For generations, Blackfolk have been handed a peculiar measuring stick: Whiteness.
Measure your career against white success. Your intelligence against white scholarship. Your beauty against white features. Your speech against white accents. Your spirituality against white religious perspectives. Your neighborhoods, schools, businesses, families, and institutions against white standards. No matter how idiotic, anti-Black, or demeaning to our own history, heritage, and culture those positions might be.
Then, somehow, we are expected to feel accomplished when we get closer to the standard that was created to simultaneously convince us that we’re supposedly inferior.
Make that make sense.
Who decided the measuring stick was accurate?
The problem isn’t simply that whiteness has been used as the standard. The bigger problem is that Blackfolk have been conditioned to believe it’s a legitimate standard in the first place.
Western civilization has spent centuries presenting its history, culture, and intellectual achievements as evidence of inherent superiority. Yet many of the scientific, mathematical, agricultural, architectural, cultural, and spiritual foundations upon which later civilizations were built emerged from African genius. From us–Blackfolk.
Ancient Egypt (Kemet) wasn’t waiting for Europe to discover civilization. Neither were any of the Blackfolk of antiquity. And if our ancestors were so backward, why then would the historian considered the most historically significant and influential (Herodotus) write that “the Ethiopians are the tallest, most beautiful, and long-lived of the human races”? He and Homer called these Ethiopians “the most just of people; the favorites of the gods” because the civilizations they built far outshined any Herodotus or Homer had seen in “whiteworld.”
And when they spoke of “Ethiopians,” they meant people who originated from and lived in “the land of the Blacks,” which in Herodotus’s time meant the people of The Sudan (Nubia), Egypt (Kemet), Arabia (The Middle East), Palestine, in Western Asia, and India.
Yet generations of miseducation have taught Black people—and much of the world—to associate “European” with sophistication and African with primitive; white with beautiful and Black with undesirable; and Western with intellectual and “non-Western” with emotional. Thus, their history is deemed universal and required, while ours is derided as abnormal, laughable, or nonexistent, and only to be taken as an elective, if at all.
That isn’t merely education. That’s conditioning.
The absurdity of competing on somebody else’s field
Malcolm X captured the psychological damage brilliantly when he said Black people had been trained to believe “white people’s ice is colder and their milk is sweeter.” Consider how ridiculous that sounds when applied to virtually anything else.
Imagine entering a sports competition, allowing your opponent to establish the rules, determine the score, select the referees, define what counts as quality play—and then spending the entire game desperately trying to prove you belong. And when you start dominating, even in a rigged system, your opponent changes the rules mid-game. That’s essentially what happens when Black advancement is measured primarily by proximity to white norms.
And history exposes the absurdity.
If white superiority were self-evident, why were laws created to prevent Black competition? Why poll taxes, whites-only restrictions, segregation, racial terror, exclusion from universities, discriminatory housing policies, and countless other barriers?
If the competition wasn’t threatening, why work so hard to block it?
White rage has always had a familiar trigger
Dr. Carol Anderson’s book White Rage helps expose another uncomfortable reality. As Anderson writes, “The trigger for white rage, inevitably, is Black advancement.”
That observation matters because it challenges the familiar explanation that Black suffering via white domestic violence or via violent, anti-Black policies, laws, and rulings is the result primarily of Black deficiencies that require harsh punishment because that’s all the “simple minds” of Black “brutes” can understand.
But yo, Black people weren’t excluded because we weren’t prepared. Most often, we were barred, kept out, and banned because our excellence shone so bright it put other folks’ doings, products, and ideas to shame.
Black excellence has repeatedly produced a peculiar response: Admiration when it can be appropriated, hostility when it can’t be controlled, and erasure when acknowledging its origins threatens the mythology of superiority.
That’s why cultural confidence matters.
Ways we must change the measuring stick
Question inherited standards: Before asking whether we measure up, ask who created the measurement and whose interests it serves.
Self-define: A people who cannot define excellence for themselves will forever seek validation from somebody else. Self-definition isn’t narcissism. It is community sovereignty. Plus, striving to copy someone else will always leave you in second place. Even a superior copy is inferior to the original, no matter what that original may be.
Invest in Black institutions: Our schools, churches, businesses, newspapers, cultural organizations, and community institutions have survived all manner of whitelash. They deserve more than nostalgic praise. They need investment, participation, and protection.
Understand that cultural confidence fuels innovation: People innovate more boldly when they don’t spend half their energy apologizing for who they are. Cultural confidence gives people permission to imagine possibilities outside somebody else’s blueprint.
Measure success by community well-being: A Black person becoming wealthy while the surrounding community remains impoverished cannot be the only definition of success. That idea has been played out. What happens to our children? Our elders? Our neighborhoods? Our institutions? Our collective quality of life?
Reconnect with ancestral measures of excellence: Ancient African wisdom understood something modern society routinely forgets: knowing oneself is foundational. The ancient Kemetic principle “Man/woman, know thyself” points toward a profound truth—self-knowledge is essential to genuine spiritual and psychological freedom.
Embrace your authentic self
This isn’t an argument for rejecting everything European or pretending every Black tradition is automatically good. It’s an argument against believing you’re less than the “pearl of great price” you were created as—salt of the earth, and light of the world.
And hey, feel free to learn from other cultures. Just don’t abandon your own. You can participate in Western institutions without accepting Western dominance as proof of human superiority. We don’t need to prove that Black is better than white. We need to stop accepting the lie that white is better than Black.
The goal of becoming a copy of someone else is inherently flawed. Even the greatest copy ever produced is inferior to the original. Thus, using proximity to whiteness as our measuring stick is a no-win game. Ask Clarence, Candace, Byron, or Time. Our greatness, historically, currently, and in the future, depends on us living and moving as the best “us” we can be.
