Black Baptist women wielded respectability as a weapon against biological racism

Evidence

By claiming respectability through their manners and morals, poor black women boldly asserted the will and agency to define themselves outside the parameters of prevailing racist discourses. Notwithstanding the sincerity of the Baptist women’s appeals to respectable behavior, such appeals were also explicit rejections of Social Darwinist explanations of blacks’ biological inferiority to whites. Respectability was perceived as a weapon against such assumptions, since it was used to expose race relations as socially constructed rather than derived by evolutionary law or divine judgment. — Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent, 882

Categorization

• DEFINE: Articulates the core of the ‘politics of respectability’ coinage: self-assertion against racist discourse via manners and morals.
• XREF: connects to: Respectable Baptist women’s journalism openly protested white supremacist violence. — Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent: The Women’s…, 385; Teaching domestic respectability to black women was read as racial-equality activism by white supremacists — Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent: The Women’s…, 477; Black Baptist women tied racial progress directly to mothers’ virtue in the home. — Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent: The Women’s…, 652 (+8 more)

Broader Connections

• Black Baptist women mobilized a politics of respectability as resistance to consumer capitalism. #corroborates (0.86) — Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent, 954
• Black Baptist women infused words like respectability with their own meanings through self-definition #expands (0.82) — Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent, 1541
• Respectability discourse loaded black women with responsibility for the whole race #complicates (0.78)