Claiming Rage and Resting Respectability
As I turned the last page of Brittney Cooper’s Eloquent Rage: A Black Feminist Finds Her Superpower and set the book down, I caught a flash of myself in the mirror. Tidy, short dreads, youthful face, no outward sign of the turmoil inside, a flood was unleashed by Cooper’s writing.
Cooper illuminates that our cultural, suppressed rage is due for evaluation, and when we, as Black women, find (and make) the freedom to unleash it, we step into our superpower.
This is provoking to a girl raised by an auto-worker and a stay-at-home mom in Northeast Ohio. I was born and bred with a respectability politic: hair straightened, clothes tidy, and impeccable grades. I was told those would help me appeal to, and be kept in high regard by, a seemingly ever-present, yet undefined, mostly White public.
This politic didn’t necessarily include shaming or blaming others or other black people for their lot in life, but definitely centered on the notion that I could better control my destiny if I exemplified the proper manners, the right clothes, got a good education, and basically, had everything together and tidy. I was prim and proper and high achieving and my family would protect me from all the devastation, sacrifice and loss that they and my elders faced. It was the least I could do and I was going to uphold my end of the deal.
A couple academic degrees later, I’m learning that respectability politics — which seemed to be working in my favor during the first quarter of my life, have become a barrier to my professional leadership during this next chapter.
As the former Director of State and Local Policy at Prosperity Now, I rose through the ranks focused on policy solutions to the economic oppression facing Black people and other people of color in this country. I built a career of advancing policies and shaping programs that make it possible for low-income people to ‘get a job’ or ‘save small amounts over time’, ‘set a budget and use credit wisely.’ Low-income people are often instructed to invest in assets like homeownership, education, and business ownership to achieve multi-generational prosperity. These are indeed important to building wealth, but I was divorcing those solutions from the lived realities of many people of color.
In her book, Cooper writes: ‘Suppressed rage will allow us to accept gratuitous violence as a necessary evil. Expressed rage offers us an opportunity to do better…Black women’s rage is a kind of power that America would do well to heed if it wants to finally live up to its stated democratic aims.’
As I sat with this concept I asked myself: What gratuitous (economic) violence had I been accepting as a necessary evil? I had been accepting that if I work on opportunity structures to build wealth, I could leave the racialized extraction economy to others to handle. I found myself comfortably working on policies, a respectable place to do systems work. I’m ready to bring an eloquent rage to the racial wealth divide that faces the complexity of people of color’s lived economic experiences by advancing both protective measures and bold investments in people.
The existence of the racial wealth divide flies in the face of respectability. This is sustained, pervading economic oppression and it is rage-worthy. Cooper writes that rage and respectability often cannot sit together, and the waves of inner turmoil I was experiencing were proof points toward her claim. The existence of such a major racial wealth divide in the United States flies in the face of ‘respectable’ tips and instructions for wealth accumulation.
Respectability has gotten us nowhere fast, especially when it comes to economic prosperity. This includes families who have made all of the right, respectable choices with their money: They have worked hard (for stagnating wages), they have attained college degrees (taking on new levels of student loan debt), they have purchased homes (in depreciating markets), they have saved for retirement (but can’t afford to retire, see first point about low, stagnating wages). Despite all of these activities, median wealth for a Black family and a Latinx family making roughly $60,000 to $100,000 is approximately equal to the median wealth of a White family making $18,000 to $37,000.
These are working Black and Latinx families that are squarely middle- to upper-income, but their wealth does not reflect it.
Graduating from college is no guarantee of prosperity either. White graduates with a four year degree have a median wealth of just over $180,000, while Black and Latinx graduates have $32,000 and $36,000 in wealth respectively. Clipped Wings, a recent report from the Insight Center, illuminates why Black women have a rightful rage — Black millennial women have a fraction of the wealth of their white co-workers, are more likely to be financially responsible for their parents and extended family, and are more likely to be incarcerated.
In a country where people of color, especially young women are working, going to school, buying homes and still facing such low rates of wealth, respectability is not to blame and may not even be a part of the solution.
Respectability politics is more in service of dividing people of color than providing a blueprint for individual success. We can no longer afford to be lulled into respectability tropes. The racial wealth divide flies in the face of respectability and this sustained, pervading economic oppression is rage-worthy. It makes my blood boil.
People of color are more woke than ever before. In large part because of conspicuous acts of racism, we are starting to see our mutuality in the oppressions we face. Now is the time for collective action that does three things:
- Exposes the policies and policymakers that have orchestrated this divide,
- Sets forth a new racial and economic justice policy agenda, and
- Demands of candidates that they speak to and deliver on comprehensive, sweeping solutions that we know are possible.
I’m late to the game, but I’m now on a personal journey to stop propagating the respectability playbook in large part because we, as people of color, no longer have the luxury of letting it divide us. Yes, playing the respectability game may have gotten me to where I am, but will do little to take me or other people of color to where we need to go. This playbook proves to be nothing but a farce when we set out to solve important problems.
It’s not easy to admit that I am setting down my respectability politics. It was fear for our safety and health that caused my parents and others like them to instill this pathway in their children, and now I wonder what happens next? If I set aside respectability as a coping mechanism, will I just be left with rage? While a bit scary, I’m ready to follow the lead of Zora Neale Hurston and let ‘the broom of anger sweep away my fear.’ I can nurture a rage to a slow, steady burn so it’s energizing and restorative for me and maybe contagious to others, not flaming out too soon or destroying everything in its path.
I’m ready to take that chance because I think we’re all ready for undoing deep, rampant, metastasizing racial wealth inequality. We’re all ready to demand that our federal budgets stop prioritizing war, walls and wealth for White people, that are funded on the backs of low-wealth people of color.
I’m ready to ask harder questions with a direct and furious gaze at the biggest economic barriers we face. We are all ready for an economy that works for people of color. We are ready to demand nothing less from the candidates that want our votes. We are ready to leave respectability at the door. As Martin Luther King said, “We are coming to get our check.”
