Gaia WeiseLiterature of the Harlem Renaissance

Final PaperFall 2014

On Respectability and Internalized Racism

“The Younger Generation comes, bringing its gifts. They are

the first fruits of the Negro Renaissance. Youth speaks, and the

voice of the New Negro is heard” (Locke 47). The project of

self-determination these “New Negroes” of the Harlem Renaissance

inherited was enormous. As Black youth born at the turn of the

20th century, they were the first generation of African-Americans

born fully removed from the “peculiar institution” of slavery.

For the first time, Black musicians, artists and writers all had

the opportunity to produce work that was not anchored in the fact

that the majority of their own people were legally designated as

subhuman property. However, this newfound freedom was not

absolute, for racism in post-slavery America evolved into the Jim

Crow system of segregation, which created a new set problems for

Black people. The body of work produced in this brief moment

represents the explosive energy of a people recently transplanted

from the South “northward and city-ward”, to Harlem, “the largest

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Negro community in the world” (Locke 6). Migration to this urban

environment brought independence as well as a sense of solidarity

to the Black people who inhabited it, but remained subject to

poverty, unemployment, and disenfranchisement resulting from

racism.

Many “race leaders” of the time—primarily Booker T.

Washington and W.E.B. Du Bois—worked to extricate the Black

masses from the external forces of racism; this project was

labelled “racial uplift”. It is imperative that contemporary

readers set aside preconceived notions about Black life at the

turn of the century because those assumptions are fundamentally

altered by monumental historical events that occurred between

then and now. At this point in history, there was no “Civil

Rights Movement”, no single iconic leader or banner under which

all Black people could organize. Race leaders were numerous, and

so were the solutions to the “Race Question”. All the solutions

proposed seemed to require little to no change in White behavior,

instead urging Black people to “lift themselves up” from

centuries of oppression perpetrated by White people. Racial

uplift was defined in terms of ascension of the hierarchy to the

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position occupied by Whites, rather than the toppling of the

racist system itself. Why was it the responsibility of the

oppressed to change the system, and why did Black people have to

assimilate into White culture via respectability in order to gain

their rights? Why couldn’t Black people become equals in society

without sacrificing their own cultural heritage in the process?

Did the arrival of the “New Negro” offer an alternative approach

that resisted racial oppression, rather than engaging with it?

These questions cannot be answered without some

understanding of the structural nature of racism, and the ways in

which it ingrains itself in the collective imagination.

Financial interests play the most important role in the

perpetuation of racial inequality; economic uplift and racial

uplift run parallel to each other. Tracing the history of White

supremacy back to the justification for the enslavement of

African people uncovers how racism serves to uphold the economic

interests of White people. In Nigger Heaven Byron’s father, a

stand-in for the “old Negro”, explains to his son that “the late

Booker T. Washington preached industry and thrift. He in his

wisdom realized that the advancement of the Negro would come only

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through economic progress.” (Van Vechten 172). However, for a

community to advance economically, the dominant group must

relinquish its economic advantage, which goes against its own

interest. Dick Stills, a light skinned lawyer, recognizes that

Black people have “got to have money to fight the system and earn

the respect of the world.” (Van Vechten 120). But wealth

disparity is not the only variable upholding the system of racist

oppression. It is also semiotic, in that the language of race

itself upholds systems of inequality. The power of definition is

essential to overcoming oppressive structures. Take for example

the meaning of idea of “the world”. For Black people, “the

world” is synonymous with the white world. Byron attends a White

college because he knows that he has “to get along in a white

world” (Van Vechten 118). Blackness exists within—as well as in

opposition to—the White world. Black is the racial “Other”, and

in being so Black people are dispossessed of subjecthood. This is

why literature that deals with the Black experience is so vitally

important, because without articulation of Black subjectivity,

dehumanization is perpetuated.

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It is equally as crucial to identify what is not being said

when speaking about race. Whiteness is the unspoken, default

category. As long as the Whiteness occupies the position of

dominance, its integrity is a given and does not need to be

articulated. White supremacy and its ontological invisibility

allows individual White people to act in ways that are out of

accordance with the confines of their race without affecting its

hegemony as a racial category. But Black people do not have the

ability to act without reinforcing anti-Black stereotypes; they

bear the burden of representation. Therefore Black people must

carefully, self-consciously regulate every action and personality

trait so as not to reinforce prejudice against all Black people.

