Terrell Starr, senior editor at AlterNet posed a profound but straightforward question to his Twitter timeline: How old were you when you kicked black respectability politics to the curb? Starr’s tweeter handle is @Russian_Starr (he is a great follow by the way) received a wide array of responses — some flippant e.g., “from birth” others taking the question more seriously writing about their experiences that lead them to reject the regressive and fictitious standard of African-American social, political and financial perfection. Honestly, I struggled with the question. By no means do I count myself among the #wellactually or the #youhavetohearbothsides dissenters that flock to every incident searching for a middle ground of convenience. We all know this magical place where good people are put in bad situations make mistakes and those who commit unquestionable evil acts are “troubled” individual actors. Still I could not truthfully say that I am immune to the impulse to questioning African-American roles in the numerous and growing list of individual and community traumas that befall us. Never to the point of victim blaming, however I was not dismissive of the idea that an individual action independent of where it falls on the scale of reasonability carries the same weight as an unjust systemic response. The error of my capitulation was crystallized in a single response to the Mother Emanuel AME Church massacre.
DeStorm Power, according to his Wikipedia page he is a musician, actor, athlete with a YouTube page that has amassed over 1.7 million subscribers; he tweets at the handle @DeStorm. In a four-minute vlog that can be found here Powers masterfully destroyed the comfortable gray area where most black respectability politics thrives. In the first half of the video Power’s offers his condolences to the families of the Charleston Nine, next he actually puts the heinous attack carried out by Dylann Roof into historical context. Then Powers makes a pretty drastic pivot that descends into the depths of respectability politics cloaking it in the familiar theme of self-hate. The detour to we got to do better-land starts when Power’s says, “that particular hate crime (talking about Mother Emanuel shooting) is not our fault, but most of the times it is our fault, because we have so much f-ing self-hate.” “Why would anyone care about us when we don’t care about ourselves?” Power’s goes on throw out false equivalence opining about the difference in government response if the Baltimore uprising happen in Beverly Hills. Power crosses the point of no return when he states the following, “to be honest I can’t think of time that I had a white enemy, the last time I watched my back was for another black man.” Hearing these words jolted me back to Starr’s writing when he said, “Respectability politics are all about performing for “massa.” It’s also called “step n’ fetchit.” All of it is a performance for white folk.” To think that an African-American living in these United States could conclude that because they had more physical altercations with black people than with white people translate to white society means him no harm is astoundingly tragic. The very idea that tragedy of the magnitude would be used as springboard to lecture African Americans is diluted and detached from any reasonable understanding of American’s long and troubled history. I can no longer even tangentially associate with that way of thinking.
Even as I write this there are still family members of the Charleston Nine who have not buried their loved ones. Every flag in the state should be at half-mast until that has occurred. The Rebel flag that was once worn proudly by the confessed killer still waves at the statehouse. In the same state no less than two African-American churches have been burnt to the ground since the initial act of terror. I fooled myself for too long that there was another side to the unrelenting and unapologetic assault on people of color in this nation. It simply is not. This realization does not free people of ethnic background of all personal accountability, but for me it ends the anecdotal suggestion of minority wrongdoing without a thought to the systems that have been built to limit our success. It’s an inarguable claim that so many of America’s economic and social policies were first crafted with minority subjugation as the standard. The fact that so many people of color have been able to success despite the written and unwritten rules is a testament to collective force of will, courage and intellect.
So to answer Terrell Starr’s Twitter question, I kicked black respectability politics to the curb at 34 years old, and I will do my best to keep it there every day for the rest of my days.
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