I don’t think “respectability won’t save you” does the work we want it to do. Because yes and no. Respectability won’t stop anyone from experiencing anti-Blackness. But, usually manifesting as a feature of class, it will shape how they experience it in important ways.

Respectability can be the difference between life and death in any particular moment, certainly. And I think we lose a lot of where anti-Black violence intersects with class when we say “respectability won’t save you.”

I get where the desire to remind folks we all experience anti-Blackness comes from, but as in conversations about colorism & gender & cross-diaspora coalition building, we have to also always acknowledge how we experience anti-Blackness differently if we’re going to get anywhere.

More than that, I worry that the way a lot of us approach movement building—where this work is presented as only as important as it can benefit the person doing the work—only reinforces this colonialistic individualism that’s at the root of exploitation in the first place.

(I also find this in how we [mis?]use “none of us are free until Black women are free”). What if we could do some work solely to benefit others in our community? What if we have to sacrifice our own freedoms, at least in the short term, for the freedom of Black women?

What if those of us with respectable designations (class status, degrees etc) had to give up being saved for those without access to respectability? Would this work still be worth doing?

I think the combahee river collective was saying that the health of the community is sometimes more important than the safety of an individual. That freedom is a communal experience. Not that all individuals should ultimately experience freedom in the same way.

If we admit respectability might save folks—that some of us do have some freedoms even when (& even because!) Black women aren’t free—but the community’s health is most important, then this can’t be enough. And emphasis will fall on community, where it always should have been.