This act of self-regulation lies at the core of respectability,

defined as “a philosophy promulgated by black elites to ‘uplift

the race’ by correcting the ‘bad’ traits of the black poor”

(Harris 33). Those who embrace respectability as a tactic do so

in order to “prove to white America that blacks [are] worthy of

full citizenship rights” (Hobbs 175). The problematic

exclusivity of this practice is exemplified by Du Bois’s

“talented tenth” strategy, wherein the “top tenth” i.e. elite of

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Black society should behave within strict confines of propriety

in order to act as examples that would succeed in “getting the

untalented nine-tenths to rid themselves of bad customs and

habits” (Hobbs 33). Any hint of immorality would be swiftly

condemned by conservative race leaders within the Black

community. Though done with noble intentions, these attempts at

reformation were denouncing the reality of the majority of Black

people. Ironically, by identifying behaviors associated with the

Black poor as “bad”, race leaders may have been doing more to

reinforce internalized racism amongst Black people than to change

the perception of Black people in the larger social context.

In “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain”, Langston

Hughes establishes the link between respectability politics and

internalized racism. The young Black poet who wishes to be a

“poet - not a Negro poet” actually wants to be White, because it

is the unspoken category (Hughes 150). In Nigger Heaven, this is

Byron’s primary conflict; he wants to be a writer without being

qualified as a Negro writer. “We are forced by this prodigious

power of prejudice to line up together. To the white world we are

a mass…” (Van Vechten 189).The struggle of the Black artist is

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the struggle towards individuation. Byron’s motivation to

extricate his desired profession as a writer from his Black

identity thus becomes more meaningful; his belief that Black

people are “not very different from anyone else except in colour”

(Van Vechten 122) is not simply an egalitarian aphorism; it is

the expression of his desire to distance himself from the

negative perception of the group to which he involuntarily

belongs.

If the project of respectability represents a collective

attempt to alter the perception of the Black masses, how then, do

“respectable” Black people want to be seen? As inherently

virtuous and good, as deserving of equal rights. It is tragic

that in order to gain their civil rights Black people have to

become “good” in the eyes of their oppressors, because it

presupposes that they are not inherently good to begin with.

Separating “goodness” from Whiteness requires the stripping away

of a lifetime of social conditioning. From childhood “white

comes to be unconsciously a symbol of all the virtues” (Hughes

151). Additionally, “the (Black) mother often says ‘don’t be

like niggers’ when the children are bad”, and thus the

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association with negative behaviors is reinforced. In the

statement “don’t be like niggers”, an important distinction is

being made. A Black person isn’t necessarily a “nigger”, but a

“nigger” is always a Black person. A white person may act like a

“nigger” but they can never be a “nigger”. What qualities does a

person have to have in order to be “like niggers”?

From this question, another arises: what is the difference

between “being” Black and “acting” Black? There is a

relationship between the two, of course, but they are not

equivalent. How do variables like skin color and racialized

behavior interact to form a Black identity? The variety of

possible combinations complicate the monolith of an essential

“Black” identity. Simply being born with the phenotypic traits

associated with African ancestry is not enough to be regarded as

being “really Black”. Black people (especially those with light

skin) who do not exhibit specific behaviors have their Blackness

called into question; they are accused of “acting White”. Are

“acting White” and respectability the same thing? If this is the

case, is respectability actually good for the Black community?

Answering these questions are vital in order to establish what it

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is that respectability politics are actually trying to

accomplish.

In The Blacker the Berry Emma Lou’s upbringing reveals the

connection between respectability and colorism—the translation of

White supremacy into the Black community by valuing features

associated with Whiteness, most importantly light skin color.

