BLACK MAN MEETS HUMILITY
One of my favorite stories has always been that of Icarus. I don’t remember when I first heard it, but I must’ve been young. You know the one, the boy who flew
too close to the sun, his wings melting from hubris. The story’s meant to warn us about pride. About flying too high. Recently, a close friend of mine was venting
about life in corporate America. He said his White coworkers thought he “believed in himself too much” and should practice humility. Then he hit me with something
that stuck: “Black people in corporate America are Bruce Wayne… we have to become Batman just to get the job done.”
I laughed, but didn’t argue. I just listened. Because while he and I share the same skin tone and corporate backdrop, our experiences differ. I’m reserved by nature. Maybe
to my own detriment. I don’t speak up often. I’ve shed most of the shyness I grew up with, but I’m still just a worker at heart. I’d rather make something worth talking about
than talk a lot in meetings.
That conversation reminded me of another one this time with my friend, the artist Julian Gaines. He said something I’ll never forget. I’m paraphrasing, but it was along the lines of
“White people invented humbleness to keep Black people from being expressive.” And honestly, it makes sense. Black expression has always been expansive, wild even. You put us
in basketball, you get crossovers that rewrite physics. You put us in music, and we bend language until Shakespeare sounds plain.
But take that same expressiveness into boardrooms or brainstorms, and suddenly it’s “too much.” Loud. Arrogant. Unprofessional. That’s when I thought about Icarus again. His story has
always been told as a warning stay humble, don’t fly too high, or you’ll fall. But if Icarus were Black, the sun wouldn’t sit still. It would move constantly. He’d have to adjust his flight just to
survive, lowering his altitude not because he wanted to, but because he had to. I don’t have a grand solution here. Just a reflection. Maybe the moral isn’t to stay low or fly high, but to
remember that even our flight patterns are a form of resistance.
“Black kids stunt on them, then tell them they can do it too.” — Tyler, The Creator