"Uplift Suasion" vs. Dysfunctional Black Behavior

Ultimately, our image is up to us

“UPLIFT SUASION” vs. DYSFUNCTIONAL BLACK BEHAVIOR

Ultimately, our image is up to us

John Washington

As a black center-left liberal who grew up under Jim Crow in the American South, I often ask myself a difficult but necessary question: “What is our racial image as black people today?” How are we seen by our fellow Americans—and by the wider world?

In April 2025, a large altercation broke out among black passengers disembarking from the Carnival Jubilee at the Galveston, Texas, cruise terminal. Video footage quickly circulated online, showing individuals shoving and trading punches in the baggage-claim and terminal areas.

What this incident reveals is an uncomfortable truth: when misconduct is caught on camera and widely broadcast, judgment rarely remains confined to the individuals involved. Instead, fairly or unfairly, it is projected onto the group with which the public associates them. In such moments, concern about racial image is no abstraction; it becomes immediate and consequential.

What made the episode especially notable was not only the size of the fight but the velocity with which it spread. Within hours, the footage went viral, drawing millions of views across social media. Predictably, outlets like Fox News amplified it with enthusiasm.

Such behavior is profoundly damaging to our collective image. It supplies those already inclined to disdain us with visual evidence that appears to confirm their prejudices. History has repeatedly taught us that an image, whether accurate or distorted, carries real consequences. Ignoring this truth does not neutralize it; it merely cedes the narrative to those least inclined to be fair.

This brawl represents how some of the world wants to see us. It is not an isolated incident, but part of a steady stream of real events replayed nightly on the news and endlessly across social media. There are people who profit from hunting for such moments, packaging them for clicks and outrage. Right-leaning politicians weaponize them. And, most troubling of all, we blacks continue to supply the raw material.

Even worse, the statistics on father absence, low academic performance, and high crime rates reinforce those stories.

As a native son of the South who attended segregated schools staffed entirely by black teachers, I was raised in an environment where our racial image was never taken lightly. We understood ourselves as a noble and resilient people—descendants of those who had survived slavery, endured trauma, and were at that time on the verge of breaking the final chains of segregation.

When we misbehaved, our teachers reminded us, quite firmly, that our conduct reflected not merely on us as individuals, but on our people as a whole. Bad behavior was not treated as private; it was understood as an obstacle to collective advancement. We were taught that defeating stereotypes required excellence, dignity, and discipline. We knew, deeply, that we were not ignorant, criminal, lazy, or sexually reckless, no matter how often those lies were repeated.

In many ways, what I call “Black Image 101” was an unofficial but essential part of the curriculum of black schools. We sought not only legal equality, but honor, respect, and recognition of our moral worth. Nobility, we were taught, had to be earned through restraint, self-respect, and achievement.

This ethos did not originate in Jim Crow classrooms. Its roots stretch back to slavery and flourished among free blacks in the nineteenth-century North. Facing a society saturated with racist pseudoscience and propaganda, early black leaders concluded that freedom alone would not secure recognition of our humanity; it had to be demonstrated. This belief led to a philosophy called “uplift suasion”: the conviction that we had to demonstrate, through our behavior, the best of moral conduct, education, and economic self-sufficiency to refute the lie of black inferiority.

That outlook shaped early black institutions: churches, schools, mutual-aid societies, abolitionist organizations, and newspapers. The message was uncompromising; we could disprove the lie by living the truth.

In the mid-2000s, Bill Cosby attempted to revive this tradition, urging black Americans to confront self-destructive cultural patterns in parenting, education, speech, crime, and personal responsibility. This campaign informed his speeches, books, and media appearances and aimed squarely at internal reform.

I completely agree with Crosby that at some point it became impossible to explain all our troubles by racism alone. Structural barriers were real, but they did not account for all outcomes, especially those rooted in family breakdown, academic neglect, and corrosive behavioral norms.

