In Tuesday’s installment of the spring Black Lives Matter Speaker Series, black feminist scholar Brittney Cooper challenged the idea of respectability in a talk to UW-Madison students and community members.
Cooper, a professor of gender and women’s studies and Africana studies at Rutgers University and co-founder of the Crunk Feminist Collective, presented what she called the “more fun talk” of a two-part series on campus, exploring respectability and the roles of black feminism and “ratchetness” in pop culture.
Respectability politics, which Cooper defined as self-regulation of black culture during Reconstruction, was an effort to eliminate racism and present black men and women as worthy of respect after the Civil War.
Cooper said this era of respectability began to decline first with the “sag,” a fashion trend that emerged in the early 1990s in which young black men wear their pants below their waists. She said the trend exemplified a failure in respectability politics, because acting “respectable” does not provide any advantages or protection from injustice.
“Whatever your personal view of how high on the waist someone chooses to wear his or her pants,” Cooper said, “I think we can all agree that sagging pants don’t determine one’s access to a college education and would have little bearing on achieving a positive outcome if one should encounter the police.”
Another signal of the end of respectability politics was the advent of “ratchet.” Cooper said the idea began as a gender-neutral term meaning the opposite of respectability, and has morphed into a derogatory term meant to regulate black female bodies.
Cooper said this regulation stems from a negative view of black women’s bodies because of the history of pain and sexual exploitation associated with them.
She added recent protests and social actions, while mostly centered around black men, are the types of cultural movements necessary for changing historical systems of inequality.
“Disregarding racial convention and dissing respectability is sometimes the very best way that we can show regard and respect for black [people],” Cooper said.
