Black Power Was Replaced With Black Excellence, and the Black Community Has Never Recovered

Black Power and Black Excellence are not the same. They are opposing ideologies, and treating them as related does a specific kind of damage because it obscures what was deliberately taken and what was deliberately put in its place. Black Power was a political project. It was concerned with land, self-determination, community institutions, collective defense, and the structural conditions that produced Black poverty and Black death. Black Excellence is a cultural product. It involves individual achievement, credential accumulation, and the performance of worthiness before institutions that were built to exclude. One created unity. The other dismantled it. One asked what the community could build for itself. The other asks what the individual can earn from the system. They’re not cousins. One of them was manufactured specifically to kill the other.

To understand how that replacement happened, you have to understand what Black Power actually threatened. By the mid-1960s, the Black Panther Party had built free breakfast programs feeding tens of thousands of children, established community health clinics, created cop-watching patrols to document and deter police brutality, and developed a political analysis that named capitalism and white supremacy as codependent systems requiring collective dismantling. This was not a cultural movement. It was not asking for representation in existing institutions. It was building parallel institutions. It was demonstrating, concretely, that the Black community could govern itself, feed itself, protect itself, and educate itself without permission from the state or the market. That demonstration was an existential threat to the oligarchic order, and the state treated it accordingly.

J. Edgar Hoover declared the Black Panther Party the greatest threat to the internal security of the United States. That designation was not hyperbole. It was a directive. COINTELPRO did not target the Panthers because they were “violent”. It targeted them because they were organized. The FBI forged letters to manufacture distrust between Panther chapters, planted informants to instigate internal conflict, assassinated leaders like Fred Hampton in their beds, and prosecuted members on charges that were frequently fabricated or wildly inflated. The campaign was systematic, coordinated, and successful. But destruction alone was not enough. Destruction leaves a vacuum, and vacuums get filled. The more important and less discussed part of the strategy was what was put in place of what was destroyed.

The women who built and sustained that movement deserve to be named specifically, because they were targeted with the same precision as the men and their contributions have been far more consistently erased. Angela Davis was a philosopher, a Communist Party member, and one of the most intellectually rigorous voices in the Black liberation struggle. She was placed on the FBI’s Most Wanted list, hunted across state lines, and prosecuted on charges that were ultimately thrown out entirely, but not before the state had spent enormous resources trying to bury her. Assata Shakur was a Black Liberation Army member who was subjected to one of the most aggressive law enforcement campaigns of the era, convicted under circumstances that civil rights attorneys have long argued were deeply compromised, and was ultimately forced to flee to Cuba, where she lives in exile to this day with a bounty on her head. Kathleen Cleaver was the communications secretary of the Black Panther Party and one of its most effective public voices, a trained legal mind who worked to expose the state’s campaign against the organization and who spent years in exile in Algeria after the repression made remaining in the United States untenable. These were not peripheral figures. They were architects of a serious political project, and the state recognized them as threats serious enough to destroy. The erasure of their specific contributions from the popular memory of this period is not accidental. It’s part of the same system.

Richard Nixon understood something that the more overtly violent architects of Black suppression did not. Raw repression produces martyrs, and martyrs produce movements. What you need, if you want to permanently neutralize a political threat, is not just to destroy the leadership but to replace the ideology. Nixon’s approach to the Black community operated on two tracks simultaneously, and the combination of the two was more lethal than either would have been alone. The first track was the war on drugs. Launched in 1971, the war on drugs was not a public health initiative. Years later, John Ehrlichman, Nixon’s domestic policy advisor, told journalist Dan Baum in an interview published in Harper’s Magazine in 2016 that the administration knew it could not make it illegal to be Black or to be against the war, but that by associating Black people with heroin and associating the antiwar left with marijuana and then criminalizing both heavily, they could disrupt those communities and incarcerate their leaders. Ehrlichman said that they knew what they were doing and that it worked. That’s not an interpretation or an inference. That came out of his mouth. That was a confession.