Cosby’s effort failed because it collided with a culture increasingly hostile to internal critique. By the early 2000s, appeals to responsibility were dismissed as “blaming the victim,” while grievance-based narratives had become institutionalized. His emphasis on agency threatened activists, nonprofits, and media figures whose influence depended on racism being treated as the sole explanation for inequality. Lacking broad support from respected black leaders, the campaign was politically unsustainable long before Cosby’s personal disgrace.

Uplift suasion itself came to be dismissed as “acting white” or “Uncle Tomism,” a supposed bid for white approval. Concern for image was reframed as betrayal. Critique, whether internal or external, was branded racist. Certain behaviors, once defended as authentic black culture, became insulated from scrutiny.

During a military tour in Germany in the late 1990s, I experienced a moment that exemplified this. I stopped at a gas station in a quiet, postcard-perfect village when, suddenly, out of the serene quiet, a deep, thundering bass rolled down the highway. The sound was unmistakable, loud American rap music. Moments later, a young black soldier sped past, his music shattering the village’s calm and vibrating the windows of my car.

My stomach dropped. I felt embarrassed by the Germans’ snickering as they watched the scene—not because of who he was, but because of the image being projected: loud, intrusive, indifferent to the context of German life or any human life. And I know that it was instantly associated with black America. In a country of 80 million people living within a space roughly the size of Montana, awareness of others is not optional; it is a cultural necessity.

In the United States, this same loud music often appears alongside other public behaviors—pants sagging below the waist, rudeness, and a disregard for basic manners—that stubbornly refuse to fade. Pull up to a stop sign and, suddenly, your personal space and radio are violently hijacked by the bass speakers of the car beside you. One can easily imagine what non-black drivers conclude about our racial image when subjected to this daily racket.

When I later told my wife, she shook her head with weary sadness, as if to say, “Why do we keep doing this to ourselves?” Yet a black friend to whom we related the story years later saw no issue at all, insisting the soldier was merely expressing a “noble black culture.”

If a particular expression of culture is offensive, disruptive, or dismissive of others, it cannot reasonably be called noble. Nobility implies discipline, self-command, and awareness of context. Anything less diminishes our racial image rather than strengthens it.

These behaviors are dangerous for our image, for those who disdain us in this country look for such incidents to verify their hateful attitudes towards us. Fox News had a field day with the Texas cruise incident, as did other media.

There is now a growing sense that we simply do not care how we are perceived, and that caring itself is a form of submission to white people. This marks a dramatic break from earlier generations. When we were portrayed as ignorant, lazy, undisciplined, or sexually irresponsible, it was widely understood that our conduct had to counter those lies. Uplift suasion emerged precisely because our forebears knew stereotypes could become self-fulfilling if left unchallenged.

Over time, that ethic faded. Integration played a role. White teachers avoided racial criticism out of fear of reprisal, while black teachers often hesitated to address sensitive issues in mixed settings. The collective guardianship of our image, once central to black life, gradually dissolved.

Until we confront, honestly and without fear, the question of who we are presenting ourselves to be, we will continue to suffer the consequences of an image that we reject but cannot escape.

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John Albert Washington is an octogenarian who has earned his daily bread, first, as an Army paratrooper and then, later in civilian life, as a computer support technician, two careers from which he has now achieved a double retirement. In and around these occupations, he fed his family with janitorial work, factory labor, and long-haul trucking, while also managing the completion of 2 years of college during the journey. Though he is not academically credentialed, he feels his short school life expanded his ability to think broadly and enhanced his analytical thinking skills. As a center-left liberal, he holds firmly that values like family commitment, self-sufficiency, and personal responsibility are not merely conservative but also deeply liberal ideals. He has published in Quillette and has two previous articles in the Journal of Free Black Thought: “Black Culture and the Euro-American Collective Brain,” “Blaming Racism Won’t Cut It,” “The Unraveling of the Black Family,” and “The Brother War.” He lives in Fayetteville, North Carolina.