In the Spring of 2014 the two of us, former dissertation advisor and advisee, along with our colleagues Robin Means Coleman and Khadijah White, convened a panel at the annual meeting of the Society of Cinema and Media Studies in Seattle. We called our panel “The Right Representation: Race, Gender, and Black Respectability Politics in the Media,” and anticipated a lively conversation about the historical and contemporary dimensions of the politics of respectability in mass culture. What we found was that the overflowing crowd, while interested in the individual papers, was really focused on the larger topic of how to make sense of race and respectability in our highly politicized and fraught cultural moment. Audience member Herman Gray’s voice was particularly compelling as he connected the audience members’ and panelists’ comments, and argued that the specter of African American respectability politics touched everyone regardless of their location or identity. Gray encouraged the audience to re-think their assumptions about the meaning of respectability in the African American context, and to ask why it matters. The conversation continued as we moved from the conference room to the hallway and then to the now-defunct soul food restaurant Kingfish Café, located in Seattle’s once-vibrant African American neighborhood (one that has experienced the rapid loss of Black businesses and people because of breakneck gentrification).
As we processed the session at Kingfish we realized how our panel only skimmed the surface of the questions animating this topic. We wanted to further interrogate how the representations of marginalized people bear the weight of depicting whole communities, cultures, and races. We wanted to examine how W.E.B. Du Bois’s oft-cited formulation of double-consciousness—“this sense of looking at one’s self through the eyes of others”Footnote1—has shaped the idea of respectability during different eras and across the boundaries of gender, sexuality, class, and color. We wanted to understand why community debates around respectability ebb and flow, often becoming inflamed and contentious. We wanted to see how the idea of the “politics of respectability,” a phrase coined by Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham’s in her study of Jim Crow–era black female reformers, resonates in 2016. The contestation over the politics of respectability has been inspired by representations in the arts, politics, and culture. From hip-hop fashion and lyrics, to popular media, to the Internet, and to public sites of protest and civil unrest, African Americans remain acutely hypervisible and under surveillance a century after Higgenbotham’s activist women and their counterparts began advocating for strict codes of behavior.
When we issued the call for papers, we had no idea how much interest there would be in the topic. To our surprise, there was an unprecedented number of submissions; according to Souls’ Managing Editor Prudence Browne, the most in recent memory. After our initial selection process, there remained so many examples of compelling and high-quality scholarship that the journal decided to produce a double-issue. We are delighted with the results—a diverse array of theoretical, methodological, and conceptual approaches that take up the subject of race and respectability from both historical and contemporary standpoints. This issue begins with an invited article by Herman Gray, in which we asked him to extend and ruminate on his contributions to our discussion two years ago. In his usual brilliant and erudite manner, Gray asks whether the discourse of respectability is relevant to today’s crises; whether the politics of respectability “continues to find traction and a reason to exist.” This rhetorical challenge opens up a dialogue among and between the articles of this issue, enabling us to see black identity and community formation as fluid, dynamic, and powerful.
The first part of this issue of Souls features articles that ground the question of respectability politics through an historical lens. Co-editor Jane Rhodes begins this section with a discussion of how the black press and race movies of the 1920s disseminated “pedagogies of respectability” to influence black women’s sexuality and public personae. The policing of black women’s behavior reflected elite’s efforts at reform and social control and at the same time functioned as strategies of protection and of resistance. Rhodes demonstrates how, since the early 20th century, respectability has been a contested and contradictory framework for black women’s liberation, and that black media played a critical role in representing the multiple versions of this project. Jarvis R. Givens also looks at how respectability politics are deployed during the era of Jim Crow through the writing and discourse of black teachers and their textbooks. This study focuses on how narratives of the Nat Turner rebellion are presented to black schoolchildren. Although Turner’s story is one of violence and insurrection, it was presented to black youth as an example of race vindication and race pride. Givens argues that black teachers’ efforts to both educate and shield their students underscore how tropes of respectability did not require an opposition to violent resistance; indeed, such a radical history could be embraced.
Two articles in this issue trace the lives of black women who were deeply affected and constrained by the politics of respectability and the exigencies of black life during Jim Crow. Interestingly, they were contemporaries and influential figures in different professional spheres. Sara P. Díaz analyzes the life and work of Roger Arliner Young, the first African American woman to earn a doctorate in zoology, as well as an educator and activist. Díaz’s analysis unpacks the multiple strands of respectability politics that were exerted by institutions and communities during Young’s life, resulting in a constant struggle to realize her ambitions as a scientist. Similarly, Bettina Aptheker is concerned with the life and career of Shirley Graham Du Bois, who is known primarily as an activist and partner of W.E.B. Du Bois but was also a talented musician and composer. Aptheker’s narrative, based in part on interviews with Du Bois’s son, seeks to understand how respectability politics influenced her subject’s life choices and rendered her musical career nearly invisible.
The legacy of civil rights activist Rosa Parks, like the lives of Roger Arlinger Young and Shirley Graham Du Bois, was shaped by what Katharina M. Fackler terms the “iconography of respectability.” Fackler engages in a close visual analysis of photographs of Rosa Parks, arguing that visual culture was an essential tool for both the mobilization and memory of the black freedom struggle. This article connects the early formulations of respectability carved out by early 20th-century black elites to the strategies of mid-century organizations and media who created an “ambivalent visual grammar of respectability.” The visually constructed memories of Rosa Parks and the Montgomery Bus Boycott serve to undermine—or erase—her radicalism and fierce advocacy for social justice.
