Harvard Can’t Save You: How Respectability Politics Attack the Integrity of Black Lives
In reading the recent news articles about the viral Central Park video illustrating a white woman calling the police to falsely accuse Christian Cooper, a black man, it has been interesting to see the way in which Mr. Cooper is consistently described. There has been a collective fawning over his credentials, insinuating that Mr. Cooper is not just any black man but rather an esteemed one. He is a Harvard graduate, a senior biomedical editor, a former Marvel Comics editor, an avid birdwatcher, and a member of the Audubon Society. A comment on a Reddit post with the now infamous video in question stated, “there’s nothing scary about him at all.” Such qualifiers in describing Mr. Cooper are not innocuous. These details are propositions for why Mr. Cooper deserved to be in that park, as if a black man needs to earn the right to exist. The need to characterize him in a distinguished social class indicates that the normal expected status for those of us who look like him is not so distinguished. It tells us that we are still in a country whose default perception of black personhood is one that is unimpressive, misplaced, and frightening.
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This is not the first case in which society has imposed qualifications for the right for black lives to be seen as valuable. In reporting the now innumerable cases of black people whose lives have been unjustly threatened or taken, there is frequently a character inquisition of the person, as if to suggest that certain actions make one worthy of life. For 17-year-old Trayvon Martin, the normal act of wearing a hoodie was enough to render his humanity worthless. I remember reading a comment by American talk show host Geraldo Rivera in which he stated, “…the hoodie is as much responsible for Trayvon Martin’s death as George Zimmerman was.” Rivera soon apologized following ridicule for insinuating that Trayvon had some culpability in his own death by wearing attire that could be perceived as “gangsta style.” A piece of clothing found in almost any American home, it was not the hoodie itself that generated the suspicion of the young black boy that escalated to his murder. It was that he lived in a society already primed to perceive him as scary.
The idea that black people are somehow responsible for the way that they are perceived in society is not new. In her 1994 book Righteous Discontent: The Women’s Movement in the Black Baptist Church, 1880–1920, Harvard professor Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham first coined the term “politics of respectability” and illustrated the viewpoint of black women who thought that “respectable behavior in public would earn their people a measure of esteem from white America, and hence they strove to win the black lower class’s psychological allegiance to temperance, industriousness, thrift, refined manners and Victorian sexual mores.” Black leaders including Booker T. Washington, W.E.B Dubois and Dr. Martin Luther King have either explicitly endorsed or conducted themselves by respectability politics. The philosophy promotes the idea that proper conduct makes a person, particularly a black person, less deserving of brutality. Yet distinguished Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. — a summa cum laude Yale graduate and University of Cambridge PhD graduate — found himself arrested, while dressed in a polo shirt and properly belted slacks, for trying to enter his own Cambridge home. Neither respectable attire or accomplishments ameliorated the systemically-sewn suspicion in Gates’ blackness.
There is no quality of conduct that justifies the wrongful killing of black people, and the character assassinations that seek to “thuggify” and thus belittle their victimhood must cease. Michael Brown was described as being “no angel” and was introduced in media through a surveillance video showing him stealing cigarillos from a corner store, as if his imperfect character made him deserving of being shot at 10 times and killed by the white former police officer who instead of seeing a human in this 18-year-old described him as looking “like a demon.” Even in the recent case of the killing of 25-year-old Ahmaud Arbery, media outlets were quick to quibble over Mr. Arbery’s prior criminal history. Following the arrests of those who killed him, footage surfaced of Mr. Arbery walking through a property under-construction minutes prior to him going on a jog. Although video and examination of his body revealed no stolen items, investigators still pushed the story that he was killed due to involvement in a possible burglary. A great amount of expressed dismay and shock in the killing Mr. Arbery was accompanied by remarks of his widely relatable action of going on a jog. But again, a victim’s actions need not be relatable or endearing in order to be deserving of human recognition. If Mr. Arbery had less innocent conduct, would the collective response to his death have been the same? The respectability of a casual run did not save him from men primed to perceive him as less worthy of life. The baseline dehumanization of black life could not be more apparent in the killing of Breonna Taylor, a 26-year-old EMT who the media was quick to qualify had no criminal record and aspired to be a nurse. Her upstanding citizenship and noble career aspirations are irrelevant as there is no context that can absolve the guilt of the police officers who shot more than 20 rounds at her after invading her home with an invalid “no-knock” warrant for a drug search. In the most recent case of the police asphyxiation of 46-year-old George Floyd, while bystanders pleaded for the officer to remove his knee from Mr. Floyd’s neck to let him breathe, one of the accompanying officers managing the crowd was heard saying, “Don’t do drugs, guys.” Through actions and words, the perpetrators conveyed that the life draining out of Mr. Floyd’s body was negated by a supposed blameworthiness in his character. And thus the current events in this country show us that we have not come far from the days of lynching black men for even as little as a sideways glance or for being on the “wrong side of town.”
As a black Harvard-educated woman with a brother studying biomedical engineering at Harvard, I identify with the descriptions of Christian Cooper’s credentials and character. However, there is no rung on the meritocracy ladder — no credential or characteristic short of being white — that makes us safe from systemic racism. We live in a society that has historically and continues to default to a devaluation of black lives. Despite his socioeconomic status, Christian Cooper still found himself intentionally targeted by a white woman who knows all too well the default perception of suspicion in Mr. Cooper’s identity as a black man and the power of her systemically-entrenched racial privilege to decimate his life. What is truly frightening is witnessing a society that consistently fails to recognize that respecting human dignity is a given and is not a quality to be earned. Respectability politics fails to uphold black lives in its distortion of justice for black people, erroneously displacing culpability for violation of life from the perpetrator to the victim. As a society, we must instead come to hold that a person’s humanity is of inherent, immutable value — the same for both the exceptional and the common among us. We must come to a place in which equal respect for black lives is our new default, regardless of merit, character or background.
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