Respectability theorists prioritized inner moral reform over structural environmental change

Evidence

Yet Burroughs placed greater responsibility on her own people: “In Washington City there is much talk about getting the seventeen thousand Negroes out of the alleys. To the student of euthenics, who believes that the shortest cut to health is by creating a clean environment in which to live this plan is most feasible, but to do a work that will abide we must first ‘get the alley’ out of the seventeen thousand Negroes, and it will be an easy task to get them out of the alley.” — Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent, 926

Categorization

• SEED: The ‘get the alley out of the Negroes’ inversion is a vivid quotable for an essay on how moral-uplift discourse defers structural reform.
• XREF: connects to: The politics of respectability fuses personal reform with structural protest — Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent: The Women’s…, 859; Moral self-evaluative incentives outweigh material ones in environmental change programs — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement: How People Do Harm…, 2945; Moral reform requires structural change, not promises of better future conduct — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement: How People Do Harm…, 1588 (+3 more)

Broader Connections

• Burroughs prioritized internal moral reform over the physical alley conditions #exemplifies (0.94) — Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent, 926
• Moral reform requires structural change, not promises of better future conduct #contradicts (0.88) — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 1588
• Moral self-evaluative incentives outweigh material ones in environmental change programs #corroborates (0.82) — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 2945
• Respectability’s work ethic fused individual self-help with collective race responsibility #expands (0.80) — Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent, 961
• Crusading moral idealism, denied other outlets, turned inward against external change #expands (0.78) — John Higham, Strangers in the Land, 1782