The Mask of Respectability
A critical exchange on race, respectability politics, and minstrelsy
The exchange below was inspired by an unexpected but energizing discussion of minstrelsy during a staff meeting last month. We’ll be discussing respectability politics (including my recent essay on the subject), minstrelsy, and other related matters on the next livestream (this Friday, May 15, 1:00 P.M. EDT), and hopefully continuing the debate. We’ll have more to say about the show’s guest and content, along with links to the stream, in tomorrow’s announcement post. For now, enjoy. And please do let us know your thoughts in the comments.
Also, we wanted to include more images and video, but we’re pushing length and data constraints as it is. We’ll have some more prepared for the livestream.
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Dear Glenn,
In a staff meeting ahead of the April 3, 2026 livestream, Rob and I were trying to convince you to watch Druski’s Nascar video (which you ultimately did), when the topic of minstrelsy came up. We talked a bit about the video as a kind of response to the minstrel show, an ironic, race-flipped commentary on social stereotypes, and you reminded me of Nathan Huggins’s chapter on minstrelsy in his classic book Harlem Renaissance (1971). I hadn’t cracked that book in many years. In fact, I’d entirely forgotten about the minstrelsy chapter. When I revisited it, I was pleasantly surprised by how penetrating and perceptive his analysis remains, 55 years after it was first published.
What surprised me most, though, was not the chapter’s applicability to Druski’s video but to your own recent defense of respectability politics, “Respectability Politics and the Moral Ecology of Freedom.” Huggins locates the maintenance of respectability at the core of the minstrel show’s popularity, at first during its codification in the 1840s, then again after the Civil War, until it mostly petered out in the first decades of the twentieth century. But examples can be found in theater, film, and television as late as the 1970s. In the United Kingdom, the BBC’s popular The Black and White Minstrel Show almost made it to the ‘80s—it was canceled in 1978, after a 20-year run. Though the minstrel show was created by white men and the performers were initially white, their faces blackened and made up with grotesquely exaggerated features, some black performers eventually took up the practice. As Huggins notes, there were no viable avenues for the creation of black theater for a black audience at the time. Black performers had to take work where they could find it.
Huggins describes the minstrel character in the following way:
The theatrical darky was childlike; he could be duped into the most idiotic and foolish schemes; but like a child, too, innocence would protect him and turn the tables on the schemers. His songs were vulgar and his stories the most gross and broad; his jokes were often on himself, his wife or woman. Lazy, he was slow of movement, or when he displayed a quickness of wit it was generally in flight from work or ghosts. Nevertheless, he was unrestrained in enthusiasm for music—for athletic and rhythmical dance. Likewise, he was insatiable in his bodily appetites; his songs and tales about food would make one think him all mouth, gullet, and stomach. Indeed, performers gave themselves grotesque lips, creating the illusion of cavernous mouths. The stage Negro went into ecstasy over succulent foods—pork, chicken, watermelon—“lip-smacking,” “mouth-watering.”
The minstrel was, Huggins writes, “patently the antithesis of the Protestant Ethic.” In his view, that is no way incidental to the minstrel show’s popularity with white audiences. He counterposes the theatrical type of the minstrel to that of the Franklinian American. The theatrical form that would become the minstrel show developed alongside the moral, individualistic, entrepreneurial model of American success. The terms of that success are as familiar today as they were in 1971, as they were to readers of Horatio Alger in the 1870s, and as they were to Northern minstrel show audiences in the 1840s. As relayed by Huggins, those terms these include,
[...] industry (dedicated work in some useful calling), order (decorum, good manners, the avoidance of excess in emotions and all other things), cleanliness (the honoring of one’s own body and possessions but also the deference to the good taste and sensibility of others), punctuality (industry and order combined for efficiency and in deference to the opinion of others), frugality (negatively, not wasting, but positively, accumulating by deferring present consumption for future benefits).
The most significant item for Huggins, though, is sexual continence—abstinence, not mere moderation. That value lines up with all the others, in the sense that it indicates the demands of both public morality and a kind of personal thrift. Abstinence preserves the reputations of young men and women and spares them the shame of having children out of wedlock while enabling them to save energy and attention, which is to be spent only when it can be most useful (when economic opportunity presents itself). It should not be frittered away on seduction and sexual exertion.
