One of the most confounding peculiarities of contemporary political activism is the broad belief — apparently sincere — that getting along with the average person is a bad thing. Shouting down or assaulting opponents, blockading traffic, actual rioting: these are the modern activist’s sacred tools of persuasion. “Why are you screaming,” a sane person might ask. “Don’t tone police me,” the activist responds. “‘Respectability politics’ doesn’t work.”

But is that true?

While it is often argued that getting along, blending in, and finding points of commonality is the path of the loser, history indicates something entirely different. In fact, “respectability politics” seems to be the only activist tactic that has ever worked. Today, a fascinating, intuitive, and yet highly-controversial dive into the unfortunately (for crazy people) entirely “respectable” history of liberation from River Page.

-Solana

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I first encountered the term “respectability politics” in 2016 when a local activist used it to defend herself against accusations that she was being “a bitch” on Facebook. Maybe you’ve heard this term from an annoying person in your community, or have seen it in a trite personal essay you read on the internet to make yourself mad. If you haven’t, know that “respectability politics” is verboten on the identitarian left, where rudeness and insularity are seen as pure, radical, and virtuous. To say someone is engaged in respectability politics is to demean them as a naive assimilator, as this particular method of activism looks good but doesn’t work. But that is not only ahistorical and wrong, it’s pretty much exactly backward. Not only does respectability politics work, in terms of meaningful, lasting change, respectability politics is perhaps the only thing that has ever worked.

The social justice non-profit Studio Atao defines respectability politics as “a school of thought that utilizes respectability narratives as the basis for enacting social, political, and legal change.” These respectability narratives “are representations of marginalized individuals meant to depict them as sharing similar traits, values, and morals that align with the dominant group’s definition of ‘respectability.’” In other words, engaging in respectability politics is a way for minorities to achieve equal rights by showing they are just as decent and normal as everybody else — the sort of people who go to church on Sunday instead of suggesting that being half-Korean gives them some secret, moral right to be “a bitch” on Facebook, for example. 

Scary stuff.

Although often associated with BLM, respectability discourse is also a feature of trans activism. Briana Wu, a video game developer best known for her role in the 2014-2015 Gamergate scandal, came under fire a few weeks ago after she criticized trans activists in a now-deleted tweet thread, which read in part:

This is going to be hard to hear for some of my trans friends, but I’m going to say it anyway. It’s entirely realistic that trans people could lose it all if this political trajectory continues. TERFs are putting out a clear message. Trans people and allies ARE NOT.

You have to have a f***ing gender studies degree and have ODed on Twitter to understand half the discourse. If you care about trans people, you will stop pretending this is an academic symposium. It’s not. Human rights are on the line. Communicate so normies can understand.

The LGBT publication INTO wrote of the incident, “Adhering to respectability politics is never a way to stop a genocide.” 

Although it’s trendy among activists to say so, there is no trans genocide in this country. There is, however, an incredible backlash against the excesses of trans activism, which has rejected respectability politics more than any other movement besides BLM, which quickly lost a sympathetic public in the summer of 2020 after defending the worst excesses of its supporters. Americans witnessed looting, rioting, and arson on a scale unparalleled in recent memory. They witnessed the CHAZ, an anarchist “cop-free” neighborhood in Seattle that, within a month, killed two young black men and was alleged to have fallen under the warlord-like control of a Soundcloud rapper. 

The truth is, respectability politics works, and it’s virtually the only thing that has ever worked for minorities in America, as history clearly shows.

Understandably, such a fact might be uncomfortable. For example, it’s depressing to learn that abolitionist Henry Ward Beecher’s mock slave auctions typically featured beautiful light-skinned women and female children, as this implies his audiences wouldn’t have been as sympathetic if asked to imagine the bondage of a dark-skinned man. Does that speak to a profound moral inconsistency on the part of these 19th-century audiences? Yes. But Beecher’s goal was not to make his audience morally consistent. His goal was to convince his audience to oppose slavery.

