Thinking Beyond 'Black Excellence'
In the 1903 book “The Negro Problem” (edited by Booker T. Washington), W.E.B. Du Bois coined the phrase “the Talented Tenth.” The concept, at its core, recommended that higher education was the place to develop the leadership capacity among the most able 10 per cent of Black Americans. As I explain in my book Uncle: Race, Nostalgia, and the Politics of Loyalty, “Du Bois, in effect, was arguing for not just African American educational advancement, but also the creation of an elite intelligentsia and leadership class.” Many of the historically black colleges and university (HBCUs) were founded on this principle of an exceptional class of Black persons, who would be best equipped to “uplift the race” in the first decades of the twentieth century.
This concept also created a problem. To be part of this "Talented Tenth," a Black person had to be college educated. If you were not, even if you ran a successful business, the message was that you were not successful, you had not achieved success on the level of the top “10 per cent” and therefore had not really uplifted the race. In the twenty-first century, this notion of education attainment as the dominant metric of Black success is still alive and well. Today, we call it Black Excellence.
As a 2015 post on the Celluloid in Black and White blog described, Black Excellence is “the notion that black people who are educated, smart, articulate, poised, and basically every other positive adjective you can think of are atypical or rarities among the general black population.” This Black Excellence, then, needs to be celebrated, highlighted, and amplified — especially by institutions of higher learning.
In a 2021 article in Forbes, Janice Gassam Asare explains further that
Proponents of Black exceptionalism assert that representation matters and is vital to showcase. The symbolism of a Black president and other Black firsts highlighted in the media are an impactful way to show Black children what is possible but how is our society’s obsession with Black exceptionalism actually harmful?
Asare goes on to explain that the idea that being exceptional will somehow shield Black people from discrimination and racism is a fallacy. Often times Black people who are deemed “excellent” are hyper scrutinized and penalized for their excellence. As such, she asserts that
Black excellence is not just the firsts, who accomplish the unimaginable. Black excellence is not just those who achieve accolades and awards. Black excellence is simply existing in a world that so desperately wants to destroy you.
I completely understand the logic of Black Excellence — Black people, especially students, are underrepresented, under acknowledged, and often feel like outsiders at universities, especially in Canada where campuses are still predominantly White.
The 2010s was also a very challenging decade to be Black. From the tragic death of Trayvon Martin in 2012 to a series of deaths seemingly every year thereafter (Sandra Bland, Oscar Grant, Michael Brown, Eric Gardner, Tamir Rice, and dozens of other unarmed, African American men and women) reaching its climax with George Floyd in 2020, one of the ways we tried to make sense of this violence was through the creation of hashtags such as #BlackLivesMatter, #SayHerName, #ICantBreathe, and #IfTheyGunnedMeDown.
Source: Unsplash
In Canada, #AndrewLoku, #JermaineCarby, #AlexWettlaufer, #KwasiSkene-Peters, #Jean-PierreBony, #IanPryce, #FrankAnthonyBerry, #MichaelEligon, #EricOsawe, #ReyalJardine-Douglas, #JuniorAlexanderManon, #D’AndreCampbell and #RegisKorchinski-Paquet were also part of the Black-death-hashtag moment.
What wasn’t discussed, however, was the historical connection between this twenty-first century violence against Black Americans, and the 400-year historical realities of living in cultures built on White supremacist frameworks that were created in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In Canada, the focus on violence against Black people similarly ignored White supremacist frameworks and structures, and rendered invisible centuries-long experiences of Black Canadians as trailblazers, leaders, community-builders, and thinkers.
Source: Wikimedia Commons
Colored" drinking fountain from mid-20th century with African-American drinking (Original caption: "Negro drinking at "Colored" water cooler in streetcar terminal, Oklahoma City, Oklahoma"). Date: July 1939
By celebrating Black people’s accomplishments while ignoring the systemic realities we have lived (and continue to live) through, Black Excellence became the veil that shielded people from seeing how our systems and institutions are still rooted in White supremacist notions of “success”. In many cases, Black “success” has been measured up against the alternative — Black death. So either we are “excellent” (achieving goals that affirm normative modes of behaviour) or we die — symbolically, spiritually, or physically. In this dualistic logic, a myriad of Black experiences cannot exist.
In many ways, the Canadian documentary content of the last few years has sought to present a counternarrative to the Black-death-as-Black-life messaging of the 2010s. Yes, we have (and do) exist in a world of anti-Black racism (ABR) which requires attention, but the notion that ABR is Black history is deeply problematic and increasingly, offensive. As this media content has shown, we are inventors, innovators, strong, resilient, and an extremely multi-talented people.
A 2022 four-part doc series that aimed to look beyond the Underground Railroad to explore the Untold Stories of Black Canadians from the 1600s to the present.
A 2023 CBC 8-part documentary series that aimed to reframe the rich and complex histories of Black people in Canada over 400 years.
Source: Wikimedia Commons
Howard McCurdy awarding of the Order of Ontario in 2012.
How many people know about the life of Howard Douglas McCurdy (1932 – 2018)? Born in London, Ontario to a family who were descendants of African Americans who migrated there in the nineteenth century, in 1959, he joined the Biology Department at Assumption College (now the University of Windsor). McCurdy is the first Black person to hold a tenure-track position in a Canadian university. This first is significant because it asks us to reflect on the question — how many Black faculty are tenured today? How (if at all) has Canadian university faculty demographics changed since the 1970s?
Author Toni Morrison explaining why “race” is not a Black problem but a human race problem (Aug 6, 2019).
Black Excellence, then, was a necessary response ten years ago, but it is time to think beyond it. Especially given how co-opted the concept has become within our universities. It functions as a way to reframe the narrative, celebrate the lives of Black people, and redefine what it means to be Black. But at the same time, the stories that would help young Black people realize that they are not alone, that their lives matter — whether they are in an advanced university program or work at a gas station —often do not form part of the Black Excellence rhetoric and celebrations.
There are so many people who have influenced my work, and in their time were not examples of Black Excellence but were Black Agitators, challenging structures and laws from the inside and outside. These folks were not trying to be excellent, they sought to free Black people from systems and structures of oppression.
“If you challenge universities to do what they must do, to teach what they must do to make … programs be what they must be … the school sent students to travel everywhere else … but they wouldn’t do that [support sending students to Africa], so I said … it is legal to use the money of all these Black students send everybody else to Europe and then they can’t ….so we said we want the money that students pay into student fees and we were told we could get it and we put it in a separate bank.”
South African Steve Biko (1946 – 1977) led a grassroots anti-apartheid campaign known as the Black Consciousness Movement during the late 1960s and 1970s and he lost his life in the process.
“No race possesses the monopoly of beauty, intelligence, force, and there is room for all of us at the rendezvous of victory.”
In February, 1956, Little Black Sambo, the book and film, was finally banned from Toronto schools.
“In 1954 Daniel Braithwaite, born in Sydney, Nova Scotia, of Barbadian parents, launched a campaign to rid Toronto public schools of Little Black Sambo. The book painted Black people in a derogatory manner, and did much to foster racial stereotypes in young minds. Its existence as part of the Toronto Board of Education’s curriculum gave tacit legitimacy to racist beliefs”
I study Black people because I’m invested in giving voice to people who look like me. Black Excellence has nothing to do with it. With each article, book, post, I aim to be in community with Black people, regardless of their grade point average, where they live, how they dress, and most importantly, how they identify. It’s time to think beyond Black Excellence and the exaltation of individuals to how we can create the sociocultural conditions that will foster Black community — widely defined. We need a vision for collective progress, not an exceptional 10 per cent.
