Respectability Politics is Dead.
The idea that to be respected means you must play by the rules of your oppressor is ridiculous.
For anyone who has ever pushed on the boundaries of the social restrictions that are erected around them from birth, it should be obvious that there is a consistent thread of what is the “correct” way to go about empowering oneself in the pursuit of their own justice or needs. Whether being told that raising our voices, using profane language or symbolism, or to only exercise non-violent means of resistance, the walls that keep us contained within the acceptable bounds of our general society are clear and enforced around us.
But what happens when your idea of justice is not the same as those who decide the limitations? What if you are being arbitrarily wronged by the powers you empowered to take your interests to the highest levels of our government, your power being taken and explicitly used in the furtherance of goals which will ultimately harm you and your community. All who have been involved in protest marches or watched how the spin-doctors of US media have consistently enforced the bounds of Moderate acceptability know the answers.
It is impossible to protest injustice within the status quo enabling oppression and mistreatment; you cannot protest against enforced silence without raising your voice. Likewise, you cannot resist violence against your bodies without something that the Liberal considers to be violence against them. Look to the protests against police brutality over the last decades – since before the first slave patrols – and you know exactly the point at which the dominant ideologues perceive themselves as having been the victims of violence: burning down an Arby’s, a police car, or a street corner.
Let’s reject outright the idea that the violent can be victimized by those they control; the concept is ludicrous as every Indigenous People, the enslaved, and the ethnically-cleansed can attest to. Every oppressed People has had to resort to some definition of “violence” in order to gain their own enfranchisement, pushing the bounds of what their occupier deemed “respectable” to achieve their own justice where no other was able or willing do so.
Therein lies the crux: to be heard, one must be violent – in whatever terms that means for the moment – and push against the artificial bounds of respectability politics erected as a preliminary defense against dissenting opinions. In today’s techno-feudalist landscape, the bounds of “violence” have become so wide-ranging as to have no meaning at all, any dissent against the Liberal or moderate perceived instinctively as oppression and portrayed as violence regardless of the substance of the act itself or the motivations behind it.
“Defund the Police” is seen as violence. As is “Land Back,” “From the River to the Sea,” or “Tax the Rich.” Not so long ago, looking at the wrong woman, not crossing the street, or refusing to de-bus in a timely manner were seen as violence. Resistance to war is seen as violence, as is the promotion of peace.
The beauty of language is its ability to enrapture and shock. Not just the capabilities of communication, but the variants which we have created to influence the impact of our statements. And if you use this language in the quest for self-emancipation, if you push back at all, you are committing violence; the idea that a march might have the potential for property damage being enough of a threat to the establishment to authorize the use of “non-lethal” munitions which, if used outside our borders, are considered war crimes in the international courts.
And why is there no demand that those requiring such “respect” of their norms be held to the same standard? Why are those who see (or at least compensate) themselves as the elite of our Nation somehow above the stratospheric standards set for the rest of us on this dying Earth? At this point, the answer should be obvious.
As everything else is in our political machine, we find ourselves facing yet another barrier consisting of nothing but smoke and mirrors; theatrics and photo-ops; “I Can’t Breathe” shirts and Kente stoles on the House floor. The admonitions of those who have nothing to say other than “be more respectful” in response to cries for justice are not admonishments at all, but expose the artificial boundaries which have been erected to maintain the status quo social order.
Reflecting on the late Aaron Bushnell – may he rest in power – makes the pointlessness of adhering to the established rules of acceptability clear to the point madness. Before he committed to self-immolating in the name of Palestinian emancipation, nothing Aaron said or did could mesh the ideological misalignment that genocide creates; he was driven by the impotence that naturally comes of bashing one’s head against hurdle after hurdle, finding that nothing within the bounds of “respectability” has any effect whatsoever on the conditions and contexts of injustice, not when those setting the conditions also set the standards of dissent.
At the end of the day, the use of vulgarity to make a point doesn’t lesson the value or truth of what one has to say; just because you use particularly colorful sign language or a provocative art-style does not mean that your voice is less-than those who trade in 3-syllable jargon inherited from dark corners in slave-built law schools.
Respectability politics are a complete farce, the same playbook used to tell marchers on Birmingham that their concerns were invalid being used against the GOP in the Obama-era and once more reinvigorated against the Left today as Progressive Democrats demand justice from those hypocrites who have accepted the vote to Congress but not the responsibility of representation. Adherence to the principles of making oneself worth respecting is nonsensical as a strategy of political empowerment, doing nothing that the Moderate wouldn’t already find palatable as the ethereal boundaries of what is respectable move as fast as the people rise to meet them.
At a certain point, the facade of Respectability collapses, and the Aristocracy of the United States is exposed for what they are. Just as the supposedly socially liberal Democrats continue to ratchet rightward, adopting principles previously supported by Deplorables and gaslighting all in their wake, so too do the standards of respectability fall under the already Hell-level bar set by the most reactionary elements of the political landscape.
Photo: The Union As It Was, Harper's Weekly, October 10, 1874; Thomas Nast, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
