Founded in the basement of the Springfield Baptist Church in Augusta, GA, our dear college was constructed out of the promise of uplift and hope for black communities just a few short years removed from failed reconstruction era policies.
To be sure, this promise –one that many HBCUs share –has somehow been able to sustain the toils and snares of a country that, since its inception, has been riddled with vast inequities that have plagued black bodies.
The entire conglomerate of HBCUs, it seems, serve primarily as a metaphorical ladder implanted in communities all over the country as an avenue of escape out of the ghettos and socioeconomically dispossessed states of living many have found their ways in.
Throwing on a three piece suit, “cleaning up” perceived trashy language, and challenging students to pursue respectability are all mantras that seem to have created paradoxes when coupled with the idea that HBCU students have some duty to go back into riddled communities.
Unfortunately, the education of black and Latino men and women of color has forged tiny respectable utopias across the country where sagging pants and foul language are often admonished and rarely respected as an admirable form of expression in the eyes of administration. Outside those gates, we barely lift our voices above a whisper. In many cases, we dig trenches around our tiny bubbles as to create more distance from ourselves and the communities that struggle most.
In essence, we perform for a gaze –a heteropatriarchal gaze at that –which tells us that if we are respectable: using proper diction, standing upright, abandoning foul language –then we stand a chance of being presentable enough for this gaze to achieve upward mobility.
This gaze has been the root of the ideals we seem to hold most true. And in doing so, those who are not respectable are dehumanized, even demonized for not fitting within this mold. I’m guilty myself. But the fact remains, we other the very black bodies that desire the promise of climbing the same ladders we have had the privilege to climb. We do so in the name of respectability.
But this summer laid to bear a stark reality that faces black life today: trading our sagging pants for suits and our sometimes foul language for a newly formed loquacity does nothing to address the systemic inequities and injustices that plague black bodies nearly 150 years after reconstruction. In 2013, respectability did little to stop key provisions of the Voting Rights Act from being stricken and George Zimmerman from being acquitted of murder.
Albeit in different forms, the most respectable in our communities have just as much recognition as the cookie cutter negro in the hood have in the eyes of the gaze. Henry Louis Gates and Trayvon Martin are only separated by two or three degrees.
For HBCUs, we are left with no choice but to use the summer of 2013 as an important lesson: respectability is not a viable politics because it forces distance between our colleges –founded on uplift –and the communities in which we reside.
To that end, we often find ourselves having conversations about our communities instead of engaging them to find ways to make their lives better.
Instead, we must find strategic ways to address the systemic issues that face the underserved and unprivileged. The question must inevitability turn to how we can ensure that black bodies, whether suited and booted or pants to the floor, can have equal economic opportunities. Because the present reality is that respectability does little to liberate even respectable black bodies.
We can have a million more conversations about the n-word and sagging pants, but they do little to change the conditions that surround us. That changes when we start including our communities in what we represent as HBCUs.
Jared Loggins
Managing Editor
