The Eck’s Factor: R-E-S-P-E-C-T — find out what it means to policy

A few weeks ago, I voiced some concerns to my supervisor in a private email about a new protocol that I, as well as most of my coworkers, considered exploitative and inconsiderate to our time. Instead of receiving a response or private meeting request, my supervisor interrupted a staff meeting and berated me in front of my colleagues and shared my private email with my entire workplace. They read each line out loud before criticizing it, scoffed at my concerns and then finally said: “Your tone in this email was very disrespectful.” 

Did someone say “hostile work environment?” Yeah, that was me, and after reflecting upon this encounter for the past month, I feel that it speaks beyond your typical supervisor-employee dynamic mishap. It speaks to our workplaces and standards of professionalism — what we consider appropriate and its foundation in white supremacy. It speaks to our society’s perception of emotions and their role in discourse. 

And, it speaks to the concept matter at the forefront of this column: respectability politics. 

Broadly, respectability politics encompasses policymakers’ condition to engage in discourse only if advocates present their demands in a socially acceptable way. During the Black Lives Matter protests, for example, the peaceful protest, as opposed to rioting and looting, existed as the golden standard of respectability. However, because we saw no policy change from the “respectable” mode of communication, which police forces nonetheless confronted with violence, advocates’ frustrations boiled over and some rioted. 

But the nation frowned upon these riots, partly because respectability politics detests emotions. According to “White Supremacy Culture,” an educational workbook, white supremacy instills a fear of open conflict in our workplaces and culture, with the dominant group “[blaming] the person for raising the issue rather than [looking] at the issue which is actually causing the problem,” “requiring that people ‘calm down’ if they are angry when anger often contains deep wisdom about where the underlying hurt and harm lies” and “equating the raising of difficult issues with being impolite, rude, or out of line.” 

In other words, instead of allowing the natural flow of emotions, the dominant group will refuse to respect these concerns unless the person communicates through a respectful avenue. 

However, the entire concept of respect roots itself in white supremacy. According to Studio ATAO, a nonprofit that creates educational content to drive social change, “Respectability politics upholds the idea that the supposed worthiness of a marginalized group should be evaluated — that is, by comparing the traits and actions of the marginalized group to the values of respectability set solely by the dominant group.” These standards manifest in workplaces, for example, where employers prohibit natural Black hair in favor of Eurocentric beauty standards. 

These respectability standards infiltrate our cultural understanding of civil discourse. From respectability politics, we cultivated the “agree to disagree” and “just chill” rhetorics. During the 2020 presidential election, you could probably pinpoint someone’s exact vote if they posted a colorful infographic along the lines of, “No matter who you voted for, I will forever love you and respect you as a person,” with white hearts in the margins. 

At that moment, many of us saw the issue with respectability: Discourse becomes tricky when we appropriate “agree to disagree” in the name of politics. We can disagree over Ariana Grande’s casting as Glinda the Good Witch in “Wicked,” but it seems egregious to apply this same logic to issues where complicity contributes to any -ism, violence and death. 

So whenever respectability prevails and the parties agree to disagree, what are we supposed to do — stand by and find comfort in the fact that some situations are just very complicated? Because the dominant group dictates respectability, however, buying into respectability politics merely condones the status quo.   

For example, we can look at the recent controversy surrounding USC student Yasmeen Mashayekh’s now-deleted tweets, in which she wrote, “I want to kill every motherfucking Zionist.” We can all probably agree: It’s not morally right to direct murderous intent toward anyone, regardless of identity. We can also agree that antisemitic and anti-Palestinian rhetorics do not belong on campus nor anywhere. 

However, we must also place Mashayekh’s language in the context of the Israel government’s occupation of Palestinian territories. I cannot say it better than the online petition that circulated in support of Mashayekh: “The language of the oppressed toward their oppressor is a form of personal resistance, as opposed to the colonial violence that the Zionist project has enacted against Yasmeen’s people — a people that has historically been brutalized at the hands of settlers.” 

By looking at Mashayekh’s language in a literal sense, we default to the respectability politics paradigm, where we can only take her frustrations and concerns seriously if she expresses them without the emotions and like the millions before her — to no avail. The dominant group, the Israeli government, still holds the support of the United States, and Palestinians still suffer from its colonial violence. By not acknowledging the clear oppressor-oppressed dynamic, we perpetuate its cycle of negligence. 

This isn’t me condoning that we all run around and commit violent acts against each other. I’m saying that we should challenge our perceptions of incivility. We should think about the marginalized among us, their humanity and the root of their emotions before concerning ourselves with tone. It’s the least we can do to confront respectability’s suffocating weight. 

Matthew Eck is a senior writing about hot-button social issues in his column “The Eck’s Factor.” He is also the Wellness & Community Outreach Director at the Daily Trojan.