confessions.

words.

"...I realize that my being ladylike is an inherited struggle that never gets lighter. Even in a moment where this older generation could care less to seem respectable to the white folks. I don't have the words but I understand right there that black folk respectability is often parasitic instead of mutualistic. We feed on the (in)visibility of respectable gender performance that surrounds black bodies as validation of our own worth. It’s rare for black bodies to be mutually respectable in the same space at the same time. That’s too much like right. Hell, if anything, black folks’ respectability is commensal; the white folks that we model ourselves after are not even remotely affected by our performances.

Thirteen after my debut, I still invest in a performance of respectability. And only part of it is to please my grandmother. I feel an inherited obligation to move, walk and talk like the respectable Southern black women who have come before me, but I accept that I am not, and never have been, a conventional Southern belle. I do not, under any circumstance, want to be a white woman. I know now that the cyclical nature of race, gender, and respectability in the South is rooted in a history that privileges the white hand that writes it.

I realized at an early age that my kind of people wouldn’t be the ones twirling that lacy parasol; they’d be the ones behind it, or plotting how to get under it, or belittled by the ones doing the twirling. Yet those twirling ladies remained the standard, a romanticized whirlwind of Southern charm trying to push past racial disparity. If anything, black women’s push to be ladylike was a move to be acknowledged, to be visible on terms that registered as resistance in plain sight. Being ladylike signified a conscious effort to protect that little humanity publicly available for Southern black women. Today, I’m respectable on my own terms, respectable in way that branches from, but is not fully dictated by, Nana Boo and the countless other Southern black women who insisted on standing up straight, no matter the weight on their back, and being recognized — to themselves — as respectably black, feminine, Southern and human."

GAWKER: Confessions of a Recovering Black Debutante