The marijuana component of this strategy operated on two fronts at once, and we need to look at both. The antiwar movement and the counterculture were overwhelmingly associated with marijuana use, and criminalizing it gave the state a legal instrument to arrest, prosecute, and silence people whose political organizing was becoming disruptive. White hippies and antiwar activists were arrested. But Black people were arrested at rates that bore no relationship to their actual rate of use. Studies conducted across multiple decades have consistently found that Black and white Americans use marijuana at roughly comparable rates. What is not comparable is the rate of arrest, the frequency of prosecution, and the severity of sentencing. A white college student caught with marijuana in 1972 faced a fundamentally different legal reality than a Black man caught with the same amount in the same city. The law was the same on paper. Its application was not, and that gap was not a bug in the system. It was the system’s intended function. Black communities were flooded with heroin and later with crack cocaine while simultaneously being subjected to enforcement that was disproportionate in its frequency, its violence, and the sentences it produced. The Black family, already under economic stress from generations of deliberate exclusion from wealth-building opportunities, was further shattered by mass incarceration. Fathers disappeared into prisons. Children grew up in poverty and instability. The social fabric that had sustained the community through the worst of Jim Crow was systematically torn.

What Nixon started, Reagan expanded into something even more devastating. The crack cocaine epidemic of the 1980s was not a natural disaster. Crack arrived in Black communities at a specific moment, spread with a specific speed, and was met with a specific policy response that has never been adequately explained as anything other than deliberate. The Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986 established a sentencing disparity in which possession of crack cocaine triggered the same mandatory minimum sentence as possession of one hundred times that amount of powder cocaine. Crack was the form of cocaine that had taken hold in poor Black communities. Powder cocaine was the form used predominantly by white professionals. The law was written as though these were categorically different substances with different moral weights, when in fact they are pharmacologically nearly identical. The disparity meant that a young Black man in a housing project and a white banker in a high-rise could be using variants of the same drug, and the young Black man would face a mandatory five-year federal sentence while the banker faced almost no legal jeopardy at all. This was the Nixon strategy continued and amplified. The war on drugs under Reagan incarcerated a generation of Black men, destabilized Black families, and produced the conditions of concentrated poverty and community breakdown that the ideology of Black excellence would then attribute to a failure of individual character rather than a coordinated policy of state destruction.

The second track of Nixon’s strategy was integration, not as liberation but as dispersal. Nixon promoted Black capitalism. He encouraged corporations and institutions to open their doors to talented Black individuals, to give them seats at tables that had previously been closed to them. On its surface, this looked like progress. In its function, it was a mechanism for draining the Black community of its most educated and ambitious members and redirecting their energy away from collective institution-building and toward individual advancement within existing white structures. The Panthers had been trying to build something separate and self-sufficient. Nixon’s counter-offer was: you do not need to build anything. We will let you into what we have already built. All you have to do is be exceptional enough to earn it. This was the birth of Black excellence as a dominant ideology. It did not arrive as an explicit political program. It arrived as a cultural shift, a gradual reorientation of what success meant and where it was to be pursued.

That reorientation required the elimination of the voices that were articulating an alternative. Malcolm X was assassinated in 1965. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in 1968, after he had begun connecting the struggle for civil rights to opposition to the Vietnam War and to a broad critique of American capitalism, a turn that significantly expanded the list of people who wanted him dead. Fred Hampton was assassinated in 1969. Kwame Ture (also known as Stokely Carmichael), who had developed one of the most coherent theoretical frameworks for Black political organization and Pan-African solidarity, was surveilled, harassed, and ultimately driven into exile in Guinea, where he died in 1998 having spent the last decades of his life outside the country of his political formation. Angela Davis was imprisoned. Assata Shakur was forced into exile. Kathleen Cleaver fled the country. The pattern was not coincidental. The people who were killed, imprisoned, surveilled, and exiled were specifically the people who were teaching the Black community to think structurally, to reject the terms of Americanism, and to build power outside of the systems that were producing their subjugation.