By all accounts, Beecher was successful in this regard, but his impact is minuscule compared to the work of his sister, Harriet Beecher Stowe. Her novel, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, is the epitome of respectability politics. Her story follows the eponymous Uncle Tom, a long-suffering Christian slave, who is ultimately martyred and beaten to death for refusing to betray the whereabouts of two runaway slave women. Casting a slave as not merely a paragon of Christian virtue but, in many ways, a Christ-like figure himself was a radical appeal to the morality of the white Christian majority. Unlike the former slaves who traveled with Stowe’s brother on the lecture circuit, Uncle Tom was not merely a black person white audiences could sympathize with, but one whose virtues they sought to emulate. This worked.

Upon release, Uncle Tom’s Cabin outsold the Bible. Despite the fact that Uncle Tom is beaten to death because of his refusal to abandon his Christian values and betray his fellow slaves — which constitutes defiance against his cruel master, not passivity — his name has become a pejorative term for a black man who subordinates himself to white people in pursuit of his own personal ambition. The pejorative “Uncle Tom” represents what people who disparage respectability politics think it means. The novel, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, is a representation of what respectability politics actually is — a powerful political tool for changing minds and harnessing support. There’s no proof that Abraham Lincoln told Stowe, “So you’re the little woman who wrote the book that started this Great War,” during their meeting in 1862. However, the fact that such an apocryphal detail exists only speaks to the extent of the book’s reach and usefulness in the abolitionist cause.

People on the left are fond of saying Martin Luther King Jr’s legacy has been misappropriated as a tool of respectability politics. In the words of Aleo Pugh, who wrote about the supposed misappropriation of MLK in BDG: 

King’s imagined sainthood is constructed from early on, usually in his differences with Malcolm X and the Black Panthers. This dichotomy of good vs. evil, nonviolent vs. violent, is the basis for the type of respectability politics that is weaponized as a tool of pacification against the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement.

But the differences between King and Malcolm X and the Black Panthers should be analyzed, not on a moralistic basis, but in terms of their goals and their effectiveness in pursuing them. King, a Christian preacher in a suit and tie, was actually successful in his push for the Civil Rights Act. He was an assimilationist who wanted to unite black and white society. Malcolm X and the Black Panthers were Black Nationalists, they wanted to separate black and white society, not just with schools but with borders and passports. What’s their legacy? Foodbanks, jailhouse Qurans? Certainly not legislation. 

Pugh was correct to point out that extreme opposition to King during his lifetime has been sanitized, particularly opposition from the FBI. It is undoubtedly true that typical grade school retellings of the Civil Rights Movement fail to mention that the FBI subjected King to endless spying, or that they attempted to blackmail him into committing suicide. They note the FBI pegged him as the “most dangerous Negro and effective Negro leader in the country” after his “I Have a Dream Speech,” but don’t seem to recognize what this suggests. That speech invoked religion, American ideals, and the innocence of children. It appealed to white America’s conscience based on shared beliefs, values, and emotions. A minister delivered it in a suit. The FBI knew that King’s respectability was dangerous, which is why they tried to weaponize his marital infidelity against him. 

Within the LGBT community, respectability politics have also been effective. This claim is often contentious. The refrain “Stonewall was a riot” has become something of a gay catechism, muttered every Pride with childlike faith and adulation. But Stonewall didn’t give gays rights, it gave them a reason to get day drunk in public. The fact that they can do so today, publicly, with their same-sex spouse in matching rainbow t-shirts that they bought from Target, is not because of the 1969 riot Pride commemorates, but because of the success of respectability politics that both preceded and followed it.

The first picket for gay rights took place in New York five years before Stonewall, in 1964. It was organized by the Mattachine Society, an organization widely recognized as the first gay rights group. Later, in 1966, Mattachine organized a series of “sip-ins” to protest New York’s prohibition against serving gay patrons. Mattachine was not “conservative” — a gay conservative in the 1960s was closeted — but they showed up to protests in black suits and ties. One former Mattachine member, Randolfe Wicker, would later joke that he looked like a preacher for most of the 1960s. A preacher like Martin Luther King, one might say. The Pre-Stonewall gay rights movement, tiny as it might have been, had adopted the tactics of the black civil rights movement. Like the black civil rights movement, they had specific goals. Their sip-ins, conducted in their Sunday best, were reminiscent of the Woolsworth’s lunch counter sit-ins which started in 1960.

