moral dilemmas facing black people eating fried chicken, or Peetie Green’s instructions for appropriate ways to eat watermelon.

Imani Perry, More Beautiful More Terrible: The Embrace and Transcendence of Racial Inequality in the United States (New York: New York University Press, 2011).

Here I am thinking in particular of ABC’s situation comedy Blackish, which in a clear departure from The Cosby Show by taking on complex issues of black difference and the family’s social location in relationship to whiteness, blackness, social class, and social assimilation.

In a rather ironic twist, both President Obama and writer/comedian Larry Wilmore’s presentations at the 2016 National Press Club annual White House Correspondence’s dinner flipped this script. Wilmore ended his remarks by addressing President Obama as “Barry, my nigga.” Afterward some wondered if Wilmore’s reference to President Obama was a breach of respect for President Obama’s office, his presidency, and his person, never mind to the nation in general and the black community in particular in light of Obama’s historic two term presidency. President Obama on the other hand ended his own remarks for the evening (which preceded Wilmore, by the way) by quipping rather playfully: “I’m out!” where upon he dropped the microphone (as a black male rapper might and as if to emphatically claim blackness). Notwithstanding his position as President, did President Obama signal, in an unmistakable black cultural style a commitment and belonging to blackness thereby showing the precariousness of respectability politics in the wake of Barak Obama’s Presidency.

Just three months prior to President Obama’s “mike drop” and Larry Wilmore’s controversial comments at the correspondence dinner, comedian Chris Rock hosted the Academy Awards and called out Jada Pinkett Smith for her public boycott of the Awards broadcast. Pinkett Smith used her boycott of the event to express her criticism of the lack of diversity in Hollywood and as a gesture of solidarity with calls by black actors and actresses for more diversity in Hollywood. Rock’s rebuke of Pinkett Smith’s decision to boycott the awards show might be read as policing the boundaries of black public respectability for a largely white live and broadcast audience.

Mireille Miller-Young, A Taste for Brown Sugar: Black Women, Sex Work and Pornography (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014); Terrion Williamson, Scandalize My Name: Black Feminist Practice and the Making of Black Social Life (New York: Fordham University Press, 2016).