Thread by @GCCenterWomen

📢HAPPENING NOW📢

Cassander L. Smith is with us on Zoom, speaking on "Black Women and the Stakes of Respectability in the Early Americas"! We are live-tweeting the event RIGHT HERE!

#respectabilitypolitics #racialdiscourse #cswsevents #live
@GC_CUNY @HumanitiesGC @UofAlabama

Dr. Smith has based this talk around her upcoming book with @lsupress, titled "Race and a Politics of Respectability in Early Black Atlantic Literature".

On the impact of her 1st experience with #respectabilitypolitics: "It is part of my hard-wiring. That same kind of hard-wiring that makes black folks avoid driving through upscale neighborhoods with the music turned up loud...Or sit mute and passive when pulled over by the cops."

“#Respectabilitypolitics is the self-policing that occurs when members of an oppressed group seek to model...the cultural and social mores of a dominant group with the belief that doing so will eliminate oppression and promote equality.”

"In Black communities, even beyond the borders of what is now the United States, #respectability is a double-edged sword; it promises upward mobility but also explains away the oppressive violence done to Black bodies."

"Respectability politics failed #GeorgeFloyd; it failed #BreonnaTaylor who was minding her business in the comfort of her own home...Respectability politics failed #AhmaudArbery...#Respectabilitypolitics failed #TrayvonMartin...and so many others..."

As a professor of African-American and Early American Literature, Dr. Smith turns now to the "earliest manifestations of respectability politics”. Using three examples from the 17th century, she will walk us through tensions between #respectabilitypolitics and #racialdiscourse.

"#Respectabilitypolitics is designed to make Black bodies legible to mainstream culture."

#Respectabilitypolitics is a "special kind of moralizing discourse coming out of marginalized communities. It is about conformity and assimilation, a way to gain status and assert one’s rights...by adhering to hegemonic standards of social, religious, and political conduct."

Smith ends with questions: What was the transformative potential or limitation of respectability for Black subjects, and why did they believe respectability was the answer to equality?

How might respectability have been a response by Black Africans to notions of race and gender, a way to circumvent the rigidity of identity categories?

How do the textual examples of these women relate to later literary efforts of Black Atlantic writers like Lucy Terry Prince and Phillis Wheatley?

What makes #respectabilitypolitics a specifically gendered effort in early America?

What does success look like for these Black women and others?

To what extent is respectability transferable?

What is the relationship between #respectabilitypolitics and integration in early Black America, especially given that we typically associate integration with the outcomes of the 1950/60s Civil Rights Movement?

And that's a wrap! Thank you to Cassander L. Smith for the wonderful event, and for all of you who followed along with us tonight! The video will be available on all of our social media accounts, check it out to hear the Q&A! #cswsevents @HumanitiesGC @GC_CUNY @UofAlabama