In the 70s, as with black activism, more radical and militant gay activist movements stepped to the fore. In 1970, the newly formed Los Angeles Gay Liberation Front plotted to take over remote Alpine County, a jurisdiction with less than 400 registered voters. The plan was to move a few hundred gays into the area, vote themselves into government, and create a gay utopia. The plan never materialized, although it did scare Alpine County residents half to death. Some activism was more practical. During the 70s, newly out activists were successful in passing local anti-discrimination laws in cities with relatively large gay populations, but a backlash was coming quick.

Perhaps the most famous event in 70s gay activism was the battle against singer Anita Bryant, who got her start in conservative political activism after successfully repealing a gay anti-discrimination law in Miami. She soon took her crusade nationwide. Bryant, an Evangelical Christian, was well known for her Florida orange juice commercials, so gay bars (and people) staged a boycott. But things didn’t stop there. While seated next to her husband at a televised 1977 press conference in Des Moines, Anita Bryant was pied in the face by a gay protestor named Thom Higgins. “At least it was a fruit pie,” she quipped. Security rushed to apprehend the protestor, but Byrant’s husband asked that they let him stay. Anita and her husband told Higgins that they loved and forgave him. They prayed for him aloud. Anita cried. It wasn’t a good look for the gays.

Afterward, Bryant successfully led efforts to repeal anti-discrimination laws in two other cities — Eugene, Oregon, and Witchita, Kansas — and got the Florida legislature to ban gay adoption. In the popular retelling, gay activists successfully organized to stop Bryant’s most ambitious attack — the Briggs initiative in California, which would have barred gay teachers from employment, and made pro-gay statements by any public school employee cause for dismissal. In reality, Briggs almost certainly failed because Ronald Reagan opposed it. The Gipper wasn’t won over by a gay civil rights argument, but rather by the idea that innocent (read heterosexual) teachers could have their lives ruined by vindictive students who might accuse them of being gay in retaliation for bad grades or discipline. 

The radicalism of AIDS activist groups like ACT UP is often highlighted in discussions of queer activism, but the issue is complicated. ACT UP certainly deserves some credit for putting pressure on the FDA to do more research, and for spreading awareness about risk and safe sex practices at a time when the media and government were too prudish to do so. Additionally, ACT UP’s frank discussions of sexuality were functional. They were not deployed in defense of gay promiscuity. Quite the opposite. The organization’s founder, Larry Kramer, made himself something of a pariah in the gay community after publishing his novel Faggots in 1978. The book, a harsh satire of the orgy-centric, pre-AIDS gay culture, was banned from Manhattan’s only gay book store, and gay critics “advised readers that its purchase represented an act inimical to the interests of gay liberation.” What got them so riled up? Consider this passage: 

I'm tired of using my body as a faceless thing to lure another faceless thing, I want to love a Person!, I want to go out and live in that world with that Person, a Person who loves me, we shouldn't have to be faithful, we should want to be faithful!, love grows, sex gets better, if you don't drain all your fucking energy off somewhere else" [...] "I've lived all over the world and I haven't seen more than half a dozen couples who have what I want." [...] It tells me something. It tells me no relationship in the world could survive the shit we lay on it. It tells me we're not looking at the reasons why we're doing the things we're doing. It tells me we've got a lot of work to do. A lot of looking to do. It tells me that, if those happy couples are there, they better come out of the woodwork fast and show themselves pronto so we can have a few examples for unbelieving heathens like you that it's possible. Before you fuck yourself to death.

In essence, Kramer was canceled for advocating respectability politics (and love). He would be vindicated four years later when the first cases of what would soon be called AIDS were reported in the US. That haunting line — “Before you fuck yourself to death” — would no longer be allegorical.

ACT UP’s controversial tactics aside, one of the greatest successes of AIDS activism, the Ryan White CARE Act, enacted in 1990, represented the platonic ideal of respectability politics. The bill, which offers free HIV/AIDS treatment for poor and uninsured patients, was named after a teenage hemophiliac who died of AIDS after receiving a tainted blood transfusion. Ryan’s mother, a devout Methodist, advocated for the bill alongside gay AIDS activists, who she credited with giving her information about treatments she otherwise wouldn’t have known about, telling The New York Times in 1990, “he would have never lived as long as he did without the gay community.” By giving the AIDS crisis a face that even the most virulent homophobe couldn’t condemn, activists saved the lives of countless gay men with the stroke of a Republican President’s pen.