Emma Lou’s situation demonstrates the cognitive dissonance that

arises when a dark-skinned Black person desires to be

respectable. Born of a light mother and dark father, she is

devalued by her family for being “too black” (Thurman 58). Her

maternal grandmother founded the local “blue vein circle”, so

named because all of its members were “fair skinned enough for

their blood to be seen pulsing purple through the veins of their

wrists” (Thurman 6). In the Black community, light-skinned

people occupy a position of privilege, “entitled, ipso facto, to

more respect and opportunity and social acceptance than the more

pure blooded Negroes” (Thurman 6). Blue vein societies represent

a masochistic byproduct of internalized racism. Their motto

“whiter and whiter every generation” (Thurman 7) positions

Blackness as a contaminant that must be diluted. For Emma Lou,

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gender intersects with colorism and reinforces a sense of

inferiority; her womanhood makes her a “carrier” of Blackness.

Due to the socially imposed belief that Black girls are less

desirable, Emma Lou becomes pathologically “color-conscious”

(Thurman 113), believing “There was no place in the world for a

dark girl” (Thurman 31). When she attends UCLA she becomes

“determined (...) to associate with the ‘right sort of people”

(Thurman 29). Her pursuit of these associations reveals her

tendency towards social masochism, for she defines the “right

sort” as “those people on campus who practically ignored her”

(Thurman 30).

Emma Lou’s plan of getting in with the “respectable” crowd

is immediately foiled “because of her intimacy” with another

freshman, Hazel Mason (Thurman 26). Texas-born and

rambunctiously, unashamedly Black in her behavior, Hazel speaks

in a Southern dialect and has a “circus-like appearance” and Emma

writes her off as “just a vulgar little nigger from down South”

(Thurman 22-23), but Hazel persists in attempting to befriend

Emma Lou, much to her chagrin. Hazel’s identity is complicated

by the fact that her father “had become quite wealthy when oil

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had been found on his farm lands” (Thurman 16). Hazel does not

act in a respectable manner because her father did not “struggle”

to earn his money, i.e. he did not have to abide by standards of

propriety defined by Whiteness in order to get it. Racial uplift

does not come about through all forms of economic development,

only those deemed to be “earned” in terms of the White Protestant

work ethic. Eventually, Hazel adopts the “New Negro” lifestyle—

she becomes friends with “a group of housemaids and mature youths

who worked only when they had to”, “going to cabarets and parties

and taking long drunken midnight rides”, eventually dropping out

and moving back to Texas (Thurman 128). Emma Lou is unable to

find any friends who fit into her criteria of propriety and drops

out after just one year.

Byron shares Emma Lou’s distaste for an open performance of

Black identity. However, his light-skinned privilege alienates

him not from the respectable elite, but from the Black working-

class. Unable to find a job in his desired field even though he

graduated from an elite university, he is forced to find

employment in more “typically” Black positions. When Byron gets

a job as an elevator boy, he doesn’t fit in because he is mixed

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and does not speak in dialect. He is immediately judged by his

coworkers as a “posin’ and signifyin’, high-toned mustard seed,

arnchy yaller boy, sheik from Strivers’ Row…” (Van Vechten 192).

He dislikes them as well; “he could never feel anything but

repugnance for these people, because they were black” (Van

Vechten 192).The repugnance he feels, because they were black,

connects back to Hughes’s understanding of internalized racism.

When he recounts his experience on the job to Mary and her

friends, Howard explains that “low-class smokes haven’t any use

for a fellow that puts on airs. You have to be a mixer” (Van

Vechten 194). Byron refuses to don Black working-class

mannerisms, even temporarily because by doing so the value of his

elite university education is called into question.

These failures highlight the complexity of respectability

politics; the attainment of a respectable persona cannot be

collapsed into purely economic terms, though the possession of

wealth certainly puts one closer to it. The cultivation of

elegance is also necessary, but no amount of refinement

guarantees a Black person gainful employment. Being light-skinned

also makes it easier; the “right people” in Emma Lou’s mind “were

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either mulattoes or light brown in color’” (Thurman 29-30).

However it is not impossible to be dark-skinned and accepted into

the respectable community. “Verne Davis was dark and she was not

excluded from the sacred inner circle” (Thurman 26), however she

is accorded this status because she is “a bishop’s daughter with

plenty of coin and a big Buick” (Thurman 28). Wealth, skin color

and class privilege intersect with regards to respectability.

