Abolitionists made freedom conditional on Black respectability
Evidence
As freed Blacks proliferated in the 1790s and the number of enslaved Blacks began to decline in the North, the racial discourse shifted from the problems of enslavement to the condition and capabilities of free Blacks. The American Convention delegates believed that the future advance of abolitionism depended on how Black people used their freedom. Periodically, the convention published and circulated advice tracts for free Blacks. Abolitionists urged free Blacks to attend church regularly, acquire English literacy, learn math, adopt trades, avoid vice, legally marry and maintain marriages, evade lawsuits, avoid expensive delights, abstain from noisy and disorderly conduct, always act in a civil and respectable manner, and develop habits of industry, sobriety, and frugality. If Black people behaved admirably, abolitionists reasoned, they would be undermining justifications for slavery and proving that notions of their inferiority were wrong. — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 326
Categorization
- XREF: This is a textbook embodiment of the assimilationist position in Kendi’s three-way scheme: well-meaning abolitionists demanding Black people prove their worth through respectable behavior — exactly the reader’s target category. — connects to: Paternalist abolitionists reproduced rather than abolished racial hierarchy — Marianne DeKoven, Utopia Limited: The Sixties and the…, 907; Respectability politics served as a foundation for overt black political action — Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent: The Women’s…, 1031
- DEFINE: Concretely defines assimilationism: the belief that Black advancement depends on Black self-improvement/respectability to disprove inferiority, rather than on dismantling racist policy.
- ADDENDUM: Parallels the ‘Complaints About Immodesty Go Way Back’ piece: both are moral-behavioral policing of the subordinated class as a precondition for acceptance — respectability politics with a very old pedigree.