I love Cythia Blair–I’m reading her book now! I would certainly like to know more about this, and yes, the way Blair uses the respectability politics lens in I’ve Got To Make My Living is fascinating.

And, thanks, this is fascinating, and gives me more of a reading list, but one thing: the power politics between a black dissertation director and a white grad student in the late 80s are difficult to parse, and it makes me uncomfortable that you go straight for the “p” word. Sorry if I’m overstepping, I mean, I don’t know much about the situation.
REALLY looking forward to reading your book.

Mindy, you have seen Peechington Marie’s addendum to the round table, going into the history of the term within the Black community and the affect of respectability politics on Black sex workers, right?
https://titsandsass.com/who-gets-left-out-the-people-who-coined-the-term-addendum-to-the-respectability-politics-round-table/
Peechington dates the term back to Evelyn Higginbotham, but she also goes into more of the cultural history.

one of the reasons why i have been particularly concerned about “respectability” is because it so clearly links sexual behavior with the rights that people “deserve” or don’t deserve as citizens, even as human beings. on so many other issues, including single motherhood, gay marriage, public sex, reproductive justice, leaders have refused to challenge outright the sexual puritanism that make them controversial.

however, let me just offer a smallish, librarianish and historical correction for the citations and history of respectability. i first wrote about black women and respectability in 1989… and like many graduate students, got ripped off by my dissertation director, who used the idea here (http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674769786). [i’d liken dissertation directors to “pimps,” but some might say i’m being too kind.] my 1992 dissertation and 1998 book (http://books.google.com/books/about/Marching_Together.html?id=g1_NLnQi1osC) actually argued something different than Righteous Discontent. While 19th Century African American church women were intent on establishing their respectability (in a very WEB DuBosian idea), the working class African American women active in union organizing during the mid-twentieth century had a somewhat different view. They understood respectability as a cultural strategy and were willing to pretend conformity to it in their political rhetoric, but many personally rejected the pretentiousness and social distancing that middle class black leaders engaged in. Moreover, as Rhonda Y. Williams found (http://books.google.com/books/about/The_Politics_of_Public_Housing_Black_Wom.html?id=7zw7ExjJ1CkC) African American women in the public housing projects of Baltimore in the 1960s and 1970s organized their communities against the respectability politics that officials used to punish residents who didn’t comply with all the bourgeois rules imposed on them by social workers and public officials. Cathy Cohen wrote about the deadly consequences of respectability politics during the AIDS crisis, see this http://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/B/bo3630260.html. End of lecture. Sorry I couldn’t help it, but i’ve been teaching this stuff for more than two decades.

cheers!
mindy

Who gets left out, indeed.

I just wanted to repeat what I wrote in response to peechingtonmariejust on Tumblr:
“Wow, I’m really sorry. This was indeed disgusting and horrible of us, and if there’s any way we can address this and do better, please let me know. Obv. “respectability politics” was a term/concept coined by the Black community and we should have had Black sex workers discussing it…”
I hope peechingtonmarie will be interested in doing a continuation/improvement of this dialogue with other Black women. I’d be interested in any other suggestions from Black sex workers on how to rectify this exclusion, though. I love peechingtonmariejust’s tumblr and I think I’ve asked her to write for us before, but I’m not totally sure.