"Fix Your Face" and "Watch How you Talk To Me." Perpetuating Inequality through Expectations of Respectability.
I woke up this morning thinking about the words “professionalism” and “emotional display.” Many of us attend courses and workshops that help us to become more “professional” so that we can adhere to the standards of the society and increase our chances at success. But adhering to the standards of a society that already stigmatizes you for your race/ethnicity, gender, the way you dress, or the money in your bank account, means that you have to also adhere to the ideology that counts any of those statuses as less than human, inferior, or unacceptable in some way. For instance, notions that women are too emotional, Black people are always angry, and Spanglish and Ebonics are inferior to “Standard” English vernacular are elitist notions that reproduce inequalities. But no one wants to admit that they are holding on to the practices that exploit and hurt them, do they?
By these standards, anyone who shows anger, cries and shows their pain, or uses the language and dress style of their family or age cohort, runs the risk of being judged as unworthy in some way. However, many of the people who judge or stereotype people in this way, even members of their own marginalized race, gender or social class groups, participate in an active dehumanization of those who chose to “be real” and not hide their emotions, language, or culture. I see this a lot in segregated communities. I definitely see it when members of those communities are shunned or turned down for positions because of some elitist expectation of "professionalism."
For starters, every human has human emotions. So then, the act of suppressing our true emotions, or making someone else do it, for a job or leadership position is called dehumanization and exploitation through emotional labor. The suppression perpetuates a notion that we must “work” our emotions to fit expectations of the situations and people around us. But any situation that requires you to suppress some emotions and evoke only certain others to for approval tells us that we must codeswitch and deny our emotions. We’ve all heard that “there is a place for everything.” That is, we must be less human or authentic than we really are so that we can please others and adhere to “standards.” Whose standards? The same notion tell us that we must be more robotic and dial our emotions down so that the audience is not “scared,” or taken aback somehow by our true feelings. Who is in that audience that would be afraid of us? And isn't their fear their problem? Who made someone else's reaction to us our issue?
If the listener refuses to acknowledge the authentic emotions of the speaker, then that listeners is not really willing to listen fully and actually thwarts any real attempt at communication. I know that this is exactly the opposite of what we were taught when people with authority said “Fix your face.” But true healing and humanization means that humans get to be all that we are, all the time. If we are angry, then we get to show it. If we wanna angry-cry, then we get to let it out right there in front of the people who created the situation that pre-empted our emotional response. And if we are actually proud of the fact that we grew up in a certain neighborhood or with a certain group of people, and lived long enough to become adults, then we get to speak in the language and with the “accent” that we were raised with. This can include jargon, word combinations from AAVE, or hard “rrrr’s” from Spanish. It can include twangs, drawls, and emotive facial expressions from regional or lower-class backgrounds.
There should be nothing in our communications with one another that requires less powerful people from being who we are and where we come from. We should not need provethat we are worthy of respectable from a people who seems to have never accepted us in the first place. We should not have to dial ourselves down for someone else’s comfort, or set ourselves on fire so that others can be warm.
But this is exactly what our elders and teachers taught us that it means to be “professional.” Part of the responsibility of an academic from less powerful groups is to make sure that members of marginalized groups know that they don’t have to fall for the respectability politics of remaking themselves to fit a standard to be taken seriously or considered as fully human. When we hear Black people from “the hood” speak, we just need to listen to what they say. How they say it, or what they wear while they say it, should not take away from what they say.
We have been erroneously socialized to believe that we don’t have to listen to people if they don’t speak, act, or dress the way we expect them to. We are wrong. And we are also wrong if we think we should have to contort ourselves to make people listen to us. We are not defective. They are wrong for wasting our time by putting all these prerequisites on our communication efforts. No one should have to jump through hoops to talk to anyone.
We said what we said, they said what they said, and I said what I said. And I'll just bet you understood it the first time we said it. Claiming to not understand is just a way of denying accountability for creating or perpetuation the harmful expectation of "respectability."
For further reading:
Cameron, C. Daryl; Lasana T. Harris, and B. Keith Payne. 2016. "The Emotional Cost of Humanity: Anticipated Exhaustion Motivates Dehumanization of Stigmatized Targets." Social Psychological and Personality Science, Vol. 7(2) 105-112.
Foronda, Cynthia. 2020. "A Theory of Cultural Humility." Journal of Transcultural Nursing, Vol. 31(1) 7 –12.
Giner-Sorolla, Roger, Rocío Martínez, Saulo Fernández, and Alexandra Chas. 2023.
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