u/APlayerAndaMac

I still love my guy Conscious Lee, but he's dead-wrong here.

Respectability politics would be if we as Black folks go policing ourselves by a white comfort standard.

This case simply isn't that at all.

This HBCU school is deciding what their own output looks like—same as a law firm or a hospital sets a dress code for its own people.

Their message isn't to "look white." It's "look ready."

As the Black community, we've become a little too sensitive when it comes to criticism about our appearance—and I understand where it comes from, given how much this country has come at us over "respectability" politics.

But, somewhere along the way, we've started treating any critique as an attack, even the constructive kind that's coming from inside our own house.

We need to get better at telling the difference. An HBCU is exactly the place to learn it.

Fighting for the right to wear heritage Black hairstyles at work is resisting a standard built to exclude our hair specifically because it's Black. THAT'S respectability politics rejected correctly.

A dude in class with a durag and sagging skinny jeans or a gal wearing pajamas and bonnet to class isn't erasing anything about our heritage or defying respectability politics. It's just young people doing what's easiest at 8am. Super-relaxed aesthetics normalized.

I live near a diverse PWI and I watch it daily on my commute—students geared in sagging skinny jeans, bonnets, pajama pants, sandals and socks, etc.

(And it's not even staying in our community anymore—I'm seeing it get picked up by other groups too, which tells you it's becoming a pop-culture export.)

Some PWIs won't touch it because they don't want the negative news headline. Which is exactly why it's got to come from inside the house, like an HBCU.

You want young Black adults who take their own presentation seriously. It's not just because the world's watching, but because WE set the standard.

And Tuskegee didn't even ban it off the entire campus. Just keep yourselves from wearing the stuff to class and other certain settings.

The whole difference between respectability politics and self-respect: one's performing for somebody else's comfort; the other's just discipline from within. 🤷🏿‍♂️

Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin co-authored the line: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal..."

Yet equality remains an elusive ideal 250 years after they wrote it down. And, America, I think we should still make that a reality.

I hope it's self-evident that black people really are just looking for equality and not revenge--to paraphrase the immortal words of Kimberly Jones. Look at all the race massacres in the last 250 years and you'll see that we have a clean record. (Except for that one time when Nat Turner had to bust a move.)

In the next 250 years, we will continue to demand and fight for equal opportunity, equal justice, and equal treatment for all. Even it feels like "reverse discrimination" to some of your citizens.

But.

It.

Ain't.

I’m cryin right now. Like, why is he reading them out loud???