Abstinence, as the exemplar of all other “American values,” is key to Huggins’s account of the minstrel show’s popularity and the role it plays in the public imagination. The need to instill and reinforce these behaviors—to “cultivate respectability,” as you might put it, Glenn—implies what we all know to be true: effort, discipline, and social reinforcement are required to stop us from shirking our work, blowing our money on entertainment instead of saving it, showing up to appointments whenever we feel like it (if at all), saying exactly what we’re thinking instead of observing decorum, and sleeping with whomever we want, whatever the consequences.
In Huggins’s view, the minstrel show served as an outlet for those repressed desires, a way to both preserve and disavow what was least acceptable and most sought by ostensibly upright white audiences. “Could the fantasies of such men,” Huggins writes, “have been other than the loose and undisciplined creatures of appetite—Sambo, Jim Crow, Jim Dandy?” As Eric Lott has written, minstrel shows “coupled a nearly insupportable fascination and a self-protective derision with respect to black people and their cultural practices, and that made blackface minstrelsy less a sign of absolute white power and control than of panic, anxiety, terror, and pleasure.” According to Huggins, the minstrel show character was designed, from its garish clothing to its enormous eyes and mouth to its physical appetites and sexual licentiousness to its very racial otherness, “to achieve the effect of character and personality antithetical to respectable taste and manners” (emphasis added).
We could further explore, with Huggins, Lott, and many other scholars, the cultural and material origins of the anxieties on display in the minstrel show. But the most important point, for my purposes, is the nearly ritualistic role that minstrelsy plays in what the sociologist Norbert Elias called “the civilizing process.” Minstrelsy abetted that process in America by providing a screen—the grotesque image of the “darky”—onto which white audiences could project all that was “antithetical to respectable taste and manners.”
The minstrel show is hardly the only theatrical form that served that purpose—the use of drama to both purge and enjoy perceived social contaminants in the service of legitimating the dominant order goes back to the Greeks. It likely has even deeper roots in our psyches. But the choice to use the image of the black man to satisfy the unmet and unmentionable desires produced by the demands of respectability surely matters in America, where the color line’s sharp legal and social divisions produced two antipodal categories of person, whatever the finer distinctions within each category. Once such a line is established, the terms of transgression—symbolic or otherwise—become much clearer. I can only choose to cross a line if I know which side of it I’m already on. I can only make a point by breaking a rule if I understand the rule and its meaning. I can only commit miscegenation—a word invented in 1864, far postdating the advent of the minstrel show—in a society that treats racial categories as so real that they can be violated.
The minstrel show provided a way for white audiences to float over the line from the respectable world to the world of appetites, carnal satisfactions, and unrestrained expression without actually touching down. And the vehicle for that trip—the symbolic hot-air balloon—was the distorted image of the black man, invested with all that was desired but unutterable, made a figure of fun and humiliation as a way to both enjoy and disavow the pleasures white audiences imagined he, as “all that is antithetical to respectable taste and manners,” uncomplicatedly enjoyed.
In short, Huggins suggests that minstrelsy allowed repressed whites to objectify and project the desires, appetites, and parts of themselves they could not express socially onto a figure located well outside the precincts of respectable society: the black man. They could then relish in the performance’s excesses while keeping them at bay with mockery. The minstrel show was less an expression of outright repulsion than a platform from which white audiences could see and hear the ambivalence of their relation to blacks—feared and desired, admired and disdained, subordinated and idealized—played out before them.
If you asked a nineteenth-century, white audience member if they agreed with that description, they would likely stare at you with incomprehension. After all, none of them had access to the Freudian concepts that underpin Huggins’s analysis. I would also guess that, even if they had some conscious inkling of what was going on, that they were imputing their own unspeakable desires to a figure it was already acceptable to mock, it would not behoove them to admit it. That would entail admitting what it was most crucial to deny: that they had these desires in the first place, that they would indulge them if not for the social consequences, and that—most disturbingly—those desires formed a basis for deep commonality, even kinship, with black men (at least in the way black men were imagined by these audiences). Beneath the leering blackface mask was the face of a white man much like themselves. And perhaps, if they could remove the mask of white respectability that disguised their true nature, they would find a black face staring back at them in the mirror.
