What's Wrong with Respectability?

with John McWhorter

“Respectability politics” is a term of abuse in progressive circles. It refers to the idea that black people ought to comport themselves—in their language, manner of dress, and behavior—so as to earn the respect of those around them. That is, the white people around them. One hears it thrown around when someone (like me!) suggests that many problems in the black community can be traced back to behavioral issues. To accuse someone of purveying respectability politics is to accuse them of telling black people to “act white,” and so to accuse them—if the target is black—of racial self-hatred. It challenges the speaker’s authority with the unspoken and usually unsubstantiated charge that he has a problem with blackness and black people.

But what’s wrong with respectability? There’s nothing inherently “white” about speaking well, dressing for the occasion, obeying the law, and treating others well. Nor is the right to respect a token handed out to every person at birth, regardless of his behavior. It must be earned through respectable acts. And I can find little to respect in the actions of African Americans who put their communities through hell by breaking the law, causing disorder, and refusing to step up to the challenge of leading a decent life. If that makes me a purveyor of “respectability politics,” then so be it. I wear the label proudly.

In this clip from one of our subscriber-only Q&A sessions, John and I discuss one of the effects of the resistance to respectability: a willingness on the part of some troubled black communities to overlook antisocial, criminal behavior. Activities that would render one an outcast in most social circles—violent crime, for example—are too often written off as the lamentable but predictable result of generations of so-called systemic racism. What else can we expect of our young people, given slavery and Jim Crow and redlining and the cops? What else can we expect of their parents?

Quite a bit more, John and I both think. There is something deeply backward about a situation in which anyone calling for respectability is branded a reactionary while anyone excusing indefensible behavior in the name of systemic racism is seen as a right-thinking ally of the black community. Until those polarities flip and dishonorable acts are met with dishonored social status, we’re going to keep sending the wrong message. In the process, we’ll only be disrespecting ourselves.

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This clip is taken from a subscriber-only Q&A session. For access to Q&As, comments, early episodes, and a host of other benefits, click below and subscribe.

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GLENN LOURY : This question comes from someone whose initials are G.J.R. G.J.R. writes:

My question is about the sharp divergence between how mainstream white and black communities tend to regard their own riffraff. There are respectable, reputable people of all ethnicities, and then there are the deadbeats and the criminals. The difference between these two types is much greater than the difference between the races.

It seems like upwardly mobile, good, black citizens are to be forever saddled with the riffraff of their communities, certainly more so than whites. White people have always seemed more inclined to write off their lower cohort as “trash,” et cetera, while black people seem to be more duty-bound to theirs. One advantage to writing off your riffraff is that it creates social pressure to not be like those people. Nobody wants to be looked down on another advantage, especially if there is a socially acceptable epithet involved, is that it instantly distances you from the other bad group.

So that's the question.

JOHN MCWHORTER: A few decades ago, somebody white who I think was in the sports industry—we could look it up and you might remember who it was. Somebody said the problem with the black community is that there's no shame in failure. And his head rolled. I remember at the time thinking, and I've always thought since then, that is a very broad-brush thing to say, but there's a little bit of truth in it, in that the enlightened black view is that black people are working against a certain rising tide, that black people work with a general obstacle of racism, be it personal or systemic, and that therefore, if a black person fails, if a black person is “riffraff,” you can't see it the same way as you would see white riffraff because of the obstacles that black people face.

And of course, there are those obstacles, and you can argue that there are differences, but what it does mean is that there is a tacit sense that black riffraff are not to be dismissed as facilely as a white suburbanite would dismiss the kind of white riffraff you saw on a TV show like Breaking Bad, the people who are addicted to meth, et cetera. There is an element there. The idea is that we face more obstacles and therefore if a person fails, to an extent, it has to be understood.

So I would say that, yes, there is a sense in the black community that if somebody is riffraff, as you put it, it's not ideal, but there's much less of an impulse to condemn that person as just a disaster, to consider that person unsuitable for any kind of romantic attachment, to keep that person hidden than there might be in many communities. White communities.

