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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