Language as a Tool of Obedience: From Home to Hustle Culture
How “Respectability” Became Supremacy in a Suit
They called it manners.
They called it professionalism.
They called it respect.
But what they really meant was:
“Make yourself small enough to be palatable to power.”
Because from dinner tables to boardrooms, from classrooms to comment sections, the language of obedience has been marketed as maturity. And the cost has been our authenticity, our brilliance, and our ability to speak truth without apology.
What if “being respectful” was never about character?
What if it was about compliance?
This week, we peel back the layers of respectability politics, hustle culture, and tone policing, and ask:
Who benefits from our silence being packaged as professionalism?
“Watch your mouth.”
“Fix your face.”
“Speak like someone’s listening.”
From Sunday dinners to staff meetings, what we’ve been calling manners or professionalism has actually been a centuries-old code of assimilation, enforced through shame, survivalism, and the myth of neutrality.
Because in supremacy culture, language doesn’t just communicate behavior. It polices it.
And at the heart of it all?
Whiteness, not as a race, but as a script.
Whiteness Is a Performance — Not an Identity
The majority of “white” culture in the U.S. doesn’t come from aristocracy, it comes from aspiration. (which breeds aspirational whiteness)
Poor immigrants.
Religious refugees.
Indentured servants.
All taught to mimic a system built by former feudal elites.
WASP culture (White Anglo-Saxon Protestant) became the dominant mythology, not because it was the majority, but because it was the most politically and economically useful.
Respectability was the entry ticket.
“If you can fake it, you can make it.”
“Dress for the job you want.”
“Speak like them. Sit like them. Eat like them.”
And that “them” was always coded as wealthy, Protestant, upper-class, and emotionally suppressed.
Let’s tell the truth:
Whiteness is not a culture, it’s a performance.
And language has always been its favorite costume.
Because whiteness, as we know it today, didn’t descend from heaven wrapped in silk and scripture. It was cobbled together by elites trying to preserve power… and by poor Europeans trying to survive.
The dominant white-bodied culture in the U.S., what we now call “WASP” (White Anglo-Saxon Protestant), was shaped by aristocrats who crossed the ocean carrying feudal ideals in their suitcases. And everyone else? Former indentured servants, refugees, peasants, they were handed the script and told: play the part if you want a place at the table.
That table, mind you, was already stolen from Indigenous hands.
But the performance? The performance had rules.
Respectability Is Not Neutral — It’s a Script
From “speak properly” to “dress for the job you want,”
from “don’t talk back” to “stay in your lane,”
we’ve all inherited the myth that if we perform well enough,
we’ll be safe, accepted, successful, loved.
But here’s the bitter truth:
Respectability is not protection. It’s pacification.
It teaches us to cut the edges off our voice,
smooth out our culture,
flatten our emotions,
and submit to a performance that was never made for our thriving.
It’s how whiteness tricks even those it harms into becoming its messengers.
And yet —
what would this world be like with truly diverse expressions and joy?
What would our workplaces, schools, and sanctuaries feel like if they honored rhythm, dialect, adornment, slang, laughter, stillness, story, and emotion as sacred?
We catch glimpses of it all the time, in the richness of Black American hood culture that gets co-opted, commodified, and sanitized into mainstream trends.
The fashion, the lingo, the music, the vibe, stolen, stripped of context, and sold back to the masses.
There’s a phrase that speaks this truth:
“Ghetto until proven fashionable.” — @Nareesha Willis
That’s not just a quote, it’s an indictment.
Of a world that wants our culture but not our people.
Our expression, but not our existence.
Our rhythm, but not our rage.
Because this system doesn’t truly fear difference, it fears uncontrolled difference.
It fears expression it can’t monetize.
It fears joy that refuses to assimilate.
Whiteness as Performance, Not Identity, Not Ancestry
Let’s tell the truth: Whiteness was never a heritage. It was a hustle.
This system was never just about white bodies — it was about white behavior.
Because whiteness is not ethnic.
Whiteness is not ancestral.
It was built not on bloodlines, but on behavior, a performance passed down by proximity to power. Because whiteness is not an identity. It’s an aspiration.
It is the echo of empire, whispered in the accents of assimilation.
It asked poor Europeans, indentured servants, and religious refugees to trade in their surnames, their songs, their spices, their dances — in exchange for the illusion of safety.
It taught them that dignity required distance from their own roots.
That to be American was to be less Irish, less Italian, less Slavic, less Yiddish — and more obedient, sanitized, still.
It taught people to abandon their own languages,
to mock their own dances,
to eat without flavor and speak without fire,
to quiet the hands, still the hips, and straighten the tongue.
Because the price of admission was assimilation.
What we now call “professionalism” is the afterlife of aristocracy.
It mimics the rules, mannerisms, and etiquette of the elite… holdovers from feudal England and Victorian restraint, and then enforces them as moral law through Christian dominance.
And those who paid it were told:
“If you fake it long enough, you’ll make it.”
And so whiteness became a script:
Sit up straight.
Smile politely.
Don’t interrupt.
Keep your hands still.
Use your “inside voice.”
Don’t dress too loud.
Speak properly.
Not because it honors who you are, but because it hides what you came from.
This is where we get the sacred cows of supremacy culture:
“Pull yourself up by your bootstraps.”
“Fake it till you make it.”
“Dress for the job you want.”
“Don’t air your dirty laundry.”
“If you just work hard enough…”
“Don’t rock the boat.”
“Be professional.”
“Act like you belong.”
But here’s the thing, love, if you have to act like you belong, it means you were never meant to in the first place. The space was never designed for your thriving.
If the price of entry is erasure, it’s not a home. It’s a costume party.
Because the truth is:
Whiteness didn’t liberate anyone.
It just offered proximity to power, in exchange for your story.
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