This section concludes with an analysis of the black queer presence in Ebony and Jet magazines during the 1970s. These black-owned periodicals asserted themselves as agents of African American respectability and status, much like the black press at the turn of the 20th century. But in the post–civil rights era, the more visible presence of black queer culture and politics challenged heteronormative respectability politics and the policing of black sexuality. Author E. James West juxtaposes the magazines’ conservative framing of black queerness against letters to the editor that suggest more receptive community norms regarding homosexuality.
Part two of this special issue examines contemporary examples of African American engagement with and struggles over respectability politics. The section begins with three articles examining the conflicted ways in which respectability is performed in media. Co-editor Ralina L. Joseph investigates showrunner Shonda Rhimes’s on-again, off-again performance of respectability in the press through what Joseph calls “strategic ambiguity.” These carefully constructed images allow Hollywood powerbroker Rhimes to morph from a non-threatening, colorblindness-espousing Black producer to fierce Black feminist critic. Beretta E. Smith-Shomade documents another set of negotiated performances of respectability by analyzing “playful piety” within the Black church, what one might consider to be the most respectable of all African American institutions. Using the warning “don’t play with God” as a starting point, Smith-Shomade considers a range of cultural texts that play with respectability, from Issa Rae’s web series Mis-Adventures of Awkward Black Girl to entertainer Rickey Smiley’s performances across media, to the reality television show Preachers of LA. A third article in this same vein is Julian Kevon Glover’s inquiry into Black transgender celebrities’ creation of “transnormativity.” Glover studies how respectability is performed, often with a wink and a nod, by transwomen of color. Ultimately Glover critiques both transwomen of color celebrities Laverne Cox and Janet Mock and the media for relying upon dualisms that “situate [transwomen of color] as either respectable or subhuman.”
The articles on Shonda Rhimes, religion and the Black church, and trans celebrities of color feature contradictory yet playful and negotiated performances of respectability. Two other articles, Micaela di Leonardo’s study of “The Tom Joyner Morning Show” and Ariane Cruz’s look at the “politics of perversion” in black women’s practices of race play in bondage and discipline, domination and submission, and sadism and masochism (BDSM), illustrate a more forthright form of resistance to the sometimes-stultifying expectations of respectability. di Leonardo asserts that “The Tom Joyner Morning Show,” what she describes as “the most influential contemporary black media presence” today, provides a clear counter to respectability politics. As a “counterpublic,” “The Tom Joyner Morning Show” is a space for and makes visible questions of Black class, gender, age, and sexuality that mainstream media simply ignores. Cruz examines another type of counterpublic in her look at Black women, pornography, and BDSM. Using the notion of “policing,” Cruz “illuminate[s] how race operates not only as an apparatus of power, but also one of pleasure.”
The final three articles in the new millennium section turn from culture and representation to the life and death implications of respectability politics. Robin R. Means Coleman and Douglas-Wade Brunton’s article looks at “respectability policing” through the new ShotSpotter technology. SpotShotter, a police department–used innovation that detects and transmits the location of gunshots, became, according to the authors, a “tool of digital surveillance and discrimination in its monitoring of a Black community.” Means Coleman and Brunton discuss how SpotShotter was deployed to investigate the murder of the young Black woman Janese Talton Jackson. The authors discuss Jackson’s portrayal as ranging from disreputable to respectable in various stages of the media reportage. Looming notions of non-respectability also inform Hedwig Lee and Margaret Takako Hicken’s article about the concept of “vigilance.” These sociologists use empirical methods to document how African Americans’s vigilant behaviors, such as extreme concern about one’s language and appearance, avoiding social spaces, and psychologically preparing for discrimination, are connected to negative health outcomes. Finally, Simone C. Drake’s article meditates on how the looming threat of Black violence and death infiltrate the ways in which Black boys are permitted to simply be children. Drake at once discusses how “discourses of crisis and politics of respectability make it difficult to imagine black boyhood,” and also proposes that black soundscapes provide alternatives to the impossible demands of respectability. These final three articles illustrate how ideologies of respectability fail to keep African Americans safe, or healthy, or content.
The “short takes” section features two important and timely conversations to add to our focus on respectability. Brittany Farr interviews Gina Clayton, the executive director of the Essie Justice Group, an organization that works to end mass incarceration by organizing and empowering women with incarcerated loved ones. Farr’s interview demonstrates how expectations of respectability amount to the silencing of women. The next “short take,” a roundtable of scholars of Black and Latino studies, refutes these same cultural politics of silencing, what the authors call “an anti-respectability politics … that engages with material, content, or subject matter free from heteronormativity or specifically Western contours of African American representation.” The special issue concludes with book reviews and our recommended list of books that engage with the issue of African American respectability politics.
We are grateful for all of our generous colleagues who agreed to review the fourteen scholarly articles, two short takes, and two book reviews included in this issue. Thank you to the Souls editorial staff, especially Marco Durce Roc, for the careful shepherding of this project. Thank you to Herman Gray for providing such a brilliant and apt opening article. Finally, thank you to all of our contributors—historians, media scholars, sociologists, anthropologists, and cultural critics—for your serious and careful scholarship that reminds us of the urgency of our times and the necessity to continue interrogating African American respectability in all its forms.
Notes
W.E.B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (New York: W. W. Norton, 1999), 11.