The aversion some black people have to certain other segments of the black population plays out in the implicit and explicit policing of the boundaries of the behavior deemed acceptable for “respectable” black people. To be sure, Lucinda may not have been making the argument that domestic work is itself an unacceptable field of work, but her “devastation” at being mistaken for a domestic worker suggests that the most valuable black citizens do not deign to do manual labor, and that those who do engage in such work for a living must have failed in some way.
Ultimately, one of the places where this policing of respectability happens most explicitly and forcefully is in the responses many black people have to representations of other black people that occur within the media. Case in point: since the ascent of Barack Obama, many black women have been clamoring over Michelle Obama, proclaiming her to be the long-awaited representative of black women the world has needed in order to recognize black female achievement. Don’t get me wrong. I get it. I have done some clamoring of my own. I am one of those persons whose regard of Barack Obama was bolstered as a consequence of his being married to Michelle Obama. Yet, what does it say when the representative par excellence of black women is an upper middle-class, ivy-league trained, heterosexual mother who sacrificed her own career in order to support her husband’s? For many I suppose it says exactly what they want it to say. But for those of us who are committed to the radical conceptualization of community as a space where the full diversity of black experience is welcomed, embraced, and valued regardless of religious or political affiliation, gender, sexuality, class standing, age, marital status, or physical or mental ability, the national arrival of Michelle Obama is as much a cause for concern as it is a cause for celebration.
Terrion Williamson, “The Onus of Black Respectability”
