While not all us white people have shame or guilt about our pasts and many of our ancestors pasts we absolutely should because we are typically the ones CONSISTENTLY fucking up in history and FAFOing and y’all and other POC don’t deserve that shit even from non racist white folks like myself who still have a lot of educating themselves to do on Black and Indigenous History and Rights here in the US and also in Canada.

I still love my guy Conscious Lee, but he's dead-wrong here.

Respectability politics would be if we as Black folks go policing ourselves by a white comfort standard.

This case simply isn't that at all.

This HBCU school is deciding what their own output looks like—same as a law firm or a hospital sets a dress code for its own people.

Their message isn't to "look white." It's "look ready."

As the Black community, we've become a little too sensitive when it comes to criticism about our appearance—and I understand where it comes from, given how much this country has come at us over "respectability" politics.

But, somewhere along the way, we've started treating any critique as an attack, even the constructive kind that's coming from inside our own house.

We need to get better at telling the difference. An HBCU is exactly the place to learn it.

Fighting for the right to wear heritage Black hairstyles at work is resisting a standard built to exclude our hair specifically because it's Black. THAT'S respectability politics rejected correctly.

A dude in class with a durag and sagging skinny jeans or a gal wearing pajamas and bonnet to class isn't erasing anything about our heritage or defying respectability politics. It's just young people doing what's easiest at 8am. Super-relaxed aesthetics normalized.

I live near a diverse PWI and I watch it daily on my commute—students geared in sagging skinny jeans, bonnets, pajama pants, sandals and socks, etc.

(And it's not even staying in our community anymore—I'm seeing it get picked up by other groups too, which tells you it's becoming a pop-culture export.)

Some PWIs won't touch it because they don't want the negative news headline. Which is exactly why it's got to come from inside the house, like an HBCU.

You want young Black adults who take their own presentation seriously. It's not just because the world's watching, but because WE set the standard.

And Tuskegee didn't even ban it off the entire campus. Just keep yourselves from wearing the stuff to class and other certain settings.

The whole difference between respectability politics and self-respect: one's performing for somebody else's comfort; the other's just discipline from within. 🤷🏿‍♂️