Off-Black Excellence
And why I be up in the comments
“Tell me they’re going to hire you!”
A friendly former coworker was tipping me off that a position I had interviewed for was still available. While we had worked together temporarily, this would have been a permanent role in a familiar area doing the kind of work I had been wanting to do for years. Through a short series of texts, I found out that the person that was hired had washed out.
I also deduced that this person was really no more qualified than I had been, despite the post-interview feedback I got. The new hire failed a qualifying exam that I would have passed. I would have passed it because my entire career has been a pattern of becoming overqualified before or shortly after hiring to maintain job security.
The reason I do this is because, over time and with experience, I have come to realize that people do not associate Black Americans with excellence.
This is not just a personal problem for me, this nationwide acquiescence about Black failure. I’m sure that hundreds of thousands of Black Americans live life under the shadow their falsely assumed inferiority.
And sadly, Black people participate in the promotion of this assumption.
They Kept the Felon
Not all that long ago, I was laid off. It was mid-2020, and the pandemic was starting to be taken more seriously. I was informed that my employment status was under review and that I would be reporting to work on an as-needed basis.
This was curious. I had just been lined up to work on a series of projects that I knew could be converted into remote work. As mentioned before, I make it a point to become very knowledgeable and as close to indispensable as possible when I take on a role. Years of practice have given me a patina of professionalism that transcends settings. Feedback so far had been invariably positive. To be thrown to the side with many other coworkers who routinely reached out to me for help was humbling.
I’m not naïve enough to believe that being great at work can stop the sun from rising. Honestly, this was not really that big of a deal in the grand scheme of things. Sometimes whole projects, whole teams, whole departments get scrapped just because.
But the issue arose when I started getting said as-needed work. I saw who was still there. Most of them were senior employees, but one stood out as being a newer hire than myself. I had not met this colleague personally during orientation, so I asked my trusty assistant Google about their background.
I was promptly informed that this person had an entire felony charge.
This is what I’m up against. This is what I go over and above for: to convince someone not to pick the felon, or the failure, over me.
The Uphill Battles
Nor are these the only stories I have. Laying aside the outright nepotism that insidiously entrenches itself in any industry, I have seen meteoric rises of mediocre non-Black people who went from copy-makers and receptionists and random people doing whatever I was also doing to management and executive positions.
When opportunity does come my way, I have to convince people that I am as excellent as my work shows me to be without sounding far-fetched in a country where it is considered farfetched for true, transcendent excellence to express itself in an otherwise normal Black person without considerable coaxing and mentoring by a white savior.
White saviors aside, it is often necessary to reach out to a sympathetic sponsor or to get additional training. It is rarely worth it to ask for it outright, though. The interwoven narratives about Black trauma, Black deprivation, Black academic underperformance, etc., have made it necessary for me to be creative about advertising my potential and desire to be considered for greater things.
One time, I innocently started a whisper campaign about an accomplishment. I struck up an honest conversation about what to include in my resume, but found out later that news of one of my accomplishments had been faithfully transmitted up the managerial ladder. While it did help me stand out, it also made me something of a target, an employee to be kept on in good faith but not long enough to become a serious replacement for any current leadership roles.
In another setting, I was looking for new employment and coded my excellence into my resume: little things, a few terms, and name-drops that would win over ATS and raise the eyebrows of a careful hiring team. My fatally incorrect assumption is that I would be dealing with a careful hiring team. Short of reciting my own accomplishments, which would seem a little smug, I was left to continually bring attention to the resume in two rounds of hiring. Without fail, during each round, team members failed to bring up items that verged on being ostentatious. (That was the hiring team that hired the non-starter. In retrospect, I wonder if I was actually being seriously considered at all.)
One successful story, though, was when I was able to produce a helpful electronic tool to meet a leader’s needs with minimal description, à la Miranda Priestly. It’s nice to be able to see an accomplishment like that in my rearview, but I also have to remember that I was required to prove I was that good. Other coworkers got way more for much less.
Other coworkers are not forced to fight uphill battles about Black performance deficits. In the news, in social media, in the classroom, and in many areas where the majority population comes in contact with Black people, the narrative is at work, a story of broad acceptance that propagandizes an umbilical association between Blackness and failure.
Seen and Unseen
This story haunts my past. My senior year of high school, it happened that I scored unusually high on my College Boards. The attention and encouragement that I suddenly received was jarring, in that it had been mostly absent up until that point. Despite those high scores and a uniquely successful run in an AP class the year before, I was not so subtly warned that my success would run out. That didn’t happen, but it was years before the venom in those warnings lost its potency.
