Y’all ever notice how some white people love to tell you you’re one of the good ones? Not to everybody, now. You’ve got to get close first. Quiet. Easy to be around. Then they lean in like they’re about to do you a favor and let it out—one of the good ones. And every time, I’ve got the same question. Good compared to who?
You don’t even have to think hard about it. That phrase doesn’t work unless there’s a bad batch of us somewhere you’ve decided to hold us up against. So it was never a compliment. It’s a filing cabinet, and somebody just slid your folder into a different drawer… For now.
And every time, I’ve got the same question. Good compared to who?
Be honest about who gets offered it... You get it after you’ve proven you’re easy, after you’ve picked up the rules nobody ever wrote down. Keep your voice down. Don’t bring up race unless they crack that door first. Do it long enough, and here comes the little title, and you hold on to it right up until the day you don’t. Push back one time and watch how fast that folder flips back. That part you might already know from your own life. What I want to get into is the part that’s way older than whatever conversation you had.
Whoever said it to you didn’t come up with it. A historian named Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham gave it a name back in 1993: the politics of respectability. She was writing about Black women a hundred years ago who figured maybe if they dressed right and talked right, white folks might finally leave them be. They weren’t dumb for trying. That was survival. The deal never actually paid out…for obvious reasons. You could do everything right and still come out wrong, because right was never really the point. Their comfort was the point.
When a Black person gets killed, folks start sorting the body before it’s even in the ground. Digging through a dead teenager’s record, trying to decide where to place them, like the answer would tell us whether they deserved to keep breathing. The week they buried Michael Brown, 18 and unarmed when an officer shot him, the New York Times ran a whole profile that called him “no angel.” Disgusting…
And if some of you still think being the good one keeps you safe, look hard at Dr. King. He had a Nobel Prize and about as much respectability as this country will ever let a Black man carry. The FBI tapped his phones for years anyway, mailed him a letter telling him to go on and kill himself, and he still got shot standing on a balcony at 39. It didn’t save him. It was never built to. It’s just a story they tell you so you’ll keep yourself in line and thank them for the chance to do so.
I never chased it. Never once wanted to be one of the good ones, because I never believed there was such a thing to be. And like I said, not every Black person even gets the offer, so let’s call it what it is. It’s a leash. They just save it for the ones they’ve decided are close enough to hold, and they try to wrap it up nice, so you’ll say thank you. We are not monoliths. We were never a good pile and a bad pile sitting around waiting on somebody to sort. We’re millions of whole people, every kind there is, and ain’t no folder big enough to hold all that. I’m good right where I am—standing with all of mine. --- Sources:
“Politics of Respectability” from Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, [Righteous Discontent] (Harvard University Press, 1993);
The New York Times’ “no angel” profile of Michael Brown
FBI’s surveillance and harassment of Dr. King from the U.S. Senate [Church Committee]
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