Stop Dictating How Black People Should Spend Their Stimulus Checks
Respectability politics make it hard for us to just live free
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The writing was on the wall late last summer. Back in August 2019, Popeye’s created a fried chicken sandwich complete with a pickle, mayo, Louisiana hot sauce, and Cajun seasoning on a brioche bun that instantly became a phenomenon. Business Insider called it the “fast food item that defined 2019.” By November, Forbes stated that Popeye’s “reaped” a staggering $65 million in marketing value from the phenomenon — and Black people were the reason for the sandwich’s lucrativeness. There wasn’t a day that passed during that hot and sticky month where one could avoid a meme, tweet, or taped review about the tastiness of that sandwich and because of that, Popeye’s sold out of it in less than a month.
The criticism was swift, however, and it was coming from within our house. Ja Rule excoriated Black people for playing into stereotypes, the O’Jays lead singer Eddie Levert condemned those who ate the sandwich as a bad reflection of the African American community, and Janelle Monáe suggested that there be a voting booth at each Popeye’s location (to which she later apologized for the comment). None of this is surprising as Black people and fried chicken have been negatively linked to each other since the 1915 film Birth of a Nation. But this hyper-obsession with what and how Black people spend their money has taken both a familiar and unforeseen angle during the Covid-19 pandemic when Black social media users shame one another for how they intend to spend their $1,200 stimulus checks. Not only is this scrutiny unfair, but it also demonstrates the anxiety our community battles with by purporting that only certain representations of who we are can prove our social and economic value as akin to that of White people.
The encouragement for Black people to start a business or pay off loans with stimulus checks has its roots in the racial uplift ideology of over a century ago. Black elites such as W.E.B. Du Bois, Booker T. Washington, and, later, John H. Johnson believed that the best way to uplift the Black race was to embody respectability. According to Ayumu Kaneko, senior assistant professor in the School of Political Science and Economics at Meiji University in Japan, the…