The minstrel show is long gone, but the structures of respectability and disavowal it dramatized are all around us. Often, they are just as uncomfortable to contemplate as the minstrel show itself. The modern-day discourse of respectability politics is a case in point. I have few concerns about the stated goals of respectability advocates—who is going to argue that we shouldn’t welcome less crime, less disorder, and more prosperity in any community, no matter the race or class of its members? And even though I have my own point of view, I’m not even that interested in the policies and practices that respectability advocates like you, Glenn, recommend. Finding the right balance of carrots and sticks, formal and informal network-building and social capital acquisition, figuring out how to make the police a help rather than a hindrance, educational policy, and so on—I leave all that to the social scientists, policy wonks, and activists.
What interests me are respectability advocates’ reasons for getting involved in the debate in the first place. I don’t think those reasons are uniform. At the risk of destroying my own reputation, I’ll say that I can actually understand where Bill Cosby was coming from in the infamous “pound cake” speech. I don’t agree with the framing or sympathize with the tone, but I can well understand how a dedicated civil rights advocate and successful entertainer (who also did some other stuff) would see it as his job to promote the public morality that formed an important plank in the civil rights movement to the next generation. And I can understand his anger at seeing what he viewed as the promise of the civil rights movement undermined not only by white racists but also by the perceived failure of that younger generation of black people to abide by the standard his arm of the civil rights movement cultivated. Cosby charged that young black people were too promiscuous, committed too many crimes, dressed in an unbecoming way, and so on. If they were shot by police during the commission of even a petty crime, the first question to ask was why they were doing the crime in the first place. That seems harsh, to say the least, but he was far from the only one who felt that way.
Cosby has been fully delegitimized as a spokesman for respectability, given the sexual assault charges. There’s hypocrisy, and then there’s that. But his general position on respectability has persisted. While the proposed remedies vary in both emphasis and sophistication, the basic critique doesn’t. Black critics like you, Glenn, still see the sort of problems Cosby groused about (which others have called pathological) as basic roadblocks to two distinct but related goals: success and respectability. “Success” is material (more educational achievement, more stable families, more upward mobility, more wealth, more political power). I can’t find fault with your conception of respectability as individual and collective self-command, an autonomous commitment to living with dignity and honor. That is a noble goal in itself, as it requires us to attend to the interior processes and impulses that drive us, and to ask ourselves the important questions: Who am I? How should I live? What are my responsibilities to others? What is my relationship to my own desires and ambitions?
That’s one side of respectability. It points inward, to the individual and her community. And as you rightly point out, the tenets of respectability aren’t necessarily imposed on the black community from without. There is a long tradition of black Americans promoting and exemplifying respectability among themselves. But the other side of respectability points outward, toward the reputation and standing of the minority community in the eyes of the majority. Acquiring respectability necessarily entails, along with self-respect and the respect of the community, accord with a broader, less easily definable category of values, behaviors, and sensibilities esteemed (or at least paid lip service to) by society at large. But the relationship between the inward-directed pursuit of respectability and its outward appearance to the social body is not as direct as it may seem.
In your essay, Glenn, you make an ingenious attempt to “materialize” the abstract notion of the minority group’s public standing, treating minority group reputation as a “public good,” like clean air or a public park. The problem with a public good is that rational individuals can use it in ways that are advantageous to them but harmful to the asset. Say my friends and I have a picnic in Central Park. We enjoy ourselves, but when we’re ready to leave, we realize that the nearest trash can is in the opposite direction of the exit. Rather than waste our own time hauling our garbage to the can, we dump it on the grass. We know that’s wrong, but it’s easier and more fun and a more efficient use of our time to head straight to the nearest bar for happy hour instead of cleaning up. Meanwhile, we’ve left behind an eyesore that makes Central Park less enjoyable for everyone else, one that a taxpayer-funded park employee will have to clean up. Penalties (like littering fines) and norms (like “leave no trace” principles) may try to restrain us, but it’s unlikely we’ll be caught by the park service, and none of us really care that strangers whom we’ll never see again are scowling at us. (In reality, I always clean up after myself, so don’t come at me in the comments.)
You’re suggesting that minority group reputation works essentially the same way. The vast majority of minority group members behave respectably, maintaining both their personal reputation and that of the group. But when a tiny minority within the minority breaks the law, spends their days hanging on the corner instead of going to school, produces multiple out-of-wedlock children, and so on, they despoil the group’s reputation. Part of the cost of personal disrepute is assumed by the group. Their personal lack of respectability is imputed to the group.
