I first encountered the term “respectability politics” in 2016 when a local activist used it to defend herself against accusations that she was being “a bitch” on Facebook. Maybe you’ve heard this term from an annoying person in your community, or have seen it in a trite personal essay you read on the internet to make yourself mad. If you haven’t, know that “respectability politics” is verboten on the identitarian left, where rudeness and insularity are seen as pure, radical, and virtuous. To say someone is engaged in respectability politics is to demean them as a naive assimilator, as this particular method of activism looks good but doesn’t work. But that is not only ahistorical and wrong, it’s pretty much exactly backward. Not only does respectability politics work, in terms of meaningful, lasting change, respectability politics is perhaps the only thing that has ever worked.
