To think respectability politics are just a tool to make marginalised people more palatable to the powerful?

[ByPlumGuide]

“If you dress right, speak right, behave right, maybe they’ll treat you like a person.” It’s exhausting.

Sorry I don’t really understand can you explain more what you mean?

I see you

Sure, respectability politics is the idea that marginalised people (especially black people, queer people, working-class people etc) are expected to behave in a way that makes them more “acceptable” to those in power. It’s the pressure to speak a certain way, dress conservatively, stay calm in the face of injustice or avoid anything that might make others uncomfortable, just to be taken seriously or treated with basic respect.

The exhausting part is that even when you do all that, it often still doesn’t change how you’re treated. And it places the burden on the marginalised person to adapt, instead of expecting society to treat people fairly as they are.

Throw in intersectionality and the need to code switch constantly for the full mental gymnastics.

I think that as long as you're polite and reasonable then anything else is just window dressing. I wouldn't judge on appearance, but rude and entitled behaviour is always a turn off.

I wouldn't call it 'respectability politics', as that just seems like inventing a new buzzword for something with which we are all familiar. It risks burying the obvious truth in all the contemporary jargon of identity politics.

One of the most obvious manifestations is the tone policing of anger expressed by people of colour, especially women of colour. But we also see it in reaction to women's demands generally. When men demand things, their self-assertion is often rendered invisible by a general acceptance/expectation of male entitlement. When women resist and/or make their own demands, their self-assertion is received as something hyper-visible and ripe for criticism, because it breaches a default.

I hear ya

I get it. Spent my whole life trying to be palatable (never even bothered thinking I'd fit in) and I'm exhausted by it.