Forget “Fairness”
Fairness as Respectability Politics
“Fairness” is the latest iteration of respectability politics. But dignity is not up for debate.
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The Latest News
Sept. 12, 2025
The only thing I am going to say: Read my latest on respectability politics, and specifically how “fairness” has become the latest iteration of respectability politics in America.
From the article, at The Advocate:
One essential and relatively easy starting place is to stop debating bigots in their own discursive fields by refusing the language of fairness. Instead, we should adopt the language of freedom — of opportunity, self-determination, and dignity. Dignity, in fact, is an antidote to the respectability politics of equality. “Demands for dignity are demands for a fundamental recognition of one’s inherent humanity,” Black feminist and author Brittney C. Cooper wrote in Beyond Respectability. “Demands for respectability assume that unassailable social propriety will prove one’s dignity. Dignity, unlike respectability, is not socially contingent. It is intrinsic and, therefore, not up for debate.”
Forever prescient, forever untimely ~
Marcie
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