There’s an asymmetry in the “group reputation as public asset” comparison you make. Reputation is observer-dependent in a way that clean air and parks and the status of other public goods are not. I can analyze the particulate content in the air and say with some confidence that the nearby smelting plant has something to do with the pollution. I can observe the trash-strewn park on a Sunday evening and conclude that some people are misusing the asset. We can argue about what kind of particulate counts are acceptable, how much trash is too much trash, but that won’t change the underlying fact, that the asset has been, to some degree, devalued.
In the case of reputation, the damage done by an individual to the group’s reputation will depend on a host of other considerations, like narrative framing and existing bias. If someone cuts me off in traffic, and the driver happens to be black, I may say to myself, “What an asshole.” Or I may say, “Of course he’s black. Black people drive like assholes.” In the former case, where I don’t think race is relevant, minority reputation doesn’t suffer. In the latter case, minority reputation does suffer, if only in a very small way. Extrapolate outward, and we’ll find an incalculable number of interactions, observations, correlations, stray thoughts, anecdotes, news reports, and so on occurring in the lives and minds of observers, all of them subject to a host of interpretive and emotional filters, frames, and lenses, and all of them theoretically coalescing into the aggregate “public good” of minority group reputation, which now appears far less material than at first glance.
Not only is the reputation-as-public-asset theory observer-dependent, it is wholly observer-dependent. You write, “The standing of ‘Black Americans’ in wider society is not owned by any single individual; it is a collective asset shared by millions of people who may never meet one another. Like clean air or nation defense, it is something from which all members benefit whether or not they personally contribute to producing it.” Intentionally or not, there’s a little rhetorical legerdemain happening here, because the matter of ownership gets slippery once we accept that the asset is observer-dependent. Every American benefits from national defense (clean air is a different story), but perceptions of what constitutes adequate defense are not the same as what actually constitutes adequate defense.
The “standing of ‘Black Americans’” may be “a collective asset shared by millions,” but the Black Americans to whom it applies do not determine its value. They act in ways that may enhance or damage its value, but “standing” is in the eye of the beholder. I may attempt to act nobly in order to increase my standing in your eyes, but whether my standing actually does increase depends upon how you perceive my actions. For example, if you know that I am acting nobly only to increase my standing with you, you may be inclined to downgrade me further, believing that my self-interest poisons the act’s nobility. Or perhaps you’ll be impressed by the effort I’ve expended to impress you, rather than by my nobility, and your esteem for me will rise, but only because I’ve acknowledged my inferiority and paid tribute to your superiority. Or perhaps I truly am acting nobly because I believe it is the right thing to do, but you believe that I’m merely trying to curry favor with you.
If, as a society, we decide, for example, that clean air is the number one priority, we can take extreme measures to control and enhance it. If we decide we absolutely must have clean air at any cost, we can ban gas-powered cars, shutter coal plants and other polluters, mandate the conversion of power grids to solar and nuclear, and levy crushing taxes and fines on fossil fuel companies. But however I may try to affect my standing in your eyes, I can’t determine it. While the minority group may attempt to enhance its reputation’s value, it cannot determine it.
The argument on behalf of certain intra-group norms—obey the law, finish school, delay parenthood until you attain such and such markers of stability—seems almost self-evidently correct to me. Again, who is going to say those are bad ideas? Likewise, the practical value of respectability via self-command, the specifically black tradition of same, and so on—hard to argue with. What doesn’t make sense is the confusion between intra-group reputational norms—“If you get arrested, you’re going to look stupid, not cool, in front of your friends”—and the negative externalities you describe as the result of violating those norms. Intra-group enforcement may constrain some or even most norm-violation, but the negative externalities that result from norm-violation don’t apply (or don’t apply most relevantly) to the community’s perception of itself. They apply to the majority group’s perception of the minority group.
