What’s Good: Miley, Nicki and the Politics of Respectability

Respectability in a nutshell.
Image via Flickr user Alan Tarkus.

In my work on lynching plays, I have spent a decent amount of time pondering whether or not theater (and art in general) can save us: from actual violence, from our failings, from ourselves. And the simple truth is that I have no idea what will save us, but I have learned unequivocally what won’t: 

Respectability politics will not save us.

Respectability politics, as defined by Mychal Denzel Smith in The Nation, is “the idea that one can overcome racism (or any other form of oppression) by way of your personal actions, presenting one’s self as a citizen worthy of respect as defined by the dominant cultural norms and standards” — that if marginalized peoples behaved correctly, they will be given access to all the privileges that remain perpetually out of reach for them. Angelina Weld Grimké wrote the play Rachel in service of that argument to present Black humanity and its destruction under lynching to White audiences.

According to the Washington D.C. Public Library:

Alain Locke, in Plays of Negro Life (1927), said of Rachel, ‘Apparently the first successful drama written by a Negro and interpreted by Negro actors.’ And the NAACP production program said of the play, ‘This is the first attempt to use the stage for race propaganda in order to enlighten the American people relating to the lamentable condition of ten millions of Colored citizens in this free republic.’

Forty years after Rachel was produced, Emmitt Till was lynched. An eloquent plea written by a Black child of privilege commissioned by the leading race-based organization of the time and sanctioned by the first African American Rhodes Scholar could not save the life of an innocent 14-year-old boy with a four-decade head start. It does not get any more respectable than that and it failed. Yet we continue to believe that good behavior will save us.

It will not. It cannot. It has not.

Contemporary manifestations of this conversation are everywhere, but one needs look no further than this weekend’s Video Music Awards (VMAs). While this pop culture spectacle is an annual petri dish of nonsense, the VMAs can serve as a diorama of our contemporary moment. Both Nicki Minaj and Miley Cyrus embody problematic representations, however, Cyrus took it upon herself to tone police Minaj in The New York Times. At the VMAs, Minaj responded and was called a “savage” in Salon — one of the less subtle pieces ofcoded racist language in the lexicon. While it can be argued that each woman’s problematic elements are more or less equitable, racism as an institution allows the “newspaper of record” to minimize Cyrus’ negativity while magnifying Minaj’s.

Minaj is the anti-Rachel: “rude,” “savage,” “hypersexualized” and unapologetic. She is often maligned for refusing to engage with a dominant narrative that wishes to dismiss her unless and until she is more respectable. But what is respectable? And who gets to decide? Why do any of us think we’re qualified to make that decision? While I don’t always agree with Minaj’s choices, I admire her argument: none of us get to dismiss the humanity or validity of anyone else just because we’re uncomfortable with how they behave.

This was further highlighted for me in the comments of Scott Walters’pieces regarding “Cellphone-gazi” and performance decorum. The tone of many of the comments boiled down to

“Sophisticated audiences do not interfere with great art, and unsophisticated people should confine themselves to other spaces.”

One of the arguments I believe Walters was making is that we have redefined what this means throughout the ages so there is no such thing as objective sophistication. I want to further argue that racism, sexism, heteronormativity, ableism and any other form of powered exclusion have informed whom we include when we define sophistication or respectability. Whenever any of us are policing the behavior of another, we have to be willing to recognize how we are informing a narrative of exclusion.

So, what does a counter response to respectability politics look like? As I said in the beginning, I’m not certain that there exists one right answer, but I do have some suggestions for challenging the narrative individually and institutionally:

• Recognize that all opinions are subjective regardless of the number of people who agree.
  • Standards of etiquette count as opinion.
• In recognizing that all opinions are subjective, own yours as such.
  • “I prefer to watch theater without cell phones” is different from “No one should experience theater with cell phones.” Your preferred experience may not be someone else’s and both can be okay.
• Be mindful of asking others to adapt in ways you are unwilling.
  • Miley, when you want to engage honestly around your cultural appropriation I’ll be happy to discuss Nicki’s tone.
• Try to understand the message before you dismiss the messenger.
  • Ignoring a valid argument because it isn’t packaged “correctly” is willful ignorance at its finest.
• Acknowledge that asking someone to behave better so that you don’t mistreat them, particularly if you may have already mistreated them, is an act of violence.
  • No matter how benign the language may seem, the threat is clear: act like you belong or you will be harassed/dismissed/ignored/harmed.

Respectability politics trick us all into believing that we can objectively determine someone’s value based on parlor tricks and window dressing. I challenge us all to consider alternate ways to engage with each other and our art without perpetuating false hierarchies and structural inequalities.

In short, audience: what’s good?

Post originally appeared in The Clyde Fitch Report on September 3, 2015.

Modern Lynchings, Vintage Plays

Some women-authored lynching plays.
Photo Credit: Serge Limontas-Salisbury II.

Charged(adjective): filled with excitement, tension, or emotion.

Charged(adjective): accused of something, especially an offense under law.

