Empowerment and Respectability

In college classrooms all over the country, Black young women are being taught that anything and everything that a woman does is empowering.  They are being taught that sex work, promiscuity, vulgarity, and choosing to be degraded is a Black woman’s agency.  They are being taught that respectability is a dirty word, meant to oppress women and people of color, and make them conform to some sort of 1950s, Caucasian model of behavior.  Feminism in college classrooms all across this nation has come to mean conforming to sexist, oppressive, misogynist standards of attractiveness to men. 

I know EXACTLY the moment this new scholarship began.  I witnessed its birth.  More than a decade ago, Bill Cosby spoke out publicly saying that Black people shouldn’t buy $200 pairs of sneakers for their children when they don’t have a computer and that they shouldn’t name their children ghetto names.  He was quite detailed and went on and on about how Black people have “dropped the ball.”  White people ate it up.  White people heard their role model dissing the behaviors they found offensive from Black people and they rallied around him like he was the Moses himself delivering the Black commandments.  

The response from the Black masses, way back then before our collective consciousness became anti-intellectual and ghetto, fell in one of three camps.  The first were the “Yeah, Bill, you tell them! Those niggers! I’m not like them,” camp.  They suffer from what I call the AIC or the Assimilated Inferiority Complex.  They think whites are superior and they want to be liked, seen as good as, and respected by whites.  They needed to distance themselves from “those” Black people so they ridiculed the patterns and behaviors that habitually show up in impoverished black communities.  It should be noted, they were the loudest and most populated camp. 

The second camp was the, “Don’t air our dirty laundry in front of white people,” camp.  They were willing to admit that the things that Bill Cosby was talking about had some validity but that he couldn’t talk about it in front of white people, he could only discuss it in private in front of other Black people so a whole lot of hang-ringing, finger-pointing, and accomplishing-nothing could be done.    Apparently, it’s not okay to talk about our dysfunction in front of whites but it seems to be a greater sin to actually work to heal the collective ills that plague our society. 

The third camp roasted marshmallows and sang campfire songs about how the ghetto was some sort of Black cultural manifestation of creativity and survival that was a bastion of all things good and righteous.  It is this third camp that created this backlash against respectability.    Respectability was associated with whiteness and therefore ipso facto respectability became bad.  This group, this small faction decided that any behavior Black people collectively exhibit was deemed inherent to our blackness and thus it was all good.  Buying your three year old $200 sneakers was fine because if white people could do it, so can we. 

All three camps are misguided and wrong.  The “I’m not a nigger but those other Blacks are,” the “We might have problems but let’s not talk about them in front of white people,” and the, “Everything Black people do is justified no matter how dysfunctional it is,” philosophies are all flawed.  Perhaps the most detrimental is the third camp who feels that anything and everything that Black people do is somehow a cultural inheritance.    We don’t have to speak well because speaking well means you are trying to be white.  Noooooo, slaughtering the English language is some sort of adaptation of Gullah dialect that is passed down blah, blah, blah.  In reality, our inarticulation is because whites have denied us equal education.  There is nothing inherently Black or African about not using verbs other than Blacks have been historically denied education to keep us stupid.  But to the misguided masses, they want to believe that not being able to use the English language makes you more Black.  Only to the deluded does being intelligent, being an academic mean you are denying your Blackness, as if intellect is only the domain of whites. 

Education does not make you white.  Speaking correct English does not make you white.  More importantly, not everything that you do is empowering.  Today’s youth has no concept of what the concept of empowerment means.  To them, manipulating people is empowering.  To them, lying, cheating, stealing and using people is empowering.  Dear God, anything that gets you money is supposedly empowering, even if you must sell your soul, your humanity, your dignity and your body to get it.  If men use women, that’s supposedly empowering as long as women co-sign it.    

Then, there is poor old me.  I’m the fourth camp.  I belong to the “Yes, there are collective dysfunctional behaviors in the Black community but we have them because we have been historically, systematically, and institutionally disenfranchised for centuries, NOT because we are inherently inferior.”  I am member of the, “I’m not afraid to call out our dysfunctional behaviors because I have solutions and alternatives to the current slave mentality that continues to keep us oppressed.”  And I am the leader of the,  “Education, articulation, and respectability are NOT the domain of white people and striving for excellence is not to be as good as white people, it’s to be the absolute best you can be as a human being of African descent,” camp.    Being respectable is not a bad thing, it’s not inherent to white people.  Empowerment means gaining power, autonomy, and integrity through your actions.