I’m Celebrating Juneteenth by Letting Go of Black Excellence

I grew up hearing about Black excellence over and over and over again and the way it was described was as an expectation and it always reminded me of the idea of the success gospel advocated milliionaire pastors leading giant mega churches in Texas who shall be unnamed where the implicit takeaway is that he has all of this wealth and all of these incredible blessings that a higher power has bestowed upon him because of…… well that's unclear. Prayer perhaps.

The implicit counterpart of the success gospel is that those who do not have and are in need of support have been judged as unworthy of the blessings that the millionaire pastor enjoys. The idea of Black Excellence has always rubbed me the wrong way because I grew up in abject and extreme poverty. In the words of Biggie, “Christmas missed us” a lot growing up.

I can count on one hand the number of birthday parties where I received a gift. For most of the time that I grew up, I didn't have a bed to sleep in. I shared the floor with a few blankets with my siblings in one room without a door. I still have uneasiness with ideas like The Talented 10th and the pervasive idea that when there's not enough to go around, communities should funnel resources and support to the ones who are actually going to make it, and that's somehow a boon to all people of a particular group.

It is a variant of the meritocracy myth, but it applies to people who are maligned and who have struggled to survive. It is not that I am not supportive of those of us who are Black who achieve greatness in spite of all the challenges that we face or that have been put in our way. I'm all too familiar with those challenges as someone who grew up in a single-parent household with four siblings and who relied on welfare and food stamps. I'm the only one of my siblings who graduated from college and earned a graduate degree.

I'm also the first person in my family to start a business at 32. I just bought a house one zip code away from my old apartment. My old zip code was 2% Black, and my new one is 20%. My new zip code is 87% BIPOC, and my old one was 87%…not. I went for a walk the other day and, for the first time, did not feel like I was under surveillance or out of place because everybody around me was either used to Black people or was Black themselves.

It was near dusk, and I didn’t need to look over my shoulder, code switch, or make someone else feel comfortable when I walked by. The neighborhood kids said hello to me. The older women didn’t cross the street when they saw me. I was just regular, like everybody else. And that was beautiful. It put my spirit at ease.

Black excellence does not put my spirit at ease. It creates tension and pressure. I have often been held up by Black and non Black people alike as an example of what can be done if people just put in the time and the effort, but that is a lie. What I enjoy is not a reward for hard work or a sole reflection of excellence. It took a lot of hard work and very little support. That's not a good thing.

The exception to the rule does not reinforce the Rule. I think somewhere on the lines that got lost in translation. The same world where people have to pay off student loan debt to buy their first home, and that first home is on the higher end, closer to the million-dollar mark, is ridiculous and unattainable for the vast majority of people.

Excellence is not excellent when it's not attainable. It's a mockery and it's cruel. In an interesting twist of irony, the more I achieve that reflects the so-called American Dream, the less value I put in it. I saw a meme that talked about not needing Black people to be excellent all the time, and not being Black and regular is good, too. And that might seem tongue-in-cheek, but it's very radical in its implications because it turns on its head the expectation that we as Black people have to be twice as good to get half as much. Any world where we have to work hard constantly to hold on to a precarious livelihood is not a feasible living. That is not a just reality. And it's not sustainable. There's a cost to our health and our longevity to even engage in the pursuit of Black excellence.

Embedded within the idea of Black Excellence is the acceptance of the idea that “them’s the brakes”, and “that's just how it is”. By holding out a few examples of people who can be considered Black excellence, we obscure the reality and the hurdles of those who are Black and regular. The challenges, struggles, and pain of those who are Black and regular are rendered invisible and irrelevant each time we lift up those who are Black and excellent by the standards of those who are in power. Excellence is not a solution. Being regular and resting could be.