Geographies of Fear: Race, Respectability Politics, and Dress

In reading Day (2006) and Brownlow (2005), I was struck by the refocusing of geographies of fear on the experiences of men. Both authors point out that perceptions of vulnerability in public space and potential for victimization are often thought of solely in terms of women’s experiences. In particular, I was struck by Day’s discussion of men’s experienced of being feared in public spaces, an experience that is deeply racialized. Day takes a social constructivist approach that explains the experience of being feared (or not) in public space as created at the intersection of men’s racial and gender identities “and the ways that men assign racial meanings to public places” (p. 570). In thinking about how racialized and gendered meanings are constructed and interpreted in public spaces, I thought about how the way individuals move through public space affects the ways in which they may be perceived in those spaces. I think two characteristics of movement through public space are worth focusing on here: dress and bodily comportment.

A few years ago, I came across this piece about dressing for survival for black men. The article discusses the ways in which some black men “dress up” to look less threatening, or appear in “a way that disarms the blackness and the potential for being seen as more black than human” (Yi). Indeed, we need not look any further than the numerous high-profile cases of young black men and boys murdered by police while wearing hoodies to demonstrate the ways in which black men must dress and carry themselves to counter the idea that they are angry, aggressive, and dangerous – or to bring it back to Day, that they are to be feared in public space.  

An anecdotal experiment taken on by a Buzzfeed writer in2016 illustrates some of the less severe consequences of dress for black men. In this experiment, Pedro Fequiere, a 24-year old black man living in New York City dressed up and down throughout a week and recorded his perceptions of how he was treated while moving through public space. Fequiere visits the same upscale lunch spot and bank while dressed up and down, observing differences in the way he was treated by staff and security. In short, Fequiere felt that even though he dressed down in clothing an average college student might wear to class he was frequently made aware of his blackness, even saying “there were multiple moments where I felt unaccepted and feared” throughout the experiment.

Photo Credit: Charlotte Gomez for Buzzfeed

Fear of racialized others “serves to maintain and justify exclusion and race oppression” and is a “key mechanism through which race privilege is constructed” (Day, 2006, p. 571). The ways in which these fears serve white supremacy are multifaceted and complex, but the consequences for black men are dire. Unsurprisingly, some seek to put the blame here on black men, through a system of respectability politics that maintains if black men and boys behaved better in public and presented a more palatable (“respectable”) image, their situation in life would improve. One prominent illustration of the flaws in the logic of respectability politics was CNN anchor Don Lemon’s commentsabout the black community in 2013. Lemon was addressing a critique by conservative pundit Bill O’Reilly in the wake of the Trayvon Martin murder case.  He suggested that black men take five steps to be more respectable: stop wearing saggy pant, stop saying the n-word, stop littering, finish highschool, and stop having children out of wedlock. The problem here, as many critics of Lemon’s remarks pointed out, is not the ways in which black men dress or carry themselves in public, but how those features of their identity are interpreted and perceived by those around them in ways that serve white supremacy. Respectability politics has a long history in this country as a thinly veiled, neo-colonial logic of control and dominance designed to serve the status quo of white supremacy. Nonetheless, many black men continue to dress up, to counter the ways in which they are feared in public, and above all, to attempt to survive in public spaces not designed for them.