Emma Lou, being from Idaho and without any wealth to speak of,

has no social capital to compensate for her dark-Blackness. But

being light-skinned does not exempt one from the larger system of

racism. The fact that Byron faces contempt from disenfranchised

Black people due to his skin color and class privilege reflects

the way that colorism breaks apart the Black community. Working

class Black people, often darker skinned, resent the sense of

entitlement that light-skinned people often have. Mixed race

people face a double-bind, accepted by neither the Black nor

White community.

This dilemma pushes many light-skinned people to “pass”.

The lack of gainful employment for Black people is another

impetus to pass for White. Dick Stills chooses to pass because

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he loses his job and is repeatedly turned down in interviews when

he reveals himself as a Negro (Van Vechten 185). He blames the

White community, stating that “they make us do it [...] they make

us. We don’t want to, but they make us” (Van Vechten 182-183).

Emma Lou’s light-skinned family awaited the day when “the

grandchildren of the blue veins could easily go over into the

white race and become assimilated so that the problem of race

would plague them no more” (Thurman 6). This is why she suffered

so much abuse from them, because she represented a major step

backward in the project of complete assimilation via

miscegenation. Conversely, passing is also done to get back at

White people, who believe they can identify black people “by the

most ridiculous means: fingernails, palms of hands, shapes of

ears, teeth, and other equally silly rot”. This revenge is

hollow, though, for in order to pass, White people must be

unaware that they are being fooled. Passing is a futile solution

to the race problem as it does nothing to alter the perception of

Black people as a whole. Not only that, but it is completely

closed off to those who do not look sufficiently White. For this

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reason, passing is often deemed traitorous by those who wish to

see widespread racial uplift.

Passing may seem like a permanent crossing into another

racial location, but it is actually a dynamic process; blurring

the boundaries of the already fluid concept of race. It can even

be temporary; one may choose to pass in order to attend certain

social functions or merely to dine in certain restaurants. In

Nella Larsen’s Passing, Irene Redfield, who “is not ashamed of

being a Negro”, gets tea on a very hot day at the Drayton, a

fancy hotel that serves only whites (Larsen 178). She becomes

nervous when she notices a woman staring at her, but it turns out

to be an old friend Clare Kendry, who passed completely into

Whiteness, even marrying a White man. Both are passing, but

Irene is merely “passing through”, whereas Clare has constructed

her entire life around it. Byron sees Dick at the Black Venus

nightclub and he asks “Are you white or colored tonight?”, to

which Dick replies “Buckra, of course”, buckra being slang for a

white person (Van Vechten 208). Why is it, then, that Byron

chooses not to pass, given that he also cannot find work and

moreover does not even relate to the Black community? When

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asked, Byron claims that he “[hasn’t] got the guts” [...] don’t

let’s talk about about it” (Van Vechten 212). He is evasive and

ambivalent, he wants to be identified as neither Negro nor White.

The transcendence of racial oppression without the elimination of

the particularities of Blackness represents the aim of the “New

Negro”, but for Byron this goal stems from an insecurity with his

Black identity, not race pride. In this way his disavowal of race

bears more resemblance to respectability politics than the avant-

garde challenge to racial constraints set into motion by the

Harlem Renaissance.

Both passing and respectability required a staunch

distancing from the physical pleasures of Black life—they made

for a very dull existence. Hester Allbright, a spinster from

“Washington society” to whom Mary pays a social call, represents

the conservative elitism of the “old guard”. She is thoroughly

disgusted by the “squalor and vice of Harlem life”, possessed

“idiosyncratic ideas about propriety [...] assumed an aggressive

and antagonistic attitude towards the new literary group which

was springing up in Harlem” (Van Vechten 65-66). The young

people of the Harlem Renaissance refused to conform to the old

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guard’s notion of respectability based in Victorian ideal of

rigid nobility; instead, they embraced the casual looseness of

early Modernism. The hedonism of the “New Negro” was not a purely

decadent function; the act of drinking and losing oneself in the

cabaret was a political act. Refusing to work a steady job was a

political act. Those who lived a “low life” in the all-Black

neighborhood of Harlem were also refusing to accept Whiteness as

the ideal. Mary, who seems to be the very definition of

respectable—as a young librarian who at the beginning of the

novel never drank or attended cabarets—yearns for an embodied

connection to “this love of drums, of exciting rhythms, this

naive delight in glowing color [...] this warm, sexual emotion”

that she is only able to connect to “through a mental

understanding” (Van Vechten 89-90). Her aloofness betrays “an

[admiration of all Negro characteristics and [an earnest desire]

to possess them” (Van Vechten 89). She represents the

reappropriation of naivete, of a subjecthood that seeks to claim

the richness of Black life, but in a mature, self-aware way. But

internalized racism gets in the way of her full integration into

“this primitive birthright”, a stumbling block so deeply rooted

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that Mary authentically admires Blackness but struggles with

manifesting it personally.

