You Are One of the Good Ones. But What Does That Make Everyone Else?
I have heard it more than once. In more than one country. From more than one person who meant it kindly.
“You are one of the good kind of immigrant.”
And every time I hear it I smile and say thank you and move on. I know it is meant as a compliment, that there is no harm intended, that the person saying it genuinely likes me and is expressing that in the language available to them.
But I have been thinking about that language.
Because implicit in you are one of the good ones is the existence of the other kind. The bad kind, the kind that does not qualify, the kind that has not done enough of the right things to earn the designation of acceptable.
And that is where the inherited scorecard starts running.
What Is Respectability Politics
Respectability politics is the belief that marginalised people can earn safety, belonging, and fair treatment by conforming to the dominant culture’s expectations of behaviour, appearance, language, and attitude.
The logic goes like this: dress appropriately, speak the right way, work hard enough, stay quiet about the right things, and perform an acceptable version of yourself in the right rooms and you will be accepted. You will be one of the good ones. And being one of the good ones will protect you.
The problem is that the protection it promises is unreliable.
Research on hiring discrimination has found that applicants can receive different treatment based on perceived ethnicity, even when their qualifications are comparable. Other research has found that people who speak non-standard language varieties can receive lower evaluations of their competence and suitability for a job.
These studies do not tell us what every immigrant experiences, or whether adapting to a new culture is beneficial. They show something more specific: meeting expectations does not guarantee that prejudice will disappear.
And when acceptance feels conditional, the effort to meet those expectations can become exhausting.
Where the Belief Comes From
Respectability politics as a named concept has roots in the history of African American communities in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, where leaders advocated for conforming to white middle class norms as a survival strategy and a pathway to civil rights. The intention was pragmatic: if we demonstrate that we are respectable by the dominant culture’s standards, they cannot justify excluding us.
The strategy had genuine successes and genuine costs. It produced real gains in specific contexts and real harm in others, particularly by creating an internal hierarchy within marginalised communities where those who conformed were considered more valuable than those who did not.
The strategy was pragmatic and it was also a trap. And a hundred years later the trap is still running, just in new rooms with new language.
It is the same logic that tells the immigrant to lose the accent, tells the woman to dress modestly to be taken seriously, tells the working class person to hide their background to advance professionally, and tells anyone outside the dominant norm that the price of admission is becoming a version of yourself that the dominant culture finds acceptable.
The inherited scorecard is what decides which version of you is acceptable. And it was built by people who were never going to be asked to conform to it themselves.
What It Costs
The cost of respectability politics is not only the exhaustion of constant performance. It is the internalisation of the hierarchy it creates.
I have felt this in small ways across every country I have lived in. The moment at a professional dinner in Australia where I softened my Brazilian directness because I could feel it reading as aggression in the room, or the time I caught myself not mentioning where I was from because the conversation was going well and I did not want to introduce the variable of being foreign into it. The specific calculation of how much of yourself to bring into a room and how much to leave at the door.
None of those moments involved anyone being unkind to me, and that is the point. The performance runs whether or not there is an audience for it. You internalise the scorecard and then you grade yourself against it automatically.
When you accept the frame that there is a good kind and a bad kind, you have accepted the premise that some people deserve belonging and some people do not. You have accepted that belonging is earned rather than inherent and that the criteria for earning it are legitimate even when they were designed by people who never had to earn it at all.
Nobody has to say I believe marginalised people are inferior because they just have to say you are one of the good ones. The hierarchy does the rest.
I am not saying this about the people who have said it to me. They meant it kindly. I believe that completely. But kind intentions do not change the architecture of the belief underneath the compliment. And the architecture is worth examining.
The Good Immigrant Looks Different Depending on Who Is Watching
If respectability politics concerns the standards people are expected to meet, those standards depend on the society and the circumstances.
In some European and North American hiring contexts, research has documented disadvantages associated with racial or ethnic origin, foreign qualifications, citizenship, and non-standard language varieties. In Gulf states such as Qatar and the UAE, migrant workers' experiences can be shaped by employment and residency arrangements that give employers considerable power. In Japan, researchers have examined the limits of policies intended to promote “multicultural coexistence.”
These are different situations, with different consequences. They should not be treated as interchangeable examples of immigrant life.
But they raise a related question: what forms of participation are welcomed, and what conditions must people meet to receive recognition, security, or acceptance?
The standards are not universal. They are shaped by institutions, social expectations, and the people with the power to enforce them.
That is what interests me about the inherited scorecard. It presents a particular set of expectations as though they were objective measures of a person's worth.
What This Has to Do With Marked
When I started researching Marked I was already thinking about which version of a person does the state decide is acceptable, which people get to exist without having to justify their existence, and what happens to the people who cannot or will not perform the version of themselves the system demands.
The Irish famine post was where this research started. The No Irish No Blacks No Dogs signs named a category of person who did not qualify for belonging regardless of how they behaved. The tradition outliving its reason post explored what happens when a culture builds belonging around marks that the state then decides to erase.
Respectability politics operates differently from the world of Marked, but both raise a question about who gets to define the terms of belonging.
In everyday life, conditional acceptance can depend on whether a person meets expectations they did not set. Maera, the protagonist of Marked, faces a more absolute problem: she does not exist on paper, and the authorities decide which evidence of her existence they will recognize.
Her story takes that question to a fictional extreme. What happens when the people who control recognition have already decided what counts?
The inherited scorecard can operate through hostility, but it can also hide inside praise. “You are one of the good ones” sounds like acceptance. The hierarchy inside the compliment is much harder to see.
If you want to explore these questions further, the Marked Research Series examines the history and ideas behind my novel. The Intercultural Glossary explains concepts such as the inherited scorecard and identity migration.
Have you ever been told you are “one of the good ones”? How did you interpret it? I would love to hear your experience in the comments.
Jessica Gabrielzyk
Sources
Higginbotham, Evelyn Brooks. (1993). Righteous Discontent: The Women’s Movement in the Black Baptist Church, 1880–1920. Harvard University Press.
Lippens, Louis, Siel Vermeiren, and Stijn Baert. (2023). “The State of Hiring Discrimination: A Meta-Analysis of (Almost) All Recent Correspondence Experiments.” European Economic Review, 151, 104315. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.euroecorev.2022.104315
Schulte, Niklas, Johannes M. Basch, Hannah-Sophie Hay, and Klaus G. Melchers. (2024). “Do Ethnic, Migration-Based, and Regional Language Varieties Put Applicants at a Disadvantage? A Meta-Analysis of Biases in Personnel Selection.” Applied Psychology, 73(4), 1866–1892. https://doi.org/10.1111/apps.12528
Quillian, Lincoln, and Arnfinn H. Midtbøen. (2026). “The Racialized Penalties of Immigrant Origin: Meta-Analytic Evidence on Hiring Discrimination in Twelve Countries.” Social Forces. https://doi.org/10.1093/sf/soag028
Liang, Xiaoxian. (2023). “Assessing ‘Multicultural Coexistence’ in Politics: An Examination of Japan’s Governance Model for Immigrant Inclusion.” Journal of the Asia-Japan Research Institute of Ritsumeikan University, 5. https://doi.org/10.34389/asiajapan.5.0_32
Human Rights Watch. (2026). World Report 2026: United Arab Emirates and World Report 2026: Qatar. UAE chapter · Qatar chapter
Humphreys, Joe. (2024, April 29). “‘No Irish, No Blacks, No Dogs’: How Common Were Such Notices in Britain?” The Irish Times. https://www.irishtimes.com/opinion/2024/04/29/no-irish-no-blacks-no-dogs-how-common-exactly-were-such-notices/