I think about Bill Cosby. This is before he became the Bill Cosby of infamy. This is when he was merely the Bill Cosby of the pound cake speech. This was a speech given at an event, I think, celebrating the 50th anniversary of the Brown v. Board of Education decision striking down legal segregation, in which Cosby lamented that too many—and these are paraphrases—kids are having kids when they're 16 years old, they're running around with their pants hanging half off their behinds. They're failing in school. They're messing up by getting involved in crime and whatnot. And he was basically saying, “Come on, people.” And in fact, he and Alvin Poussaint authored a book of that title Come On, People.

It's a good book.

That is a call to black people to pull up their socks, to pull up their pants, to stand up straight with their shoulders back, to take care of their children, to get busy. “You're not living up to your end of the deal.” Another quote from Cosby to the black lower classes. “You're not living up to your end of the deal.” He envisioned a mother with an infant sitting in a high chair with a bottle of Coke watching TV all day. So you're feeding the kid sugar and you got the kid in front of TV as your babysitter instead of building the kid's vocabulary and teaching them their colors and shapes. You're being a bad parent, bad citizen, bad neighbor, whatever. “Come on, people.”

He went around the country renting out theaters—we should do this, John—renting out movie theaters and drawing audiences in the thousands to hear him hold forth in this spirit, largely of black people who came out and cheered him. And he became, Bill Cosby did, persona non grata in many progressive black political circles because of his, I don't know, washing dirty linen in public or because of his appeal to respectability politics.

I mean, part of why people don't do this is this, I think, nonsensical dislike of the idea that you would solicit the respect of others by comporting yourself in a way that was respectable, that you would be concerned about what white people thought about your community and endeavor to present an anti-defamation front such that you would foster a good impression of your community in the minds of others rather than have them think what they will.

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You don't want to be Bill Cosby. You saw what happened to him. That is, you don't want to be the guy who stands out and says this because a ton of bricks will fall on you. You don't want to seem to be catering to the opinion of others. You don't want to care too much about what they think about you. We have to earn equal respect. It should be our due. People should think well of black people regardless of what it is that they see before their lying eyes.

Partly that. Partly you don't want to blame the victim. Yes, they're miscreants, but it's not their fault. “I'm depraved because I'm deprived.” That's that line from West Side Story. I could go into a long rant about this. These thugs, these vicious, mindless, almost inhumane criminals who are killing kids deserve condemnation. They deserve sanction. They should not get anybody's respect. They should be called out, et cetera, et cetera. I feel that very strongly.

But if I use the word “thug” in reference to black criminals, carjackers, rapists, murderers, gang bangers, if I use the word “thug” I'm going to have to have a fight with a lot of people—including the one I'm married to—who will say that is a racist trope, as if thuggery didn't actually represent a real thing in the world that manifested itself on occasion, too frequently amongst African American communities. I believe people are reluctant for the reasons that I've articulated to go down that road. They don't want to be echoing the same condemnations that they hear when they turn on Tucker Carlson at night. They don't want to be that guy. There are consequences to the withholding of this kind of internal sanction.

Suppose a woman would refuse to sleep with a man who behaved in certain antisocial ways. Suppose you just couldn't get no pussy if you were a thug.

That would solve it in a week.

And instead, the hip hop moguls—who I'm sure get plenty of pussy—make a living out of thumping their chest and parading around in the most thuggish regalia with the snarl and the lyric that celebrates, et cetera. And you know, I'm in my seventies, everybody. Write me off if you will. But I think there are consequences, there are consequences for kids. You set standards in your community. What constitutes an ideal member of our community? What is success? What? What do we look up to? What do we valorize? And to the extent that you're slow to condemn the riffraff, you're sending a not especially good signal to the youth.

I don't want to become the kind of person you were just describing, but all of the gang banging murders every summer in, say, Chicago or Philadelphia or New York—and no, there's no equivalent thing happening with less fortunate white kids. It's a black thing. And part of why that happens is because of a general sense, tacit but therefore pernicious, that it's different if black people do such things.

And I think those boys internalized that message. It's not something anybody says directly. But you internalize that there's something black and almost authentic about that kind of behavior, and that it has to be understood partly because of how the cops treat Black people. The kind of acting out, et cetera. The idea being that we are fundamentally oppressed. Within the black community, that kind of behavior is not viewed the same way as it would be viewed among Hasids, put it that way. It would be better if it were.

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