What Critics of Black “Respectability Politics” Miss. Black Power Beyond “The Boundaries of Blackness”

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In the 90s and 2000s, a wave of academic texts emerged that challenge the dominate narrative of Black leadership and politics, claiming that the location of Black power in the Black church and “respectable” civil rights organizations limited Black politics. One of the most prominent of these texts is The Boundaries of Blackness, written by Cathy Cohen, which uses the example of the limited response to AIDS by Black civil society in the 80s/90s to argue that Black politics marginalized those most impacted by AIDS because the groups most impacted, drug users and those beyond heteronormativity, exceed the bounds of respectable Blackness. 

In this episode, we review this text, arguing that in its desire to challenge the limits of Black leadership, the text tells an overly critical tale of the Black community as innately locked into respectability. The text reads the Black used of genocide as a frame to understand AIDS as reflective of an inability to center non-respectable drug users and same gender loving individuals. This obscures the value of the genocide concept from a Black communities perspective in providing a comprehensive frame which includes serving those impacted by AIDS, as well addressing the role drugs /addiction played in destabilizing the Black community and larger systems of oppression. 

By largely preferring a politics of centering the marginalized over a frame of community mobilizing against genocide, the author centers a politics of representation which ultimately requires recognition from white power to be successful. By largely dismissing African centered and Afrocentric politics, the text fails to see the indigenous public health, drug use, and gender sexuality variant idea with Black/ African centered communities that could have been alternative frameworks for representation for marginalized identities, like the work of Mutulu Shakur at Lincoln Detox. It also obscures the role of white supremacy and “injecting oppression” play in forcing so-called “respectability strategies” in the Black community. 

While challenging existing Black political leadership, the text fails to challenge the larger dynamic of elite interest convergence black folks must depend on for change, leading to a diversification of the elite power brokers but failing to challenging the fundamental disempowerment of black communities. Finally, the text has been misinterpreted by some to argue the Black community is too innately conservative to be trusted with resources and power, thus being wielded as a tool against the Black community political power building.

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