Julia Ioffe writes for The New Republic:
Last Thursday, the rapper Nelly went on the air of his hometown hip-hop radio station, St. Louis’s Hot 104.1, to announce a college scholarship fund for local teens in honor of Michael Brown, the unarmed black 18-year-old killed by a policeman earlier this month. Nelly also took the opportunity to mock the looters who have flourished since Brown’s death, saying, “We don’t even know how to loot. We get out of the car without a mask, look at the camera, and then put the mask on.” Then he set his sights on black people more broadly. “Every other race I know play chess,” he said. “Black people play checkers.”
Nelly isn’t the only prominent black figure with harsh words for his own community since the unrest began in Ferguson. James Clark, the head of Better Family Lives, a local organization that works with black youth, says the black middle class is largely responsible. “They turned their back on the community,” he told me. “We have African-Americans with law degrees, that are lawyers and judges, but they’re not looking out for the black boys in the prison pipeline, they’re not sharing their knowledge.”
Clark went even further. “No one treats African-Americans worse than we treat each other,” he said. “We were outraged when George Zimmerman killed a black boy, but Zimmerman was taught by watching black people kill black people. He learned it from us. We planted the seed.”
It was a sentiment I heard again and again in Ferguson: Yes, the largely white police force acted egregiously. Yes, the system—in segregated St. Louis more than in most cities—is stacked against them. But there’s something rotten inside the black community, too. “I feel like the race needs to get the infection out of itself,” Dellena, the owner of the 911 Hair Salon, a block away from the burned-out QT, told me. “People are not educated. You need to think, what is the image that you’re giving off? You need to have all your business together if you know you’re ten times more likely to get pulled over.” Or as Mark L. Rose, a late-middle-age black man I met at a protest, put it, “When the cops see these boys walking around with their pants down, of course they have no respect for them.”
This self-criticism—or self-flagellation—is nothing new. It’s the return of a phenomenon that is referred to by African-American historians as the “politics of respectability.” “During times of unrest, black writers going back to the early 20th century have argued that the reason blacks are facing discrimination or police brutality is because they have not been acting properly in public—particularly young, poor people,” says Michael Dawson, a political scientist and director of the Center for the Study of Race, Politics, and Culture at the University of Chicago. “In the last 20 years, it’s been a criticism of baggy pants, rap music, hair styles. Back in my generation, it was Afros. I remember my grandparents telling me, ‘you should cut your hair.’”
Respectability, in essence, is about policing the behavior in your community to make sure people are behaving “properly,” so as to not attract unwelcome attention from whites—“with ‘properly’ being a normatively white middle class presentation,” says Dawson. In feminist discourse, a similar phenomenon among women is described as internalizing the patriarchal gaze. That is, women see themselves as the men in charge want to see them—feminine, sexy, pliant—and then behave and dress accordingly. Respectability is the same thing, but with blacks internalizing the white gaze.