In college, where I was often the only Black person in my classes, I was routinely overlooked or poorly advised. It occurred to me that, of my fellow majors, only my name was routinely appearing on honor lists. Years later, I would gnash my teeth reading about an unhelpful former adviser who touted his affinity for working with honor students; I remember him best for taking phone calls during our scheduled counseling time.
Also, during college, a professor told a story about traveling through New York and being processed by a travel attendant, a Black man. Reported this professor, the guy sized him up and declared matter-of-factly (and accurately), “You look like one of them latter neo-Wittgensteinian (you-know-whats).” That was, I gathered at the time, potentially my future: a funny story about the time someone met a potentially smart Black man.
The Way the Story Is Told
If you’ve read this far, it may seem as though I’m just whining about the particulars of my life (thanks for hanging in there). I shared those details to show that, in a variety of circumstances, settings, locations, and groups of people, I have encountered the same assumption of Black failure. There is, it seems, no Jordan I can cross, no Canaan I can battle into, no frontier I can seek out where this accepted knowledge has not made its way.
This failure narrative has become structurally baked into the way other, more local stories are told. Take a quote from this Time magazine article about SAT scores is a good example:
In one recently published study, Asian American students who enrolled in Duke averaged 1457 out of 1600 on the math and reading portions of the SAT, compared to 1416 for whites, 1347 for Hispanics and 1275 for blacks.
Obscured by that 1275 number are all the Black students that made perfect 1600s and near-perfect scores, as well as those who score above that average number. And even though the 1275 average was itself quite significantly higher than the average critical reading and math composite SAT score for that time, numbers and facts get deployed in ways that further cement and concretize the American abstraction of racial superiority and inferiority. The Time article agrees that while much ado is made about “undeserving blacks and browns … we don’t usually hear much about undeserving whites.”
This particular article and the study it cites centered on college enrollment and race, but too often, writers follow the well-worn narrative rather search for new outlooks. Blatant group comparisons in this or any study assume the reality and relevance of race and of test scores. The data at hand could also, in another telling, give strength to the story of the continued academic progress of minority students of all backgrounds. As things stand, we are primed to look for a deficit almost as soon as we are aware a comparison is to be made.
When It Be Your Own People
Just recently, a Psychology Today article was published that bemoaned the increasing loneliness of young and middle-aged men with specific admonishments. While the article itself sees this as a failure of the family (i.e., inconsistent parenting on a national level), a therapist on TikTok took it upon herself to interpret the article as proof of deficient behavior, apropos to Black men. She went viral, chastising Black men at large for not seeking out therapy with a pretty spicy delivery. Though her rant was based on the assumption that Black men don’t go to therapy, she also mentioned that 90 percent of her clients were Black men. Due largely to her own psychological issues (also mentioned in one of a series of related videos), she was eventually forced to separate from her employer.
In her gross overstatement of Black male psychological deficits and epic failure to communicate, the therapist revealed in a matter of seconds that she was possessed by the narrative of Black failure, blinded by it, deaf to correction because of it. The quality of professional help she might have provided to her 90-percent Black male clientele, from the outside looking in, is questionable at best.
Interestingly, though, she wasn’t totally off in her content. When it comes to marital relationships of Black American couples, for example, a lot depends on the outlook of the husband. That doesn’t mean Black men as a group have no communication skills and need therapy, but when amplifying Black deficiency is part and parcel of speaking about Black people, little wonder is it that even relatively objective takes on this situation begin to veer into anti-Blackness.
You Don’t See A Problem Here?
And because even Black people themselves can be swept away with the narrative of Black failure, to whom can I and other excellent Black people turn for support, for advice, for a neutral third party when I’m being gaslit?
Let’s take the spotlight off me. A female acquaintance of mine went to the doctor’s office with a history of eczema and dermatitis. She had unusual dry spots on her skin. A Black nurse told her off jump that she should get tested for syphilis, because, of course. (Results came back negative, because duh.)
A Black male colleague of mine mentioned the lack of seriousness even family members can have about the pursuit of excellence. In a family with strict expectations around honoring elders, he found it annoying that, in his intense studies to be a doctor, he could be interrupted at any given moment to run unimportant errands.
There was a time when there was a collective ethnic interest in the promotion of excellence, when the stakes were clear. That shared concern may have atrophied, but the problems are still there.
Expect More of Me
I’m not trying to be a bully, not trying to pick fights, but hopefully, you can see why I am urgently handing out corrections and nuance in the comment section. The more willing people are to give in to deficit narratives about Black people (esp. Black men), the harder I have to fight uphill to get others to look out for excellence in dark brown skin. This is the world I live in and the one my partner and I are raising our children in, so forgive me for not letting things fly.
If you are one of those people with unaddressed anti-Blackness bleeding into your work: You deserve the kind of feedback that makes your work less demonic and more human.
Peace and healing, fam. ✌🏿