Here, black respectability advocates run up against something uncomfortable. The basic argument looks something like this: “Goddammit, will you all stop playing into every negative stereotype about black people? It’s bad enough in itself, because you’re messing up your communities and your own lives. But it’s also bad for respectable black people like me, who get called in to comment every time a bunch of teenagers run rampant through the streets of Chicago or wherever else. Because I know what my white viewers and readers are thinking. They’re thinking, ‘Look what your people are doing out there, dancing on cop cars and looting and whatever else.’ I don’t like it any more than they do, but I’ve got to bear the burden of the negative externalities you’ve imposed on our collective reputation. I can’t just wash my hands of you miscreants, because no matter what I do, I’m going to be affiliated with you in the mind of the public, as will every other person with our shared ancestry. I want to help you, because I want better for you. But I also want better for me. So we’ve got to figure this out, for all of our sake.”
Again, I understand perfectly well why you or anybody would feel this way. Every member of a minority group sometimes feels that way about other members who seem to be actively trying to confirm negative stereotypes. (I’m not even going to get into what some of my fellow Jews are up to right now.) And I understand, too, your frustration with colleagues who act as though calls for respectability themselves are the problem, which I don’t have space to address here. Suffice it to say, it’s problematic.
But isn’t the root of the issue, Glenn, that you see members of your minority group behaving in ways “antithetical to respectable taste and manners”? Through your eyes, I imagine the reaction is something like, “Yeah, and they have got to stop! While the consequences fall hardest on them and their communities, all black people are affected.”
You can’t unload your stake in the public good of collective black reputation. It’s bound to who you are, your self-conception as a black man, a black intellectual, and the inheritor of a black tradition. Accordingly, you can no more easily divest yourself of the public good than you can step outside of your own mind, body, and soul, just as I can’t simply declare that I’m no longer Jewish because I’m disgusted with some of my people. Not even conversion to Christianity could take the Jew out of me. So it makes perfect sense to me that you see such urgency in arguing on behalf of respectability politics for your people.
I wonder whether all respectability advocates see things from that perspective, where the stakes are both social and intimate. The particular perspectives of white advocates for respectability politics within black communities must vary. I have no doubt that many of them speak from genuine concern. But most respectability politics that understands itself in those terms emanates from right-of-center. And the tenor of conservative media—when it comes to stories about economically troubled, black, urban communities—generally does not come across as “concerned” so much as “angry, frightened, and hostile.” We could add to that the recent revitalization of “just asking questions”-type “race realism” from popular commentators like Tucker Carlson and Nick Fuentes, who seem to regard black people as, on the whole, inherently violent and cognitively inferior.
Some of the data about black crime rates and intra-group victimization are dispiriting and can’t be hand-waved away. But that does not explain why they’re such a propulsive element of the conservative media. The obvious answer would be the long tail of the left’s post-George Floyd equivocations about race and crime rates. Even if we’re past the seismic upheaval of the George Floyd Summer, its aftershocks persist, if only because conservative media saw mainstream and left-leaning outlets reaping the financial benefits of covering events in their way and sought to scoop up profits from an underserved market and keep them coming for as long as possible. (Before you call that reading too cynical, please consider that we’re talking about the likes of the New York Times opinion page and the Daily Wire here.)
The true appeal of these stories, I think, lives a couple feet below the brain. For along with the standard hypocritical howling about “left-wing media bias” in reporting on race and crime came a rather extreme vision of black urban life, full of drive-by shootings, brutal beatings, “no-go zones,” fatherless children, and so on. These problems existed and still exist, but the question was why they became the primary representation of black life in certain quarters. What satisfactions do these harrowing images and lurid stories offer? What psychological and emotional needs do they serve? What does infinitely looping video of the horror-show ghetto offer to the suburbanite scrolling through his phone late at night, far away from any place that violence could touch him?
Stories and images portraying present-day black life as “all that is antithetical to respectable taste and manners” offered something beyond mere information. I think it provided a return, in the midst of the traumatic reorganization of American life and politics we were then (and still are) undergoing, to basic American assurances about who stands on which side of the line distinguishing respectability from its opposite.
In other words, the minstrel show is long gone, but the structures of respectability and disavowal it dramatized remain with us. They are reshaped, stretched, and contorted, but still legible as basic organizing dynamics, transposed from a wildly popular nineteenth-century theatrical form onto today’s hegemonic leisure activity: looking at the internet and getting mad.
