With All Due Respect: Respectability Politics and Black Support for Police Defunding and Abolition

This study explores whether respectability politics, the notion that marginalized groups should adhere to mainstream social norms of behavior and comportment to gain public acceptance, are associated with Black Americans' evaluations of police and their attitudes towards structural changes to police institutions. Conceptually, we propose respectability politics relies upon individual, dispositional attributions to explain racial inequality in society rather than systemic, structural blame. Our expectation was that respectability beliefs were associated with favorable views toward police and less tolerance for efforts to defund and ultimately abolish policing. Using data from the 2020 Collaborative Multiracial Post-Election Survey (CMPS), we find support for our hypotheses. We conclude that Black Americans’ who subscribe to respectability politics tend to resist a radical restructuring of police institutions, preferring to focus instead on ‘correcting’ individual behavior.