The problem with the New Negro tactic of embracing dynamic

sensuality associated with Blackness is that it is easily

fetishized by white people, and becomes just another tool of

emphasizing difference between the races. Exoticization does not

fit as neatly into the schema of racial subordination, for it

utilizes positive language to describe Blackness. This is often

done by liberal White people, who seek to legitimize Black art by

fetishizing its difference; when Byron is introduced to Gareth

Johns, a white author, he implores him to write about the

underbelly of Harlem. “The low life of your people is exotic! It

has a splendid, fantastic quality. And the humour! How vital it

is, how rich in idiom! Picturesque and fresh!” (Van Vechten 107).

This praise is patronizing. Descriptions of Black people as

exuberant, naïve, spontaneous or primitive, all function to

render them as childlike. This infantilization of Blackness

provides further justification for their subordination,

manifested in a paternalism that reinscribes the master-slave

dynamic.

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Returning to respectability politics in this case is

actually productive because it was invented to counteract such

White paternalism—by displaying a cultivated maturity, Black

people are able to take charge of their own destiny. But what is

rejected in the process of becoming respectable must not go

unacknowledged, because then “acting respectably” runs the risk

of falling into a mere imitation of “White” behavior. Many of

the “undesirable” markers of Blackness are precisely those things

which make it such a salient and appealing alternative to the

dominant racial discourse. Decentering Whiteness as the ideal to

be reached while also resisting the fetishization of Blackness is

similar to walking a tightrope, but such a dance has always been

the gesture used by Black people to move through the world.1

“The Harlem Renaissance opened an alternative strategy for

achieving racial wholeness” (Hobbs 177). Based on the

persistence of racial inequality and stereotyping, this strategy

has yet to be fully enacted in the American cultural imagination.

A tactic more nuanced and pluralistic than respectability

politics must be established that allows Black culture to exist

1 see the music video for “Tightrope” by Janelle Monae for an elegant portrayal of this idea

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as both serious and enjoyable. It should reject narrow

stereotypes that define Blackness as the subaltern “exotic

Other”. It must also move away from denouncing elements of Black

life that do not neatly fit within the White paradigm, they ought

to be acknowledged as constitutive of Blackness. Instead of

seeking respect from White people by acting respectable, this new

theory of respectability demands respect for Blackness in all its

different forms, from conservative spinsters like Hester

Allbright to salacious Eastmen like Scarlet Creeper.

Works Cited

Harris, Frederick C. "The Rise of Respectability Politics." Dissent 61.1 (2014): 33-37. Project

MUSE: University of Pennsylvania Press. Web. Retrieved 11 Dec. 2014, from

<http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/dissent/v061/61.1.harris.pdf>.

Hobbs, Allyson. “Searching for a New Soul in Harlem.” A Chosen Exile.A History of Racial

Passing in American Life. Boston: Harvard University Press, 2014. Web. Retrieved 11

Dec. 2014, from <http://www.degruyter.com/view/product/430015>.

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Hughes, Langston. “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain.” The Nation. 122 (June 1926): 692-94

Larsen, Nella. "Passing." The Complete Fiction of Nella Larsen: Passing, Quicksand and the

Stories. New York: Anchor, 2001. 163-243. Print.

Locke, Alain. “Negro Youth Speaks.” The New Negro. New York: Touchstone, 1992. 47-53. Print.

Thurman, Wallace. The Blacker the Berry. Mineola, New York: Dover, 2008. Print.

Van Vechten, Carl. Nigger Heaven. Urbana and Chicago: University ofIllinois Press, 2000. Print.

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