But you’re solely basing this on just you’re experience. My argument is that once upon a time BRP was, across all black classes, the aspiration.
From 1966, you could say that the post-civil right black middle class embraced respectability politics, but the rise of hip-hop, the crack cocaine epedimic, the rise of black prison incarcenration rate had a differnt reality for the black lower classes, who, by enlarge didn’t embrace so-called black respectabiikty politics. From 1966, with the launching of black power, black respectabiilty politics had been challenged. King was the symbol of such; Malcolm X was the antithesis.
BRP, in shows such Empire, is based on the superficial “purchasing” of black politics via branding. If you watch Empire all its respectabilty is premised on the veneer of success, acquisitions: clothes, cars, liquor, light skinned boyfriends and girlfriends.
As I said BRP has been on a slow decline since the rise of black power, and Empire is merely a 40-year delay representation of hip-hop cluture pushing it away; Empire has a veneer but is steeped in using violent Negro music (hip hop) to sell dreams of itself as “making it” while knee-deep in crime and pimping social deviance.
I think this is trying to put too many issues into one frame. It’s black power and agreesive confrontational politics as a mass movemnent all but dead. Even former Black Panther members such as Rush and Cleaver are emminently respectable members of congress today. The closes’t thing to anti-respectability politics around a principally black issue we have today are the anti-brutality movement (which has borad and diverse support amoung non-black peers).
I understand the conncection between the drug war and the rise of hip hop, but I hesitate to link it to a broad based rejection of respectability in politics. Hip Hop, at large, has been a force in the conversation, revolving issues such as mass incarseration, but sentencing reform/ death penalty, decriminalization and other related causes weren’t brought about by anti-respectability and confrontation politics. They were brought about wrapping injustic in appeals to white pocketbooks (look at all the tax dollars you are wasting, oh and its immoral too) and self interest (dudebros, you smoke right?).
I think Emprie’s success (haven’t watched the show) is unique because that level of “black real” on broadcast is rare; but, I go back to what I said earlier about interest convergence (Dirty laundry + profit + artistically tasteful representation). Another poster mentioned the sopranos; a show like that would never has aired in the 70’s when [Joseph Columbo][1] could got the Justic Department to eliminate its use. Quality movie from like the Godfather created a space where Itallian American cultural dirty laundy could be aired, outsides could escape into that world, and profits could be made.
“It’s 2015 and I’m watching an African-American gangsta rapper-turned-gangsta CEO shoot his best friend in the head on primetime TV. At one point, a black son calls his ex-con mom a bitch, so the mother beats said son with a broom. There’s a club shooting, scantily-clad women grinding on each other, drug use, hot tub fornication, implied sex in a club bathroom.”
Well, I guess congratulations are in order. But, I need to ask: are the women on Empire allowed to hide pot in their vaginas and then smoke it with their best buds? Because that’s when we’ll know African-Americans have truly made it.
Official after official in GOP sends racist email jokes and cartoons w/o consequence
Racist Tea Party and innumerable racist protestor signs
Trump demands sitting U.S. president show America “his papers”
Media treats Trump’s request as deserving of air time
Deadbeat dad and one-term congressman gets political points for publicly announcing he would not attend president’s speech
GOPers term Obama “Kenyan anti-colonial behavior,” “alien”, “foreign”
Governor points finger in president’s face on tarmac in full view of cameras
Same politician later says she “felt threatened” by the president
House refuses to raise debt ceiling under this president though it had done so 69 times since 1962, 7 times during Bush II, 18 times Reagan
Senate Majority Leader publicly announces his primary goal is to make Obama one-term president before his first inauguration and again later
House Speaker refuses Obama request for speech date.
He invites foreign leader in war torn region to speak b/4 congress w/o consulting the president who has constitutional power in foreign affairs
-Most of these from Politic 365
Now imagine how an African-American president would have been treated if he was not the consummate husband, father, family man. Imagine if he had the foibles and peccadillos of a Richard Nixon, a Bill Clinton or a Marion Barry.
Yes, “black respectability” is barely hanging onto the recognition and privileges they receive from the white ruling class. They haven’t been so needed in the past two or three decades, during the period in which a large part of the Black working class lost their jobs and Black youth were locked up or killed with drugs and gang warfare. Obama, the savior of Wall Street and CIA/NSA spying, was more a beneficiary of young whites. But that doesn’t mean the “respectables” are going away anytime soon, unless you’re expecting a socialist revolution at any moment now. Contrary to the author’s claim, “black respectability” politics got a boost in 1966 with the War on Poverty, which recruited a new generation of younger Blacks to play the role of “poverty pimps,” as a Black Nationalist at the time called them. The annual celebration of Kwanzaa is a product of one of those played that game - Amiri Baraka, born Leroi Jones. Those latter, plus the ones that took advantage of preferential admissions at major universities and ended up as middle class professionals, understandably protective of their status, still stand ready to serve as resistance to Black liberation, no matter how demeaning.
