Why Black Excellence is a Lie.

It’s a white-bred illusion that causes division and pain.

I recently came across an Instagram post of a mother celebrating her daughter’s academic accomplishments. Her elementary schooler had received awards for scholar roll, perfect attendance and good citizenship. The mother ended her celebratory post with “I am raising my daughter to be Black Excellence!”

I cringed.

My almost visceral response was borne not out of judgement but instead stemmed from a place of deep concern and worry for my people. The lie of white supremacy has set a dangerous snare and we are falling into it. For many, like the mom in the Instagram post, we step into the “good negro” qualifier trap, often unknowingly and unwillingly, because we have long been conditioned by a system of racism and caste that tells us three things:

• That being Black is simply not good enough. That Blackness equates to mediocrity, averageness, and insufficiency;
• That we must aspire to be more than Black in order to be of value. And that we must prove our worth and humanity by digging ourselves into a literal and metaphorical grave of Black excellence in order to be accepted by the institution of whiteness; and
• That we will never be a unified Black community.

Your Blackness is enough.

Society and media have for centuries created and disseminated propaganda in an attempt to justify the insidious violence propagated against Black people beginning with the forced colonization of Africa and the kidnapping, torturing and enslavement of Africans during the TransAtlantic Slave Trade and continuing with Jim Crow, Black Codes and the New Jim Crow era. While colonizers and capitalists constantly exploited and pillaged Africa of its natural resources, they simultaneously labeled it as the undesired “dark continent” filled with what they called “uncivilized” people. One of those colonizers was Henry Morton Stanley, who was accused of harsh violence and cruelty against Africans during his so-called explorations to the Continent in the late 1800s. Stanley created the term “Dark Continent,” stating in his book that was actually titled Through the Dark Continent, that “the savage” — his racist description of Africans — “only respects force, power, boldness, and decision.”

That racist descriptor of Africans on the Continent and later ones of Blacks in America as savage and brute (think The Birth of a Nation) would continue within all forms of storytelling, messaging and media as a tool used to shape a false and dangerous image of Black men and women in American psyche. Blackness became synonymous with words such as undesirable and unworthy. This framing would become so engrained in the fabric of every American institution that it would unfortunately become a lie that Black people themselves would internalize, even instilling in Black children a sense of inferiority and self-loathing.

Just look at the Black and White Doll experiment by Dr. Kenneth Clark and his wife Mamie Clark, which measured the psychological effects of racial discrimination on Black boys and girls. Black children were being conditioned by society to believe that their Blackness was so undesirable that they rejected Black dolls in favor of white ones, describing the white dolls as nice and pretty and the Black dolls as ugly and bad.

From the white-bred standard and definition of beauty that inundates television and movie screens, to the ill treatment of Black and Brown children within the U.S. educational system where girls and boys are not granted the freedom of kids just being kids as white children are but are subjected to biased and stricter treatment and school discipline, including being pushed into the criminal injustice system.

We know that this is all part of the European ploy of past and present to construct a hierarchial system where Black people would not only be intentionally and systematically placed on the bottom of every institutional ladder within society, but would also lessen how Black people see and think of themselves, and each other.

Why? Because from centuries ago to today, Europeans were threatened by and envied the beauty, harmony, innovation and brilliance of African people and cultures. History shows us that Africans were beyond mediocre, that we were made in the image and likeness of God. That we are reflections of God. And yes, that Jesus Christ was Black.

Such a powerful truth that Blacks are that close to God and are amazing beyond any earthly, white-supremacist controlled measure is too much for the white structure to fathom, so everything and the kitchen sink are thrown at it to ensure Blacks are not privvy to, but are distracted from, this truth.

Black excellence wont protect you from the lie of white supremacy.

In 2009, a Black, prominent Harvard scholar, professor Henry Louis Gates Jr., arrived at his Cambridge, Mass. home from an overseas trip to China. Gates was met with a jammed door and proceeded to force the door open with the help of his cab driver. A white woman who allegedly lived in the community called police saying she saw “two Black men” trying to break into a home in her neighborhood.

Gates and the taxi driver were able to loosen the lock on the door to his home, which was just blocks away from Harvard Square. Soon after entering his house, police arrived and began to question him, insinuationg that Gates did not live there. Gates would eventually be arrested and jailed.

The proximity to whiteness did not save Gates. By all intents and purposes, Gates would be seen as the epitome of Black excellence. His academic accolades, public perception within white spaces and his ascension to upper class status — all supposed markers of white acceptance — did not protect him from the bias or racism he encountered that day.

Just last September, a group of Black patrons enjoying a meal and listening to a jazz band were kicked out of a white-owned Florida restaurant after being told by white employees that they overstayed their time limit.

In an interview afterwards, two members of the group that was kicked out described themselves as “Black, successful professionals.” Still, their prestigious career titles neither their socio-economic status saved them from the assault of whiteness.

Additionally, I imagine the countless number of people who jeopardize their quality of life to toil away at goals that are not their own but are predestined for them by a society that says it will reward 40-plus-hour work weeks and the accrual of mountains of student loan debt.

This is all an illusion. We can’t work our way to excellence as a sign of distinction. We are innately amazing beings and must reject the social expectation that we have to work three times harder and do the most to be at the center of the white gaze. Many Black people live unfulfilled lives, suffer from strokes and other adverse health issues as a result. Trying to obtain the idea of Black excellence will have you digging your own grave.

Countless examples throughout history show us this, yet, many Black folk maintain their unfounded allegiance to the false premise that the closer they are to whiteness, the more comfortable they can make white establishment feel, the safer they will be. They vaccillate between the reality of systemic oppression and the fantasy of being seen as equal within such a treacherous, profoundly immoral whitewashed American system, knowing deep down that within the current system, the latter will only exist as such, a fantasy.

A unified Black community is a threat.

Stokely Carmichael, aka Kwame Toure, made a call for Black people to unite. He said it was a call “for Black people to recognize their heritage, to build a sense of community.”

The fear of the idea of Black unity and all that can be generated with it, is behind the divisive concepts such as Black excellence, and even colorism.

The advent of colorism — the idea that lighter skinned people of color are societally more favorable than darker skinned people of color — was intended to create division among the Black community by creating a false perception for a certain group of people of color that they will be accepted by the white social and political power structure. Think brown paper bag test. Even more disturbingly, think 1994 genocide in Rwanda, where European colonialism racialized the main ethnic groups in Rwanda, giving preferential treatment to one group over the other, pitting them against one another based on facial features and other markers of whiteness, which created the groundwork for the genocide that left about 1 million Rwandas dead.

This notion of Black excellence as a form of Black people distinguishing themselves from other Black folk to be as close to and accepted by whiteness is what I see as another divide and conquer tactic.

Colonization has created a mindset that we must exist in the form and fashion that best suits the sensibilities of the white dominant culture.

We must reject this premise and know that as God’s children, we are already more than good enough.