We are unlikely to see an actual blackface performance today, unless it is ironized by a black artist (Spike Lee’s Bamboozled) or used to demonstrate a white character’s idiocy (Mad Men, “My Old Kentucky Home”). But, to return to Huggins’s analysis, the minstrel show’s function as a kind of release valve for desires repressed by the need for respectability, and the grotesque image of the black man that served as that release’s vehicle, is still in operation. That is why I think there is a meaningful difference between the imperative you feel, Glenn, to promote respectability politics, and that of some others, who have turned a basically unobjectionable and widely employed set of normative guidelines to other uses.
The post-George Floyd shakeup provided a screen, this time a literal one, that permitted fantasies about crossing the line between those two antipodal American categories to take new shape. After all, in the year of the pandemic lockdown, all we had were screens. Ideas like the Great Replacement, murmurings about race war and civil war, “race science,” and other paranoid racial fantasies rushed from the grimy back alleys of obscure message boards and white supremacist mailing lists to which they were largely confined and into the respectable precincts of cable news, popular livestreams and podcasts, and the White House. They’re now mainstream, almost unremarkable fodder for tiresome “debates” between objectively stupid influencers who make seven-figure incomes peddling rancid chum to teens and twenty-somethings desperate for a sense of order in a world that becomes more frightening, inhospitable, and unnavigable every day.
Even granting the persistence of minstrel logic in the twenty-first century, we’re left with a nagging question. With the nineteenth century’s white striver class’s most central repressed desire—unrestrained sexuality—now thoroughly integrated into respectable American life, what taboo remains to fantasize about? What line is left to transgress?
Violence.
If minstrel logic provides a way to understand the social function of, to paraphrase George Fredrickson, the black image in the respectable mind (another banger from 1971), then we should seek out the taboos most vigorously disavowed by those who promote them as the essence of the other, the key to understanding him. It would be a little tendentious on my part to claim there is something inherently racial about American conceptions of violence, either as racial expression or racial projection. Most of us would acknowledge that violence has always been a part of human experience, always and everywhere, in one form or another. Nor would most us deny that, at times, we’ve all had violent fantasies, most of which involve visiting great pain on strangers who’ve offended us in petty ways, like talking too loudly during a concert, for example. (If you happened to be at Market Hotel in Bushwick last Sunday night, you know exactly the tall, obnoxious couple I’m referring to. Get a room!)
But as our discourse becomes more violent, as violence creeps into our everyday speech not as metaphor but as basic descriptor of the only “solution” to seemingly insoluble problems, as we’ve seen spectacular eruptions of public violence from the handful of George Floyd protests that devolved into street fights, beatings, arson, and looting to the January 6th riot, and as the rhetoric of our elected officials employs violent imagery so often one wonders how serious they are about it, the basic function of respectable society—to substitute civil debate and the political process for violence—would seem to be short-circuiting.
Glenn, I know this is a concern of yours. The language of civil war, of race war, speaks to a frustration with very real failures of democratic institutions and collective will. But it also has a particular character, and I wonder if its racial dimension, the inflamed mutterings about “those people” who, if they aren’t brought to heel, will soon turn their native aggression on “us,” doesn’t speak to a desire that threatens to breach the confines of respectability. Projecting the desire to be rid of the problem once and for all across the line, putting it in the gaping maw of spectral thugs eyeing the offramp to the ‘burbs, is indeed something to worry over, even if those who are doing it, like their nineteenth-century forebears, aren’t quite aware they’re doing it. And even if they were, could they say it in their own voices? Or do they (I? You? We?) still require the black mask to see what we are, however distorted, however darkly?
All the best from your buddy,
Mark
Mark,
Your letter is a hell of a piece—provocative, elegantly written, and intellectually serious. I appreciate you taking the time to wrestle with my essay so deeply, and especially for leaning into my reference to Nathan Huggins. I hadn’t revisited that minstrelsy chapter in decades. You’re right: it holds up remarkably well. The way he frames the minstrel show as a ritual of projection and disavowal, a theatrical safety valve for the very appetites that respectable Protestant striving had to repress, is penetrating. The grotesque “theatrical darky” as the embodied antithesis of Franklinian self-command—lazy, libidinous, impulsive, vulgar—let white audiences enjoy the forbidden while reinforcing the civilizing line. I see why that framework seduced you as a lens on today’s respectability debates.