The use of celebrities as political messengers aimed at the Black community did not begin with social media or Super Bowl halftime shows. The template was set in the 1950s, and it was set through a combination of destruction and replacement that should look familiar by now. Paul Robeson was one of the most talented and politically dangerous figures of the twentieth century. He was an actor, a singer, an athlete, and a committed socialist who used every platform available to him to connect the condition of Black Americans to the global struggle against colonialism and capitalist exploitation. In 1950, the State Department revoked his passport. He was effectively imprisoned within a country that considered him an enemy. His career was destroyed. W.E.B. Du Bois, who had spent decades building the intellectual foundation for Black liberation, was indicted under the Foreign Agents Registration Act in 1951 at the age of eighty-two. The charges were eventually dropped, but the message was clear. Radical Black intellectuals who connected the struggle at home to a broader critique of the American order would be made examples of. Josephine Baker, who spoke openly about American racism to international audiences, accumulated an FBI file and eventually gave up on the country entirely. The pattern was the same as it would be a decade later with the Panthers: identify the voices that are doing real structural analysis, and eliminate them.

What filled the space those voices left was not organic. Berry Gordy built Motown in Detroit in 1959 on a principle that was as much political as it was commercial. The music had to cross over, meaning it had to be acceptable to white audiences and white radio programmers and white television producers. Motown artists were sent to charm school. They were coached on how to speak, how to dress, how to move, how to present a version of Blackness that would not disturb the comfort of the “dominant culture”. The music was extraordinary, and many of the artists were genuine, but the institutional framework that produced and distributed them was designed from the beginning to sand down the political edges. When Marvin Gaye wanted to record “What’s Going On,” Gordy initially refused, calling it uncommercial. The tension was not about music. It was about whether Black artists with mass audiences were allowed to say anything that challenged the order that was giving them their platforms. The ones who stayed within the acceptable range got promoted. The ones who pushed too hard got managed or discarded.

By the time Nixon was in office, the infrastructure for this was already well established. Sammy Davis Jr.’s embrace of Nixon at the 1972 Republican National Convention was one of the most photographed political moments of that year precisely because it encapsulated the transaction so cleanly. Davis was one of the most prominent Black entertainers in the country, and his endorsement was worth something to an administration that needed to neutralize Black political opposition while simultaneously prosecuting a drug war against Black communities. Whether Davis fully understood what he was being used for is almost beside the point. The institution understood it. The photograph of that embrace circulated because it was useful. It told the Black community that a man they admired had found Nixon acceptable. That was the product. Davis was the delivery mechanism.

What is happening now is the same mechanism, refined over seventy years and operating at a scale and speed that the architects of the original strategy could not have imagined. And this is not a partisan observation. As I mentioned in my prior essays on Americanism and Oligarchy, the Democratic and Republican parties are two sides of the same institutional arrangement. They serve the same ownership class. They protect the same structures. The differences between them are real enough at the margins but irrelevant at the level of structural power. Understanding that is essential to understanding how celebrity is being deployed right now, because the manipulation is not coming from one direction. It’s coming from both, and the target in both cases is the same: Black political consciousness.

When the 2024 Democratic campaign began struggling to generate enthusiasm among Black voters, the response from the party apparatus was not to address the policy failures that had produced that lack of enthusiasm. It was to call in performers. Beyoncé licensed her music to the campaign and appeared at rallies. John Legend performed and spoke at campaign events (such as the Democratic Convention), lending his credibility and his audience to a candidate and a party whose record on the issues Legend himself had spent years publicly raising was, at minimum, contested. The message being manufactured was not a political argument. It was a feeling. It was the suggestion that supporting this candidate was synonymous with Black cultural identity, that the music you love and the artists you admire have made their choice and you should follow. This is not political organizing. It’s marketing. It’s the conversion of cultural loyalty into electoral compliance, and it works specifically because it never has to engage with substance. No one at those rallies was asked to reckon with the fact that the policies being celebrated had not closed the racial wealth gap, had not reduced Black maternal mortality to acceptable levels, had not ended the mass incarceration that the Clinton administration’s crime bill helped to build and that subsequent Democratic administrations did not dismantle. The music played. The crowd responded. The transaction was complete.

