The Need for a New Narrative of Excellence in the Black Community…

Recent attacks against President Barack Obama regarding his place of birth and academic credentials have one very important outcome: It clearly puts everyone on notice that old-fashioned bias and naked racism are alive and well in the United States. 

For the first time in America’s history, a duly elected president was forced to prove in a public forum that he was indeed a U.S. citizen, because the  narrative that a black man could represent the face of America was one far too many could not swallow.

The most insidious of the charges against Obama is that he somehow did not have the intellectual ability to “earn” his place at Ivy league schools like Columbia and Harvard, and he somehow ended up as the editor of the Harvard Law Review – one of the highest prizes of academic achievement – because of affirmative action.

If this sort of treatment can be enacted on the president of the United States, imagine the tens of millions of “regular” working-class black people confronted with this sort of push back every day.

It becomes clear that the only thing available to the black community to counter this narrative of intellectual inferiority and high achievement is collective excellence. 

It will no longer suffice to have one or two outstanding individuals like a Barak Obama or Colin Powell here, or a Condoleeza Rice there to carry the intellectual weight for our entire race. 

We must embrace active intellectualism and the pursuit of high levels of academic achievement as the most essential part of our identity narrative. Even in the face of economic disparity and with far fewer resources, we must reach high.

The time has come to release once and for all the image of the thugged-out, tatted-up, anti-academic, violent, provincial, hood-bound rapper as our “north star” to authentic blackness. 

This image of authentic blackness is so pervasive that it impacts not only Black folks who live in economically challenged inner city neighborhoods typically associated with these images, but also, it has affected the development of young people from more affluent circumstances in suburban communities as well. 

Thomas Chatterton Williams does a great job in his book Losing My Cool: How a Father’s Love and 15,000 Books Beat Hip-Hop Culture, of providing some insight into the powerful role that these images play in shaping young people’s ideas about what it means to be authentically Black and how they contribute to retarding the academic development of Black students who are not plagued with poverty.

At the end of the day, parents and teachers of Black children must be relentless in their demand of excellence from our children in everything that they pursue.

Let us do away with low expectations. Whether it is in school, how they speak to their elders, how they wear their clothing, or even their part time job at McDonalds, we must demand that our children put forth nothing but their best efforts. 

If doing this will make us look like the heavily criticized Tiger Mom as described in Amy Chua’s book Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, a book that chronicles her experience raising her children with strict discipline and expectations of perfection, then so be it. 

President Obama and his family are as close to perfect as we get in America, let alone the Black community. Yet, his ability and credentials are questioned endlessly, while the narrative of Black intellectual inferiority persists.

We can no longer depend on isolated pockets of excellence in our community to carry the weight for our entire community, less we remain a target for disrespect and humiliation, as was our President.

At this critical juncture, what we prioritize now as a community will define the place that we will occupy in this country’s social hierarchy for the next two generations. 

It is not enough to be a community who can claim exceptional individuals. We must begin the work now to define ourselves as community that is wholly exceptional. 

Written By C. Zawadi Morris

Via; http://www.Patch.com