Black middle-class respectability stigmatized calypso as lower-class degeneracy

Evidence

During the Second World War, teachers went from Guadeloupe to Fort-de-France to correct the examinations of candidates for the baccalaureate, and, driven by curiosity, I went to the hotel where they were staying, simply in order to see Monsieur B., a philosophy teacher who was supposed to be remarkably black; as the Martinicans say, not without a certain irony, he was “blue.” One family in particular has an excellent reputation: “They’re very black, but they’re all quite nice.” One of them, in fact, is a piano teacher and a former student at the Conservatoire in Paris, another is a teacher of natural science in the girls’ academy, etc. The father was given to walking up and down his balcony every evening at sunset; after a certain time of night, it was always said, he became invisible. Of another family, who lived in the country, it was said that on nights when there was a power failure the children had to laugh so that their parents would know that they were there. On Mondays, very carefully got up in their white linen suits, certain Martinican officials, in the local figure of speech, “looked like prunes in a bowl of milk.” — Frantz Fanon, Constance Farrington, Black skin, white masks, 995 (#exemplifies, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: CPS definitions apply white middle-class norms to families with differing community standards — , The Rod and the Child: A Global History…, 10375; Rising black middle-class incomes fostered women’s pursuit of idealized femininity — bell hooks, Ain’t I a Woman_ Black Women and…, 514; Black lower-class customs amounted to a political rejection of English bourgeois morality (+6 more)

Related

• Education and refinement could qualify blackness in Antillean social judgment (similarity 0.81)
• Black middle-class respectability politics rejected lower-class cultural expressions as immoral. (similarity 0.80)
• Colonial middle-class Black parents policed their children’s cultural distance from the Black lower classes. (similarity 0.80)
• Black lower-class customs amounted to a political rejection of English bourgeois morality (similarity 0.79)
• Black middle-class advancement sharpened cultural divisions within black society (similarity 0.79)
• Color becomes the judgment criterion regardless of education or attainment (similarity 0.78)

Broader Connections

• Colonial moral epithets encoded specific class and racial transgressions #exemplifies (0.70)
• Education and refinement could qualify blackness in Antillean social judgment #exemplifies (0.60) — Frantz Fanon, Constance Farrington, Black skin, white masks, 995
• Colonial moral categories coded racialized peoples’ aspirations as dangerous affective excess #corroborates (0.60)