Review of “Respectable: Politics and Paradox in Making the Morehouse Man”

Abstract

After generations of neglecting Du Bois as a founding figure of sociology, references to Du Bois now can seem like little more than a way to regurgitate traditional scholarship on racial inequalities with slightly different phrasing. Respectable is an exemplar of how Du Boisian scholarship should challenge assumptions across every aspect of mainstream sociology—what we study, why we study those topics, how to study those topics, and how to place oneself in relationship to the topic. Respectable, like the best of Du Bois’ work, offers a strong argument about a particular aspect of Black social life (here, the only all-men HBCU in the country) that speaks to an array of sociological topics of interest, from how rape culture is racialized to the elite co-optation of social justice for neoliberal ends to how generations of academic and political focus on a crisis of black men explains the intense policing of sexuality and gender presentation in Black institutions. As Grundy describes it, “incubating high achieving Black masculinity has become a laboratory for ideological experimentation by public and private interest groups” (190), a laboratory she helps us understand.