Song 247: This week Respect Yourself by The Staples Singers, written by Luther Ingram and Mack Rice, takes its place on the playlist. In the middle of the fall of 1971, you almost couldn't go anywhere without hearing this song (or at least anywhere in the Chicago area where I lived at the time), and I considered that a good thing -- a very good thing, actually. Previously, I hadn't known anything about The Staple Singers, but I really liked the altitude and the attitude of this song, from their Be Altitude: Respect Yourself LP. I especially savored the line Take the sheet off your face, boy, it's a brand new day, with its implied thought that the members of the KKK did their dirty deeds with their faces covered so they could hide their identities, which proved that they didn't respect themselves. The track makes the fundamental point that if you truly respect yourself, then you will show that same respect to others, and conversely, if you routinely act disrespectful to others, then at your core, you don't respect yourself either. These ideas resonated strongly in that era with connections to both civil rights and feminism, but today, in a much different time and context, there still are, and will likely always be, plenty of people who need to hear and understand the message when someone says you ought to respect yourself. On a side note, this message of self-respect also relates to my political blog for this week, called Ayn Randed Part 3: The Hypocrites, which appears on both Politics 106 and Daily Kos.
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