Charged(adjective): entrusted with a task as a duty or responsibility.

All representations are charged representations.

Every time we create, replicate or reproduce something, we make a statement. We charge that representation with everything we are and everything we are not. And while we aren’t (and shouldn’t be) limited to art that is a reflection of ourselves, all art that we create and consume exists in relationship to who we are. The moment you frame a photograph, compose a line, choose a color or find a medium, you begin to represent something about who you are and the world you live in.

I am currently struggling with the world I live in.

My name is Courtney Harge, and I am a black woman who also happens to be a theater producer, director and arts administrator. I have been studying and working in theater since I was 12 years old. I founded my own company, Colloquy Collective, in 2011. My work centers on examining the intersections of race, identity and theater through reviving pre-existing work. Simply, I ask this question: what can we learn about our present from works created in the past?

For the last six months, I have been directing women-authored lynching plays. In Strange Fruit: Plays on Lynching by American Women, Kathy A. Perkins and Judith L. Stephens define these works as “[plays] in which the threat or occurrence of a lynching, past or present, has major impact on the dramatic action.” It has been disheartening to realize that these plays, all written before 1930, also accurately depict life in our current reality. As Perkins and Stephens go on to state:

…lynching plays are both a dramatic record of racial history in the United States and a continuously evolving dramatic form that preserves the knowledge of this particular form of racial violence and the memory of its victims.

The cast of Rachel: Lauren Lattimore, Santoya Fields, Temesgen Tocruray, Bonita Jackson and Damone Williams. Photo by Stefano Giovannini.

In other words, Black life is a life in which the threat or occurrence of a lynching — or stop-and-frisk, or the school-to-prison pipeline, or anynumber of systems built on a racist infrastructure, past or present — has a major impact on your everyday actions.

For the last six months, I’ve read the words of Black women affirming the humanity of our people written over the greater part of the last 100 years and I have a visceral understanding of that impulse. These women used these plays to profess #BlackLivesMatter in the face of unimaginable horror. They used these representations to accuse the broader population of neglect and entrusted these characters with their legacy. These authors charged these representations with saving their people and I get to experience firsthand that it didn’t work.

Every name we say reaffirms that failure. Much like the lynching play as dramatic form, lynching (the action) is continuously evolving. Lynching is688 police-involved shootings since Jan. 1, 2015. Lynching is five women found dead in a jail somewhere in the U.S. during the month of July. Lynching is what happened to Trayvon Martin. What happened toTamir Rice. To Eric Garner. Michael Brown. Walter Scott. Akai Gurley.Sandra Bland. Sam Dubose.

Some things aren’t as far away as we’d like to think they are. Via /

For the last six months, I have explored the difference between the America in which these women playwrights lived, and the one in which I presently reside. The difference is miniscule and I am no longer able to accept arguments to the contrary. There is nothing like experiencing a play from 1916 and hearing characters speak your 2015 pain.

As I said at the beginning, all art that we create and consume exists in relationship to who and what we are. And what I am is tired of a prevailing narrative which tries to silence marginalized people with fictionalized notions of “impartiality” and “objectivity.” A narrative that tries to minimize my anger as stereotype while ignoring its impetus. A narrative that insists if marginalized people behaved better we would survive. Angelina Weld Grimké‘s 1916 play Rachel was written expressly to support this narrative.

This is from Koritha Mitchell’s critical study Living with Lynching: African American Lynching Plays, Performance, and Citizenship, 1890-1930:

[Rachel] is a full-length, sentimental play whose emotional appeal largely hinges on the similarity between whites and blacks. In fact, Grimké later explained that she had written the play to convince whites, especially white women, that lynching was wrong, as illustrated by the fact that even upstanding black citizens were vulnerable to it.

In presenting a family, named Loving, that is above reproach, Grimkéwas saying “don’t kill us because we’re just like you.” We are worth saving because we know how to behave. If you view us, impartially and objectively, as people as opposed to black people, you will see that lynching is wrong. That is a problem for me, mostly because it did not work. Therefore:

• My humanity is not up for negotiation.
• Impartiality and objectivity do not exist.
• Respectability will not save any of us.

For the last six months, I’ve read the work of many women from long ago who did an excellent job of telling the stories of people who lived with lynching. They presented the best of humanity arising out of the worst of circumstances. I am thankful for them. And I have been charged to go a step beyond by using their works as a mirror with which to judge our progress, or lack thereof. I am here to stop our collective back-patting around race and art and ourselves because those works prove that we have not overcome. I am here to continue the difficult conversations about the ways in which our artistic representations have real-world consequences.

I invite you to join me in this conversation. Throughout the month of August, a full production of Rachel, directed by me, is running at theIrondale Center in Brooklyn, New York. Each performance will feature a talkback with the cast and crew, which will be an opportunity for the audience to offer its thoughts and reactions. Tickets are free, and can bereserved here.

All representations are charged representations. Let’s see what exactly they’ve been charged with.

Post originally appeared in The Clyde Fitch Report on August 6, 2015.