Is that respectable enough for you?

Is it possible to engage in civil disobedience while still adhering to respectability politics?

While this question is not often explicitly stated, similar sentiments frequently emerge during moments of mass mobilisation within liberal circles. To contextualise the concept, respectability politics refers to conforming to standards of behaviour that have been deemed to be virtuous. Evidently, these standards of behaviour have been used as a means of regulating racialised, lower-income, and other individuals of marginalised status. Respectability politics is contingent on the idea that there are undesirable behaviours, and thus, to be respected, individuals who present these traits must curate themselves through self-censoring. For racialised populations, this often occurs through code-switching.

Similar ideas manifest in mobilisation efforts. Respectability politics shape the way protestors mobilise and who protestors mobilise over. Within movements, there is an implicit assumption that mobilising over an ‘unfit’ victim will delegitimise the movement’s stance. As the Black academic, Glenn Loury infamously stated amidst the Black Lives Matter (BLM) protests in Ferguson, “[Michael] Brown is no Rosa Parks, and he ain’t Emmett Till either” as a reflection on the fact that Brown was not an ‘innocent’ victim. Even throughout the BLM protests of 2020, conservative media sought to criminalise George Floyd, as if a benign offence could justify murder. This was an attempt to undermine increasing support for Floyd and BLM more broadly by questioning his character. Nonetheless, these attempts to undermine the status of police brutality victims are a common tactic as participants in social movements often fear that the legitimacy of their cause will be questioned if the movement’s poster case is not deemed worthy of empathy or respect.

This standard also applies to the behaviour in protests. Amidst the outrage of racial injustice during the BLM protests of 2020, various op-eds explicitly condemned riots. Protestors were expected to be angry, but still be respectable in their behaviour. Riots were deemed irrational and unproductive, while peaceful protestors were seen as building sympathy for the cause. Even within peaceful protests, similar logic manifests. Pro-Palestine protestors in Toronto gathered on Avenue Road bridge to engage in an act of civil disobedience by blocking the road. Three protestors were arrested following these events. Beyond law enforcement responses, there was social condemnation. People were frustrated about the disruption that the protests caused. In the eyes of those who subscribe to the logic of respectability politics, there is a respectable way to protest, and interfering with the lives of civilians by blocking roads is not it.

But why are we expecting acts of civil disobedience to be respectful?

There is no denying that civil disobedience disrupts civil order, but that is the objective of such efforts. Social movements rely on a slew of advocacy and activist efforts in an attempt to incite change, some of which may be more or less advantageous to the average, apolitical, and apathetic citizen. If leaders of successful social movements were to consider and accommodate the slight inconveniences their campaigns caused, nothing would ever be changed. Defenders of respectability politics often cite Martin Luther King Jr.’s nonviolent protests during the Civil Rights Movement as the standard for contemporary movements. However, even in his own time, the American public and the government deemed MLK a terrorist who was destructive to the nation’s civil order. The same is true for Nelson Mandela’s anti-apartheid activism and Kwame Nkrumah’s fight for African self-determination. While MLK has become palatable to the general public, this was not always the case. This indicates that adhering to this moral ground does not guarantee respect or dignified treatment.

Respectability politics in social movements is counterproductive and counterintuitive. The objectives of many social movements are not to simply be deemed worthy of respect, but worthy of living a dignified life, and engaging in acts of civil disobedience should not affect this.

There is value in critiquing the organisation of protests to ensure that the most vulnerable populations are protected and that the movement’s organisation is efficient. But policing protestors through respectability politics is not productive in moments of mass mobilisation.