Black self-help movements actively inculcated mainstream bourgeois values into the poor

Evidence

The role of black churches, their educational institutions, and missionaries in disseminating bourgeois values underscores the bicultural reality of black existence in America. Starting in the days of slavery, but particularly in the decades thereafter, black men and women lived within spatial and ideological communities whose collective behavior developed not in a cultural vacuum, but in contexts continuously though unevenly informed by the social, political, and economic values and behavior of the dominant American society. Home missions and other self-help activities of black women served to inculcate within the masses of poor and uneducated blacks psychological allegiance to certain mainstream values and behavior. — Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent, 454

Categorization

• DEFINE: This shows black women missionaries deploying dominant-society values as instruments of self-help — a contradiction central to the politics of respectability that Higginbotham coined.
• XREF: connects to: Respectability politics mobilized working-class blacks toward racial self-help — Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent: The Women’s…, 94; Elite Black women’s self-help efforts reproduced racist views of poor Black women — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning: The…, 727; Black revolutionary consciousness formed independently of bourgeois thought and ideology (+5 more)

Broader Connections

• Elite Black women’s self-help efforts reproduced racist views of poor Black women #exemplifies (0.84) — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 727
• Respectability politics mobilized working-class blacks toward racial self-help #expands (0.82) — Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent, 94
• Black women’s separatist organizing added gender consciousness to racial self-help #expands (0.80) — Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent, 338
• Black revolutionary consciousness formed independently of bourgeois thought and ideology #contradicts (0.78)
• Capitalism integrated Blacks into production while shielding them from bourgeois ideology #contradicts (0.78)
• Ordinary poor black women practiced quotidian self-sacrifice to fund their church societies #exemplifies (0.76) — Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent, 312
• Nonviolent mass action handed Black liberation back to bourgeois mediators #complicates (0.74) — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 1282
• Segregation and violence pushed the black church toward collective self-help #qualifies (0.72) — Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent, 241