Black Excellence Won’t Save Us

If you’ve been keeping up with my latest blog posts, you’ll notice that community care over individual acts of self-care have been the theme for the last few weeks. This week, I turn my attention to another form of this that’s been on my mind for a while: Black excellence. 

Black people love for us to be the first of something (hello Barack and Michelle). We love being our ancestors’ wildest dreams. And above all, we love us some Black excellence. 

It’s too bad that what Black excellence does not love us back.

The shift from Black power to Black excellence, I believe, took the focus off of undoing systems that harm our entire communities to instead propping up the few of us who were able to slide through the cracks and enter spaces and places that were designed to keep us out. 

I’m not suggesting that Black people, and Black women especially, should not be proud of their accomplishments and reaching their goals. I am saying, though, that by prioritizing the individual over the collective, we’ve lost the plot.

This even seeps into how we advocate for ourselves. Consider most recently when journalist Joy Reid’s show was canceled by MSNBC. While the show’s cancellation undoubtedly spoke to the network’s shift in news coverage and who is allowed to tell those stories, it also happened as thousands of Black federal workers were being laid off from their jobs– what about them? Black women quickly rallied around Reid, who earned more than $3 million a year at MSNBC, while the working class women who suddenly found themselves without an income have yet to see the same organized response. 

Black excellence is dangerous because it centers on capitalism as excellence. And when capital is king, it can be used to excuse away how we’ve internalized tenets of White Supremacy Culture and uphold them within our own community. 

Black excellence is why we celebrate a Black person becoming the first chief officer at a company when said company won’t hire Black folks elsewhere. 

Black excellence is why we’ve overlooked and excused abuse from those with power and fame, as if their bank account gives them a free pass to abuse. 

Black excellence is why in the face of fascism and late-stage capitalism, we’re looking for ways to build our individual economic security (financial freedom classes won't save you), instead of demanding the conditions be set for us all to thrive. 

Black excellence keeps us chasing a lifestyle and aesthetic that’s unsustainable. We have to shift our collective consciousness and understanding of our worthiness from what White Supremacy Culture will give us, instead of what we deserve simply from having breath in our bodies. 

By focusing on individual accomplishments and achievements seeing our worth as a community through the lens of what we earn and the titles we’re given, we miss out on the collective progress we could be gaining. Black folks are worth so much more than a 30 under 30 or power list, and our 400+ years of systemic violence and oppression won’t be undone by propping up the handful of successful athletes, entertainers, and business people we have. 

Bringing this perspective to a DEI strategy is crucial, because DEI never should have been about getting Black faces in White spaces. It’s about completely overturning and shifting that systems that only allow one of us through the door at a time. 

So the next time you go to celebrate the first Black win of something, remember the cost that it comes at to our collective community. It’s okay to for us to shine, but we’re more powerful when we do it together.