Black Media and Respectability Politics

"We cannot keep thinking that putting on a suit and tie will somehow magically rid us of white supremacy and that putting on this fake act will poof antiblackness out of people’s minds."

I saw a tweet where Vince Staples was talking about the recent Drake x Kendrick beef and at the end of his statement he said, “if we want black music to be respected we have to respect ourselves first”. Now while I do agree with Vince Staples whenever he talks about how grim the music industry is, I don’t believe in that respectability message because that doesn’t stop Ben Shapiro and everyone like him from saying that black music isn’t real music. Nevertheless, this clip made me think deeper about this respectability mentality, where it stems from, and how black media has played a role in festering this mentality like a virus. Did Vince learn this mindset from The Cosby Show and all the black sitcoms that were influenced by it? What even is respectability politics and why should disrespectability politics become the norm in black media (tv shows, movies, etc.)?

Well first, we must talk about what respectability politics entails. From “Ratchet Politics: Moving Beyond Black Women’s Bodies to Indict Institutions and Structures”, “Respectability politics is the practice of adopting the cultural practices and morals of the dominant group to counter the negative imagines of the subordinate group”. So, an example is from “If Beale Street Could Talk” where Mrs. Hunt antagonizes Clementine for having a baby with her son because according to her it would “ruin the image of her family”. Respectability politics is a byproduct of all the discrimination, racism, and antiblackness that African Americans have faced since the first slave ship touched down in America. With this knowledge we can see why Booker T. Washington thought that us being educated in trade work would make white people leave us alone, we can see why W.E.B Du Bois thought that the “talented tenth” was a good idea, and we can see how these mindsets have trickled their way into black media overtime. The Cosby Show is the quintessential show that embodies this mentality and Edgerton even states that “Sut Jhally and Justin Lewis in Enlightened Racism argue that the show strikes a politically conservative chord by failing to portray the economic and social hardships that so often constitute part of what it means to be black in the United States” (Edgerton 398). The show puts such a restraint on what blackness is and what it can be, through how their characters are depicted and the elitism that the parents indoctrinate their kids into. In addition, they fail to mention the strife that this mentality puts on black people and how it affects us physically, spiritually, and emotionally. With all of what I’ve mentioned, we can see that a resolution is needed to fix these problems of respectability politics being in black media and I think I have the answer that establishes a substantial solution to this longstanding issue.

Disrespectability politics is exactly what is sounds like, which is the opposite of respectability politics. Going back to “Ratchet Politics: Moving Beyond Black Women’s Bodies to Indict Institutions and Structures”, “Disrespectability politics acknowledges the tensions of living life in a racist, sexist, and patriarchal society but falls shorts of radically overhauling these oppressions. Instead, disrespectability politics allows for Black women to operate within the extremes of the queen- subject/ho-object framework that portray women in binaries and stereotypes.” So, while disrespectability politics won’t automatically change systemic oppression it can create the untelevised revolution that Gil-Scott Heron was talking about in the 1970’s. What I love about today’s black media is that they’ve taken this concept and have ran with it to new heights. We’ve seen this with “Random Acts of Flyness” and how the first episode really questions how black children are being raised in this white supremacist society, or with “Atlanta” and how that show has used afro surrealism to tell the most creative and profound stories of what it’s like to be black, while existing in this fever dream of a state we call Atlanta, Georgia. Nowadays in black media we are going out with the old and in with the new, and while the respectability politics do continue to fester on in any Tyler Perry production, we can see that things are changing for the better.

To conclude, this isn’t a paper about Vince Staples, or The Cosby Show, or that stray I threw at Tyler Perry in the last paragraph. It is about how respectability politics has infiltrated black media, the consequences that has had on black people as a whole, and why things need to improve. We cannot keep thinking that putting on a suit and tie will somehow magically rid us of white supremacy and that putting on this fake act will poof antiblackness out of people’s minds. Our media should depict how multidimensional we truly are, we have our struggles but we also have our humanity, our sense of humor, our hair in bonnets, our queer folks in the family, our community-oriented households and that’s what should be depicted. We are not one dimensional, we most certainly aren’t a monolith, and I feel that disrespectability politics being in black media is the best way to avoid these showings of us that corrupt people’s minds about what blackness truly is. It’s how we stop nonblack people from claiming that they know what’s best for us, it’s how we can curtail existing in this white supremacist society, and it’s how we can see black media evolve instead of regressing to Madea movies.

Works Cited Page

Long Beach County. “Vince Staples speaks on Drake x Kendrick beef”. 2024. Web. 4 May. 2024. https://x.com/longbeachcounty/status/1786829688385724533?s=46

Brown, Nadia. Young, Lisa. “Ratchet Politics: Moving Beyond Black Women’s Bodies to Indict Institutions and Structures”. 2015. Web. 1 May. 2024. https://www.proquest.com/docview/1747345067?parentSessionId=NliRLmJReNTf5jFOuCw2oTTyFI8Mw10BCVyPK6wudiY%3D

Edgerton, Gary. “The Columbia History of American Television”. 2007. Web. 1 May. 2024. https://cloudflareipfs.com/ipfs/bafykbzacec4upcr6j66kvva4jr5l5pd3eukcipavyfjnbp54amnbeu2zdxfeq?filename=%28Columbia%20Histories%20of%20Modern%20American%20Life%29%20Gary%20Edgerton%20-%20The%20Columbia%20History%20of%20American%20Television-Columbia%20University%20Press%20%282007%29.pdf