{"id":94431,"date":"2016-04-30T19:40:45","date_gmt":"2016-05-01T03:40:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=94431"},"modified":"2016-04-30T19:40:45","modified_gmt":"2016-05-01T03:40:45","slug":"white-woman-julia-ioffe-outraged-when-blacks-criticize-themselves","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=94431","title":{"rendered":"White Woman Julia Ioffe Outraged When Blacks Criticize Themselves"},"content":{"rendered":"

Julia Ioffe writes for The New Republic<\/a>:<\/p>\n

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\u2019t even know how to loot. We get out of the car without a mask, look at the camera, and then put the mask on.\u201d Then he set his sights on black people more broadly. \u201cEvery other race I know play chess,” he said. “Black people play checkers.\u201d<\/p>\n

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,\u201d he told me. \u201cWe have African-Americans with law degrees, that are lawyers and judges, but they\u2019re not looking out for the black boys in the prison pipeline, they\u2019re not sharing their knowledge.”<\/p>\n

Clark went even further. \u201cNo one treats African-Americans worse than we treat each other,\u201d he said. \u201cWe 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.\u201d <\/p>\n

It was a sentiment I heard again and again in Ferguson: Yes, the largely white police force acted egregiously. Yes, the system\u2014in segregated St. Louis more than in most cities\u2014is stacked against them. But there’s something rotten inside the black community, too. \u201cI feel like the race needs to get the infection out of itself,\u201d Dellena, the owner of the 911 Hair Salon, a block away from the burned-out QT, told me. \u201cPeople are not educated. You need to think, what is the image that you\u2019re giving off? You need to have all your business together if you know you\u2019re ten times more likely to get pulled over.\u201d Or as Mark L. Rose, a late-middle-age black man I met at a protest, put it, \u201cWhen the cops see these boys walking around with their pants down, of course they have no respect for them.\u201d <\/p>\n

This self-criticism\u2014or self-flagellation\u2014is nothing new. It\u2019s the return of a phenomenon that is referred to by African-American historians as the “politics of respectability.” \u201cDuring 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\u2014particularly young, poor people,\u201d says Michael Dawson, a political scientist and director of the Center for the Study of Race, Politics, and Culture at the University of Chicago. \u201cIn 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, \u2018you should cut your hair.\u2019\u201d <\/p>\n

Respectability, in essence, is about policing the behavior in your community to make sure people are behaving \u201cproperly,\u201d so as to not attract unwelcome attention from whites\u2014\u201cwith \u2018properly\u2019 being a normatively white middle class presentation,\u201d 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\u2014feminine, sexy, pliant\u2014and then behave and dress accordingly. Respectability is the same thing, but with blacks internalizing the white gaze.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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, … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[34],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-94431","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blacks"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/94431","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=94431"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/94431\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":94432,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/94431\/revisions\/94432"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=94431"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=94431"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=94431"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}