TAKE A LOOK THROUGH THE American Cultural Landscape and you will find a growing number of people of color who have earned the right to dictate the terms of their art, from Shonda Rhimes and Jennifer Lopez, who have signed development agreements to large-scale with Netflix, à la showrunner Misha Green, whose “Lovecraft Country”, canceled by HBO after one season, was nominated for 18 Emmy Awards and signed a global deal with Apple. All of this success, however, rests on the doctrine of the exceptional individual. For long-established racial minority communities as well as recent immigrants, the promise of the American Dream lies in what philosopher Michael J. Sandel calls “the rhetoric of the uprising”: a faith, largely illusory, that the you can go as far in this country as your talents will take you. You may have to work twice as much for half as much, but you are still the master of your destiny. The phrase “black excellence,” for example, gained traction in the late 1960s, after legal victories for the civil rights movement revealed a society still deeply rooted in racial inequality and division. In November 1969, activist Whitney M. Young Jr., then head of the National Urban League, wrote an op-ed titled “Black Excellence Can Lead to an Open American Society” in which he called on black Americans to fight for their own freedom through “discipline and responsible action”. The violent protests, Young argues, are not convincing. “We must pursue black excellence,” he writes, “the special responsibility to excel: to think, outdo and outdo those who would deny black freedom. “

“We have the burden of thinking that if our shows fail, then it’s a referendum on the viability of Asian Americans as a whole,” actor Daniel Dae Kim said.

Black excellence, however, only functions as a means of upward social mobility in a society largely free of racist structures and racist people. Perhaps, as Sandel argues, the very premise of meritocratic endeavor is wrong. “What if the rhetoric of ascension no longer inspires,” he suggests, “not just because social mobility has stalled but, more fundamentally, because helping people climb the ladder of success? in a competitive meritocracy is a hollow political project that reflects an impoverished conception of citizenship and freedom? Most Americans are not prepared to consider such a bold reframing of our civil order. Indeed, people of color are often the most vocal proponents of America’s Success Bustle. After all, just enough of us have been rewarded by following this path of hard work and determination that only underscored the viability of the myth. How can meritocracy be a myth when your cousin or your best friend’s sister-in-law has been successful working with white people? How can that be a myth when a black man and, in his own words, “a skinny kid with a funny name” worked so hard he ended up in the White House? When did a black and Native American woman do the same?

In light of these hard-won individual efforts, the concept of saving mediocrity seems perverse. In 1963, when James Baldwin published “My Dungeon Shook,” his heartbreaking and penetrating open letter to his teenage nephew, he was not advocating mediocrity but its opposite. “You were born into a society that explained with brutal clarity, and in every possible way, that you were a worthless human being,” Baldwin writes. “You weren’t supposed to aspire to excellence: you had to make peace with mediocrity. How dare we, sixty years later, propose to make peace with mediocrity? But Baldwin could not have predicted the costs of our constant efforts, for we have lived to see something that he could not: the psychic toll of the striving for excellence in a society that fails to achieve it. recognize and reward it even when it is achieved.