Snoop Dogg, who had spent years positioning himself as a cultural voice of the Black community, performed at Donald Trump’s 2025 inauguration. Chrisette Michele performed at Trump’s first inauguration in 2017 and watched her career suffer for it publicly. The asymmetry in those two outcomes is instructive. Michele was punished because her performance was legible as a betrayal at a moment when the cultural consensus still had clear lines. By the time Snoop Dogg made the same transaction, those lines had been so sufficiently blurred that the response was more confusion than outrage. That blurring is not accidental. It is the intended result of decades of replacing political education with celebrity influence. When you no longer have the analytical framework to identify who your actual enemies are and what they actually want from you, you also lose the ability to recognize when someone you trusted has been turned against you.

The through line from Sammy Davis Jr. in 1972 to Beyoncé in 2024 to Snoop Dogg at the inauguration isn’t just about individual character failures. It is about a system that has consistently identified Black cultural influence as a resource to be harvested and redirected. The celebrities involved are not the architects of this. They are its instruments. But that distinction does not change what is being done with them or what the effect is on the community whose consent is being manufactured. The real issues, the racial wealth gap, the ongoing destruction of Black families through a carceral system that was designed as a political weapon, the health disparities, the documented theft of generational wealth, those issues are never the subject of a halftime show or a campaign rally performance. They cannot be, because the institutions sponsoring those performances are implicated in producing those conditions. The celebrity’s function is precisely to make the community feel seen and represented without ever forcing the community to look directly at what is being done to it and by whom.

This is the same function that has always been served by the ideology of Black excellence. Work harder than everyone else. Achieve more than everyone else. Prove your worth through individual performance within the institutions of the dominant culture. Do not ask what is wrong with the institutions. Do not ask who built them and for whose benefit. Do not ask why you have to be twice as good to get half as far, because the answer to that question leads somewhere the institutions cannot permit you to go. Just be “excellent”. The community did not need to be built. The community needed to be represented, meaning it needed visible Black faces in the spaces from which it had been excluded. Representation replaced liberation as the operative goal, and once that substitution was made, the logic of Black excellence followed naturally. The criteria for admission are set by the people who built the spaces. You meet their criteria or you do not get in. The idea that the criteria themselves might be illegitimate, that the spaces themselves might need to be replaced rather than integrated, that question was no longer being asked by the people who had the platforms to ask it publicly. And with that question gone, a larger one disappeared alongside it. Whether the institutions seeking your excellence had exploited enslaved people to build their wealth, disenfranchised whole populations to consolidate their power, advocated for imperialism, extended the reach of colonial extraction, or aligned themselves with genocidal regimes stopped being a condition of entry. Black excellence did not ask you to reckon with what you were walking into. It asked you to be good enough to be let in. The moral history of the institution became irrelevant the moment individual achievement replaced collective accountability as the standard by which progress was measured. That was not an accident. An ideology that never asks who built the room and at whose expense will never threaten the people who own the building.

Black Power was not a perfect movement. It had internal contradictions, tactical disagreements, and failures of solidarity that its enemies were skilled at exploiting. But it was asking the right questions. It understood that the problem was structural and that the solution therefore had to be structural. It understood that individual achievement within an unjust system does not alter the injustice. It understood that the Black community’s greatest asset was its collective organization and that the oligarchy’s primary objective was to prevent that organization from reaching its full political potential. That understanding was correct, and it was dangerous, and it was destroyed by a coordinated campaign of murder, imprisonment, legal harassment, forced exile, and ideological replacement.

Black excellence is what was installed in its place. It’s just Americanism with a different name. It tells the same story Americanism has always told, that this country is a meritocracy, that hard work and individual talent are sufficient to overcome any obstacle, and that those who fail to achieve have only themselves to blame. We did not arrive at Black excellence through a process of collective deliberation and free choice. We were maneuvered into it through the deliberate destruction of our political leadership, the economic destabilization of our families through two generations of a drug war that its own architects admitted was designed as a political weapon, and the careful management of who was allowed to speak to us and on what terms. Understanding that history is not an exercise in grievance. It is a prerequisite for building anything real.

My name is Saipher Zureti. I am a visual artist and writer. All of the calligraphy in my essays is my original artwork, created specifically for the writing it accompanies.

This Substack is a body of philosophical essays on manipulation, identity, psychology, and the systems that shape how we see ourselves and each other. The essays build on each other deliberately. Each one extends, complicates, or deepens what came before, because these subjects cannot be understood in isolation from one another.

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Until next time, Namaste.

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