Your letter impressed me, as I’m sure it will impress our Substack readership. I accept a good bit of the structural parallel you draw. There is something ritualistic and voyeuristic in how certain corners of conservative media (and the internet more broadly) feast on stories of urban disorder, fatherlessness, and street crime. The lurid loops of looting or “no-go zones” can function like updated minstrel routines: they horrify and reassure at the same time, confirming the audience’s own distance from the chaos while providing a screen for anxieties about decline, violence, and social breakdown. And yes, the post-George Floyd period—with its institutional failures, crime spikes, and cultural convulsions—supercharged that dynamic. Some of it is profit-driven chum; some of it channels genuine panic. You’re not wrong to notice and to dwell on the psychic undercurrents.
But I part ways with you on how far this minstrel logic explains my project or the broader tradition of Black respectability politics. The core of what I’m arguing for in my essay, “Respectability Politics and the Moral Ecology of Freedom,” is not a performance for the white gaze. It’s a hard-headed recognition of agency and empirical reality in the service of Black human flourishing. The behaviors we call “respectable”—finishing school, obeying the law, forming stable two-parent families, working consistently, delaying gratification—aren’t alien impositions or concessions to observers. They are time-tested pathways out of poverty and dysfunction for any group. Black Americans have invoked them from Douglass and Washington through Du Bois, King, and yes, even Cosby (before his personal disgrace delegitimized him). These voices spoke first and foremost to us Black folk, because the costs of their absence fall heaviest on Black kids, Black families, and Black neighborhoods.
The social science data remain stubborn. Homicide rates, victimization rates, out-of-wedlock birth rates, academic achievement gaps—these aren’t media inventions or projections. They are measurable patterns with devastating human consequences, disproportionately borne by the very communities we both care about. When I talk about a group’s reputation as a “public good,” I’m not denying its observer-dependence. (Though what you have to say about this is interesting and important.) You’re right that standing is in the eye of the beholder, filtered through bias, narrative, and selective attention. But that doesn’t make the underlying behaviors irrelevant. A reputation damaged by observable patterns of disorder makes everyday life harder for millions of respectable Black people—in hiring, lending, policing, schooling, and simple social trust. The asymmetry you note is real and painful: we Blacks do get asked to answer for the worst actors in ways that feel unfair. Yet pretending the patterns don’t exist, or that they’re solely the product of external forces —as do many on the left who insist that structural racism is the root of all evil—helps no one. That denialism, especially in the years after 2020, was its own powerful form of disavowal with, I would imagine, its own psycho-political roots.
You wonder about motives on the right. Fair enough. But let’s turn the mirror around. The left’s long reluctance to confront cultural and behavioral factors—its embrace of “systemic racism” as near-total explanation, its equivocations on crime, its discomfort with fatherhood and personal responsibility—also serves psychic needs. It preserves a flattering moral narrative, externalizes blame, and sustains political coalitions. Which is to say, both sides have their minstrel logics if we push the psychoanalytic frame hard enough. I prefer to stay grounded in the social sciences and the moral ecology of freedom: that is, I want to focus on what actually helps people build decent lives.
I don’t deny that some respectability talk gets co-opted into racial resentment or voyeurism. But the tradition I stand in—from the “talented tenth” to the Black church to today’s quiet strivers raising kids against the odds—is fundamentally about self-command and collective uplift, not soothing white anxieties. Every immigrant group that climbed (Irish, Italians, Jews, Asians) had reformers who preached the same disciplines against their own underclasses. The tension between appetite and restraint—that is, the problem of self-command—is human, not a peculiarity of American racial theater.
Mark, we’ve been at this a long time. We both want fewer dead Black kids, stronger Black families, and more Black Americans living with dignity and prosperity. If the Huggins lens forces us to examine the emotional temperature of these conversations, I’m all for it. But the data, the history of Black advocacy, and the lived experience of ordinary people trying to do right by their children come first. The minstrel show is gone. The challenges of freedom, order, self-government and the maintenance of civilization remain.
Looking forward to hashing this out on the show. Should be a good one.
Your buddy,
Glenn
For as long as I have been commenting Glenn has been for self-respect politics instead of the common meaning of respectability politics which centers around giving the people who may be prejudiced against you nothing to criticize.
Just saw a clip of outgoing Representative Wesley Hunt assuring us Jim Crow is over. Hunt must be getting his talking points from Democrats who are punking him into making laughable statements. This ranks up there with Byron Donald saying Black life was good under Jim Crow. The two need to compare notes. I needed humor today. Thanks Wesley.