The Gift and The Curse of the Exceptional Black and Brown People

Despite facing incredible obstacles and discrimination from left to right, there are Black and Brown people among us that exceed expectations and surpass their peers. That is often received with more than incredulity—cognitive dissonance, confusion, anger, lashing out, penalization, erasure, and ultimately and more potently, indifference usually follow suit.

We’ve seen the many examples of Black athletes pulling off Olympian stunts that have left competitors and regulators in the dust and stunned. Simone Biles is one of the numerous recent examples. In typical fashion of entities that can’t fathom the reality of Black women being superior, The International Gymnastics Federation penalized her by assigning a lower grade letter to her new Triple Double move. No One Can Fly Like Simone Biles, indeed.

See yourselves:

The constant drug-testing of Serena Williams is another example of that penalization. NPR breaks it down and asks:

Serena Williams is the most decorated player in tennis today. According to Deadspin, she's also been tested for performance enhancing drugs more than twice as often as other top American women players. Why has she been singled out?

It’s because she’s Black. Something the host and guest of All Things Considered failed to say. It’s racism. It’s misogyny. Both have become dirty words in mainstream media and many circles that we have the misfortune of being forced to occupy and share with people who can’t even admit that they exist, that we experience them, that they constantly partake in and uphold with their willful and arrogant ignorance. Hell, mainstream media was recently asking itself if Donald Trump is racist. And conservatives are constantly decrying it for supposedly being too liberal, too far Left. As if. Mainstream media twists itself into knots with silly headlines just so they don’t anger a racist base for writing “racist,” “racism,” “bigot”… “racially charged” being one of their favorites. It’s almost comical but its impact is no laughing matter.

I recently wrote about the many indignities Brown men and women go through and used Julián Castro’s and my experiences as examples. It doesn’t matter if we are qualified, we will most likely be passed over or ignored entirely for excelling. The brilliant and prolific visual artist, Teresita Fernández,  said it better:

How dare we be too good. How dare we be pioneers. How dare we upset the establishment with our brilliance. How dare we try to make anything better by putting in the work. Harvard recently deployed one of those odious “how dare you” to the well-known and respected scholar, Lorgia García-Peña, by denying her tenure. Hundreds of students and prominent community figures have signed a letter in her support and in condemnation of such a blatant slap to the face. A slap that many of us took personally and felt. Because, in the end, if “you mess with one of us, you mess with all of us.”

We are constantly lectured from all people, on panels, from podiums about needing to be more than prepared. We’re sold this basic-ass lie that “luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity.” But those are never broken down through a racial lens. Class and gender are hardly ever mentioned. The data doesn’t lie. Nevertheless, we get to work and we exceed, perhaps harder than anyone else because we are constantly working to better our craft for that opportunity that may never come—even when it seems reachable it’s always taken away from us like in an ugly, systemic, malicious game of sike. The great writer Shanita Hubbard succinctly explains how we constantly go above and beyond, only to see opportunities be given instead to people whose overprivilege gifts them a baffling, underserving, and insulting confidence:

We’re not even hired to cover our own people! We’re not even hired to tell our own stories! We’re not even hired to represent our own communities! So, excuse the fucking righteous bitterness.

The Golden Globes snubbed Ava DuVernay’s brilliant and widely impactful When They See Us. It did the same to other Black thespians, to Black women. The examples are innumerable and perpetually enraging.

The goal post for us is a perpetual motion machine: it’s always moved. Even when we have a better grasp of things that can help industries tremendously, that can change the trajectory of humankind for the better. But alas. The hate is real.

I recently had a conversation with a crestfallen friend about getting his hopes up and then crushed with a job opportunity he came across and is perfect for. Here’s our private conversation about it:

I’d like to tell him that he’s better off not being there, if they’re going to pass on such a great candidate just because he’s Latinx, but I’d like to know what space, what entity doesn’t pass up on us who dare to be “too good,” who dare to be too experienced, who dare to be too great.

We literally have to create our own platforms (like this one, this one, this one, this one, among others) from the little resources we manage to scrape together and with the help of our own community, a community that’s struggling itself but persists and insists on surviving, on elevating our champions so we can one day be allowed to be great in peace.

Without permission, a las buenas o a las malas, we will be great in peace.

One day.

Thanks for reading and sharing with your family and friends.

A mainstream or indie magazine would usually pay me between $250-$450 for one of my pieces. Since I decided to go solo for the sake of keeping my voice unedited and uncensored, I created this website. Keeping it afloat and these pieces coming is not just time-consuming, but it’s also costly because it angers a lot of those same mainstream papers and magazines (along with their donors) for calling them out—so their favorite retaliation tactic is deplatforming. Especially of unapologetic and unhypocritical Black and Brown voices. Ideally, I’d like to raise between $250-$450 per piece and many of you have actually stepped-up to the plate and helped me accomplish that. For that, I thank you from the bottom of my heart. If you would like to see more of these and support one of the few unbought indie voices, please contribute:

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César Vargas is an award-winning writer, advocate, strategist, speaker, and social critic with a loyal following and a robust social capital that spans from coast to coast: Journalists, celebrities, activists, artists, executives, politicians, and more. He was named one of 40 Under 40: Latinos in American Politics by the Huffington Post. He’s written about internal and external community affairs to several news outlets and quoted in others: The Huffington Post, NBC, Fox News, Voxxi, Okayafrica, Okayplayer, Sky News, Salon, The Guardian, Latino Magazine, Vibe, The Hill, BET, and his own online magazine—which has a fan base of over 25,000 people and has reached over a million—UPLIFTT. He’s familiar with having a voice that informs, invigorates, and inspires people—creating content that usually goes viral. He recently won two awards from Fusion and the National Hispanic Foundation for the Arts for his films Some Kind of Spanish and Black Latina Unapologetically. He attained a degree in Films Studies from Queens College, CUNY. He’s currently heading Azul, a PR & marketing firm for the modern world.