The empty promise of Black Excellence on the White House lawn
“Tried to tell yall but yall wanted brunch LMFAOOOOOOOOOOOOO”
On Friday the 13th, a day I always reserve for spooky movies, the White House hosted a brunch “celebrating Black Excellence.” This brunch was the latest in a series hosted by Trell Thomas, who seeks to “reimagine a forever-evolving tradition within the Black community that empowers our voices while maintaining the tradition of creating a safe space.” The guest list was stacked with celebrities and influencers alike. The dress code was, naturally, all white. The menu included chicken and waffles. White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre spoke, Goonica performed, and President Biden talked about “Black jobs.” Everyone looked moisturized, resplendent, and rich. In the face of truly heinous, xenophobic lies about Haitian immigrants in Ohio, this must have felt—to some—like a welcome antidote.
Kamala Harris’ presidential campaign is already in the home stretch, and this kind of voter mobilization at this point is very clever. Nobody mobilizes like the Black bougie class, a community I’m very much a part of; and nobody gets energized by seeing Black and bougie people be ostentatiously Black and bougie like the aspirationally bougie-r. You know, the people who tag all their luxury vacation posts with #BlackExcellence, as though a few dozen Black people going to Croatia for Yacht Week is a sign of anything other than a few dozen Black people having Yacht Week money. Even the fact that I first heard about this brunch from an IG post by a style blogger I follow lets me know that the brunch did exactly what it wanted to do. My feed was full of Black Excellence Brunch content all weekend. It was really, really irritating.
The thing is, the Black Excellence mindset has long felt hollow to me, and lately it has started to feel genuinely malign. Because, what does Black Excellence really mean? At its heart, it hews pretty closely to respectability politics. The dress code is slightly more relaxed, so as to accommodate black t-shirts with defiant and/or uplifting slogans on them. But everything else—the emphasis on appearances, the worship of prestigious credentials, the reification of capital—is essentially the same. And capital truly is king here. Capital is the way to express yourself and signify your group identity. Capital is the way to “support the community,” be it through shopping someone’s Target collab or buying tickets to a Disney movie with a Black female lead. Of course, neither Target nor Disney nor any corporation actually represents any “community” beyond shareholders. But “the community” can only comprise people that the Black Excellence crowd want to be in community with, and never people who actually need meaningful, unglamourous support. Never people who would benefit from collective action rather than individual—excuse me, generational—wealth accumulation. Never people whose very place in this country’s hierarchy betrays the moral rot at the center of this country.
The Haitian immigrants who are suffering because of one white woman’s lie, viciously amplified by the white Republican men running for President and VP, aren’t benefitting from this brunch. The Black Southerners who have had their voting power diluted through decades of gerrymandering and naked disenfranchisement aren’t either. The only ones who are benefitting are the brunch attendees themselves, and the people who are comforted by imagining themselves there. And this is the logical endpoint of the Black Excellence mindset in a nutshell. No liberation. No imagination to hold out for something better. Just a fucking brunch.
Short and sweet (bittersweet) and powerful! I had no idea this was a thing. I guess my algorithms is so steeped in not-Black Excellence that this missed me. I especially loved the line about the only community being uplifted is the shareholder community. I’ve always maintained that the idea that making every marginalised group a “community“, just because they share an identity doesn’t serve to uplift said “community”