Visit California Refuse here. And here’s a link to the post I mentioned about respectability politics. Transcription below.
Audio Transcription
[This reflection is a little primer on California Refuse, which you can find in the projects tab. This project has lived a number of different lives. It's existed in other versions, in other formats, in bits and pieces, and I'd shared those bits and pieces along the way, and now this is what it is and has become.
And maybe the most notable change in its process of evolution has been that there are now physical pieces involved in telling this story. I wanted to speak to the two primary inspirations for this piece. The first was a very specific path that I used to walk down when I was living in Oakland, California, and it was littered with trash that was just sort of scattered all over the place, and I became obsessed by the fact that somebody had taken the care to sweep the trash to the side of the overpass, but not to remove it.
And I guess I was obsessed by it because on one hand, that's strange, but on the other hand, there was something kind of honest about it. There was something about it that reflected the hypocrisy and sort of contradictions and the wealth disparities that are so visibly prevalent in the Bay Area. And I appreciated the visibility, like a visible representation of this tension that had always kind of bothered me a little bit, that this is a state which for so many people represents an idea of paradise.
And for so many people, the lived experience of it is quite hellish. So there's something about the trash being left there for so long and being swept to the side that stuck with me. So I took a picture of it, and I was thinking about it for years.
The second major kind of idea or theme that shaped this piece, California Refuse, was the idea of respectability politics. It was the idea of it and also my feelings of it, how that concept lives and shows up in my body. I'll just provide a little background about respectability politics for anyone who's not familiar.
So there's a professor, Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, who wrote a book called Righteous Discontent, the Women's Movement and the Black Baptist Church, 1880 to 1920. And I'm now referencing from an article on therapyforblackgirls.com. Respectability politics can be defined as the belief that behaving or appearing like the dominant group in society will deem you more respectable and therefore more valued. When it comes to our ancestors, proximity to whiteness was a means of survival.
As time went on, it began to be done to gain true freedom and privileges. And I'll just kind of add this other paragraph from this article. The problem with respectability politics is that it doesn't work.
It places the responsibility and blame on the victim instead of the systems that uphold it. So this is a concept that even before I knew what it was called, I was intimately familiar with because it just permeated every facet of my being growing up. And I want to really stress that when, in this case, I'm speaking to the experience of a Black family, like when a Black family is teaching their children respectability politics, it's generally not intended from a place of harm or from a place of suppression.
It's usually intended from a place of wanting your children to survive and wanting them to be able to navigate a society that wasn't built for them. That said, the cumulative effects of this are pretty intense. And there are a lot of different books that kind of, I think, do a great job of illustrating this.
Eloquent Rage is one that I highly recommend if you haven't read that one yet. So, yeah, it's a concept that influenced my life a lot and continues to have an influence. It's something I find myself grappling with more often than I'd like to because it's so deeply ingrained.
And so how does it intersect with that trash idea? It intersects because one of the fear of being discarded and the use and engagement with respectability politics to avoid being treated as if you are disposable. I sometimes find myself having this physical reaction. It's like kind of a closing in feeling or a compression or something.
And when I see videos or interviews or something or even real life examples in person of women, Black people, whoever I may be identified with, behaving in ways that I have been taught to put on a pedestal. So I guess that would mean people who are saying what I was taught were the right things to say or they are physically carrying their bodies in the way that I was taught were the safe way to carry your body or they're dressed in a way that I was taught were the safe ways to dress. And there is this a intense contracted feeling that I get when I see that because there's simultaneously like the old conditioning, which is to put that person on a pedestal and to put myself down because I'm like, Oh God, I'll never be that polished.
Like I'll never be that elegant. My life has been too messy. Like I'll never be able to portray that kind of image.
So there's that. And then there's a deep grief that takes root. That's like, Oh, I'll never be allowed to be a whole full person with like a dynamic past or a dynamic present or, you know, a three-dimensional life.
And I sort of, if I don't sort of interrupt or recognize that thought process, it can really become a sort of vortex of feelings of inadequacy or feelings of unsafety or both. And I suspect I'm not alone in having that feeling. And so even though it was very confronting to continue with this piece and to follow it through the stages of its evolution, it also felt important to do it.
And one thing that going through with it affirmed for me was like, if you work with trash, like as an artist, or just if for whatever, for whatever reason you go through trash, or you use recycled materials, I suppose, or reclaimed materials is the more elegant way of saying it. There's just a lot of stuff that can be repurposed. There's a lot of stuff that can be used.
There's a lot of stuff that is valuable, regardless of whether it has any monetary value anymore. There's a lot of stuff that is valuable. And I think that's a helpful affirmation when it comes to the way we can treat people that we don't perceive as being useful to, I don't know, amplify the economy or something.
I think it can also be helpful when it comes to our own shadows, the parts of ourselves, the parts of our experiences that we try to discard or shun or keep tucked away because we feel like, oh, that was not a respectable part of me. That's not an acceptable part of me. So it's a waste.
Or that experience was one I wouldn't want to have again, or it's a choice I wouldn't want to make again. And so it was a waste. But it really only is a waste if you let it be one.
And if you allow yourself to believe that. I have come to believe that everything can be valuable, and that everyone is valuable. So working on this piece helped affirm that for me.
And I still have so many moments where I drift back into that conditioned space, that contracted space of feeling as if respectability politics is my god, and I need to bow down to the altar of that. But fortunately, the more practice I get in just noticing how that feels, and then remembering that I have access to a way of being that feels more liberating, the less time I spend in that contracted state. That's all I'm going to say about California Refuse for now.
So thank you for listening, and I hope you enjoy taking a look at the pieces.]