Black Excellence Is Not Elitism — It’s the Minimum Standard Your Ancestors Set

Before we argue about what Black excellence means now, let us establish what it meant then, because the distance between the two definitions is the distance between a people ascending and a people adrift. In 1881, Booker T. Washington arrived in Tuskegee, Alabama, to found a school with no buildings, no equipment, and no money, in a county where the majority of Black residents were illiterate and the state legislature had allocated precisely zero confidence that anything of value could be built there. By the time of his death in 1915, Tuskegee Institute had 1,500 students, 200 faculty, a $2 million endowment, and a campus of over 100 buildings — many of them constructed, brick by brick, by the students themselves. Washington did not call this excellence. He called it the minimum. He wrote, in Up from Slavery, that a Black person who could not do a common thing in an uncommon manner had no business complaining about the doors that were closed to them. The standard was not survival. The standard was mastery. And mastery was not an aspiration. It was a requirement.

W.E.B. Du Bois, who disagreed with Washington on nearly everything, agreed on this: that the standard for Black Americans must be higher, not lower, than the standard for anyone else. His concept of the Talented Tenth — the idea that the top ten percent of the Black community had an obligation to lead, to educate, to lift — was not a theory of elitism. It was a theory of responsibility. Du Bois did not argue that only the talented mattered. He argued that the talented were obligated to serve, and that the community was obligated to produce them, in numbers sufficient to lead a people out of darkness. This was not a wish. It was a demand. And the demand was levied not against the oppressor but against the community itself.

The Historical Standard

To understand how radical the modern relaxation of standards is, you must understand how uncompromising the historical standard was. The HBCUs — Howard, Morehouse, Spelman, Fisk, Hampton, Tuskegee — did not merely educate. They disciplined. They maintained dress codes that were stricter than those at white institutions. They enforced codes of conduct that governed speech, deportment, social interaction, and personal hygiene. They required chapel attendance. They mandated community service. They expelled students for dishonesty, for laziness, for conduct unbecoming. This was not respectability politics as it is now dismissively called. This was strategic armor. The founders of these institutions understood something that their critics have forgotten: that a Black person in America who is merely adequate will be treated as deficient, that a Black person who is good will be treated as adequate, and that only a Black person who is excellent has a chance of being treated as good. The standard was set high because the penalty for falling short was set by someone else.

“When you control a man’s thinking you do not have to worry about his actions. You do not have to tell him not to stand here or go yonder. He will find his ‘proper place’ and will stay in it. You do not need to send him to the back door. He will go without being told. In fact, if there is no back door, he will cut one for his special benefit.”
— Carter G. Woodson, The Mis-Education of the Negro, 1933

Carter G. Woodson, whose 1933 masterwork The Mis-Education of the Negro remains the most incisive analysis of Black education ever written, understood that the greatest threat to Black excellence was not white oppression. It was Black acceptance of white definitions. When a Black person internalized the idea that excellence was a white characteristic, that intellectual rigor was a white practice, that discipline and standards were white values, that person had been, in Woodson’s word, mis-educated — taught to be an instrument of their own subjugation. Woodson wrote that the educated Black person who had been trained to admire white civilization and despise their own was “the most dangerous of all adversaries” to Black progress. But the equally dangerous figure — and this is the one that Woodson’s modern admirers prefer not to discuss — was the uneducated Black person who had been taught that education itself was the enemy.

When Excellence Became Aesthetics

Somewhere in the last two decades, the phrase “Black excellence” was emptied of its content and refilled with something that the people who coined it would not recognize. It became a hashtag. It became an Instagram aesthetic. It became a way of celebrating the visible markers of success — the car, the outfit, the vacation, the acceptance letter photographed and posted — without any of the substance that produces those markers. Black excellence, in its modern usage, is a celebration of outcomes without any discussion of the standards, the discipline, the sacrifice, and the accountability that produce those outcomes.

This is not a small distinction. It is the distinction between a culture of achievement and a culture of display. The ancestors understood that excellence was a process, not a product. It was the daily decision to study when others were socializing, to practice when others were resting, to prepare when others were hoping, to hold yourself to a standard that the world would never hold you to because the world’s standard for you was already too low to be useful. The modern version celebrates the destination and ignores the journey, which means it provides no roadmap, no discipline, no model for the young person who sees the celebration and has no idea how to get from where they are to where the celebration is.

The Proof That Standards Work

The argument that demanding excellence is elitist or impractical is contradicted by every documented case in which the demand has been made. The evidence is not ambiguous. It is overwhelming.

Marva Collins, who left the Chicago public school system in 1975 to found Westside Preparatory School, took children who had been labeled unteachable and taught them to read and discuss Plato, Shakespeare, and Dostoyevsky by the age of eight. Her method was not revolutionary in its pedagogy. It was revolutionary in its expectations. She refused to accept the premise that poor Black children from the South Side of Chicago could not learn what wealthy white children on the North Shore were learning. She refused to lower the curriculum. She refused to simplify the vocabulary. She refused to accept “at least they are trying” when “they are excelling” was possible. And her students excelled.