In 1989, when Andrew Sullivan published his essay “Here Comes the Groom: A (conservative) case for gay marriage,” the proposal was indeed conservative — at least for gay people. In the words of James Kirchick, many “viewed marriage as emblematic of the patriarchal system under which they suffered and against which they rebelled.” But things were changing fast for a variety of reasons. The AIDS crisis meant more gay men, including some famous men, were coming out of the closet. It also meant that more were abandoning the bathhouses in search of monogamous relationships. Gays were becoming Rated PG, and Will and Grace proved it. The first (successful) gay sitcom in history was a tale of two Yuppies. Will wanted the same thing as Grace — a boyfriend — and he wasn’t looking for one through a glory hole. 

The AIDS crisis had not only helped popularize gay monogamy, it revealed the different ways in which gay and straight couples were treated, even when their relationships functioned in essentially the same way. Matters of insurance, hospital visitation, and inheritance had become very personal and real. Around the same time, lesbians — once inextricably linked with radical feminism — embraced domesticity. They wanted babies and SUVs. Sperm banks and Subaru dealerships were happy to accommodate. 

In less than two decades, gay marriage became the central goal of gay activism. This was peak respectability politics. Gays were asking to join a respectable, civilizing institution: marriage. Not only that, but they used respectability politics to highlight that goal. Activists centered old lesbians and buttoned-up Williams-Sonoma gays (think Chaston and Pete Buttigieg) — couples whose affection for one another seemed pure, almost asexual. Out with Cruising, in with Modern Family. Within less than two decades, popular stereotypes of gay men had changed entirely. They were no longer deranged and dying sex addicts, but pastel-wearing suburbanites with little dogs and Chinese babies.

It’s not that the bacchanalian gay sex culture Larry Kramer had described had totally disappeared by the time gay marriage was legalized nationwide in 2015. Apps like Grindr and the HIV prevention drug Truvada were bringing it back in full force. Probably less than half of the gay couples I know are monogamous, but almost nobody would have told a straight person that in 2013. A little white lie by omission, compensated (in my opinion) by the fact that lesbians barely have sex with each other, much less anybody else. In any case, homosexuals convinced heterosexuals that gay relationships are virtually the same as straight relationships, and therefore deserving of the same protections. Respectability politics worked. It has always worked — when there is an achievable goal.

Many of the stated aims of BLM and trans activists are not actionable. How does one “dismantle the gender binary?” Must we all don a mullet and overalls and demand to be called “they”? We certainly can’t all reject our white identity and become black, as Rachel Dolezal discovered, so how should we “dismantle white supremacy?” Apart from buying Ibram Kendi’s book, of course. Some of the aims which are actionable are exclusionary and tribal by nature — they require not only the support of the majority, but sacrifice. Consider reparations. One can dismiss respectability politics when discussing such goals because there is no basis for unity and, therefore, no basis for mass public support.

Trans activists can’t effectively use respectability politics to advocate child medical transition because, as it turns out, many people who deeply oppose child transition are already keenly aware of the similarities between their own childhood experiences and those of so-called trans kids. Empathy and understanding animate their opposition. That’s why every “TERF” forum has more lesbians than an Asheville coffee house. The demand that police not kill unarmed black men was reasonable. Despite its oddly explicit exclusion of other victims of police brutality, this position once garnered popular support. That support has been squandered. Years later, the movement has still not proposed any serious policy solution. Instead, BLM activists have burned buildings, looted shoe stores, sold books, and convinced the entire professional class that every conversation they have with a black coworker carries the weight of a slave ship. The rising tide of social tension only feeds their egos and, in an age of professionalized identitarianism, their wallets. It’s not that they think respectability politics doesn’t work, it’s just that they don’t have any use for the tactic — nor progress of any kind. Losing is the point.

-River Page