Genius is Your Own Fullness

To me, Genius is a neutral thing. It’s not about being better or worse than anyone else; it’s about standing in the fullness of your own self. When Genius, and more specifically when Black Genius, is grown in an environment of white supremacy that becomes a challenging thing to do. Because white supremacy relies on contrast - and where contrast doesn’t exist, it creates the illusion of contrast. Systems and policies are created and enforced that perpetuate the stories of superiority and inferiority - stories that we internalize until our own perceptions are clouded. Black Genius has always been asked to live with the contradiction of white supremacy - to plant seeds in a soil that has no interest in allowing our growth. To wrestle with the disparity of who we know ourselves to be, and who we are taught we’re permitted to become.

I believe that the remedy to this dynamic, is to double down on my Genius and to free it from the constraints I’ve been taught to internalize. To let my power be a power that isn’t reliant on who sees it, or who validates it, or how it’s measured by institutions that only know to try and extract it.  

To let my power be a power that transcends the idea that my wellbeing is so casually determined by the whims of the collective every four years.

No.
I know that to see myself is the invitation of these times - to maintain a clarity that is so unshakeable that everything else takes it place; until the insurmountable becomes the trivial and the truth becomes the seen.

Black Genius has always been asked

to live with the contradiction

of white supremacy