The Ron Clark Academy in Atlanta, which serves primarily Black students from economically disadvantaged backgrounds, has produced results that should embarrass every school district in the country. Students routinely score in the top percentiles on standardized tests. Graduates gain admission to the most competitive high schools and colleges in America. The school operates on the same per-pupil funding as other Georgia schools. It does not select for aptitude. It selects for willingness to meet the standard, and the standard is uncompromising.

Shelby Steele, in his 1990 book The Content of Our Character, argued that the most insidious form of racial oppression in post-civil-rights America was not the denial of opportunity but the lowering of standards. When white institutions lowered their expectations for Black students and employees — when they graded more leniently, promoted more readily, criticized more gently — they communicated, in the language of compassion, the message of contempt: we do not believe you can meet the real standard. Steele called this the “demoralization” of Black Americans — the systematic replacement of genuine challenge with patronizing accommodation, which produces not equality but dependence.

The Accusation of Anti-Blackness

The most effective weapon against the demand for excellence is the accusation that demanding it is, itself, anti-Black. This accusation operates with ruthless efficiency in shutting down conversations that the community desperately needs to have. It works like this: anyone who argues that Black people should hold themselves to higher standards is accused of implying that Black people are currently deficient, which is itself a racist claim, which means that the person making the argument is either a racist or a tool of racists, and their argument can therefore be dismissed without engagement.

This is intellectually fraudulent, and the people who deploy it know it. Demanding that your child study harder is not an accusation that your child is stupid. It is an expression of confidence that your child is capable of more. Demanding that a community produce more entrepreneurs, more professionals, more scholars, more institution-builders is not an accusation that the community is failing. It is a declaration that the community is capable of succeeding at a level that the current norms do not support. The demand for excellence is not born of contempt. It is born of love — the specific, painful, uncompromising love that sees what a person or a community could be and refuses to accept what they have settled for.

“I imagine one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, they will be forced to deal with pain.”
— James Baldwin, Notes of a Native Son, 1955

Woodson saw this clearly in 1933: the greatest obstacle to Black progress was not the white man who denied opportunity but the Black man who had accepted the denial as final. The modern version of this acceptance is more sophisticated but equally destructive: it is the Black intellectual who has convinced a generation that demanding excellence is a form of self-hate, that standards are instruments of oppression, that accountability is a code word for blame, and that the only legitimate response to a racist system is to lower your expectations of yourself until they match the system’s expectations of you. This is not resistance. This is surrender dressed in the language of resistance, and Woodson and Du Bois and Washington and every HBCU president who ever expelled a student for dishonesty would recognize it for exactly what it is.

What Demanding Excellence Actually Looks Like

It does not look like Instagram. It does not look like a hashtag. It does not look like a graduation photo with a caption about Black Girl Magic or a LinkedIn post about another Black First. Those things are fine. They are celebrations, and celebrations have their place. But they are not excellence. They are the acknowledgment of excellence after the fact. The excellence itself happened in the hours and years before the photograph, in the decisions no one saw and the disciplines no one applauded.

Demanding excellence looks like a parent who turns off the television and opens the textbook, every night, without exception, because the school cannot be trusted to educate and the child must therefore be educated at home. It looks like a community that measures its leaders not by their charisma or their social media following but by their results — how many businesses created, how many children educated, how many families stabilized, how many dollars circulated within the community before leaving it.

It looks like a culture that stops rewarding performance and starts rewarding production. That stops celebrating the appearance of success and starts celebrating the substance of it. That stops treating wealth as a trophy to be displayed and starts treating it as a tool to be deployed — for scholarships, for business loans, for community development, for the creation of institutions that outlast the individual who funded them.

It looks like men who define masculinity not by dominance but by responsibility — responsibility for children, for community, for the creation of stable environments in which the next generation can develop without the trauma that has been passed down like a genetic disorder for centuries. It looks like women who demand of the men in their lives the same standard that Spelman demanded of its students in 1881: show up, stand up, speak clearly, work relentlessly, and never accept the world’s low opinion of you as your own.

It looks, in short, exactly the way it looked when the ancestors practiced it — which is to say, it looks like hard work, and discipline, and sacrifice, and the daily refusal to accept the comfortable lies that a culture of lowered expectations tells itself. The ancestors built Tuskegee out of red clay and Howard out of nothing and Morehouse out of a church basement because they understood that excellence is not a privilege that the powerful extend to you. It is a standard that you impose upon yourself. And when you impose it, when you truly demand it, when you refuse to accept the patronizing whisper that says “you cannot, so we will not expect you to” — the results are not merely good. They are, as history has demonstrated over and over again, extraordinary.

Black excellence is not a slogan. It is not a social media trend. It is not a celebration reserved for the talented few. It is the minimum standard that a people who survived the worst thing that ever happened in the Western Hemisphere owe to the ancestors who endured it and to the children who will inherit the consequences of what we choose to demand of ourselves. The ancestors set the standard. The question is whether we are brave enough to meet it.