I saw the fallout from Michael B. Jordan’s snub for best actor at the Critics’ Choice Awards. One social media post in particular caught my attention.
That stuck with me because I remember being told as a kid and young adult that I had to be twice as good as white kids to get the opportunities and accolades that white kids got. I know many Black folks were told this growing up, only to realize that the reality is you push yourself to be twice as good, only to get half as much.
In a 2025 study in the Journal of Biomedical Life Science, the authors introduced a Minorities’ Diminished Returns (MDRs) framework to the “twice is good” axiom explaining that “resources like education, income, and self-efficacy yield weaker health and psychological benefits for Black populations than they do for white populations.”
According to the study, there are eight mechanisms responsible for producing those diminished returns:
- Interpersonal discrimination
- Social stratification and segregation
- Lower quality of education
- Labor market discrimination
- Accumulation of disadvantage from childhood
- Internalized racism
- Structural racism in banking, policing, real estate, and mortgage lending
- The legacy of enslavement and Jim Crow laws.
All of these mechanisms in concert have facilitated a reality for Black people that working twice as hard is nothing more than working ourselves to death.
When we cite the truth of this study in our own experiences, non-Black people resort to calling us victims. Some Black people will even say the same. My response is that of Dr. King: “nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity,” but I digress.
Looking back on such “wisdom” in my own life, as a father and an educator, I ask myself why I must be twice as good in a society that is anti-Black anyway? Who am I doing this for? The “twice as good” axiom suggests that Black people aren’t inherently good enough, and when we tell Black children this, that’s what we’re communicating to them: that they aren’t enough, because they’re Black.
The axiom fails in allowing Black people to exist as their authentic human selves. It’s a punishment for being who they were created to be. For young people who are developing and coming to know who they are, that axiom creates a person different from who they were designed to be.
That axiom pushes Black children toward white institutions, tells them that success is thriving within those institutions and that anxiety, stress, depression, and a detachment from community are a small price to pay to achieve the designation of “not being like other Black people.” You can graduate top of your class in high school, attend and graduate top of your class from Harvard, work at a Fortune-500 company, have the suburban multi-bedroom house, have the luxury car, and an 800-credit score, and still not be “enough.”
Barack Obama is a prime example.
He was considered by many Black people to have the perfect background for a position of power and prestige. He attended an Ivy League school. He was an attorney, and so was his wife. He was bi-racial. He was articulate. He was a political moderate. He even chastised Black people, and he made white people comfortable with his adherence to respectability politics.
It didn’t matter because many white people believed that he and his family still weren’t good enough.
White people, including politicians, wanted him to fail. He was labeled a terrorist because of his name. He was called unprofessional for wearing a tan suit. His wife was mocked and caricatured. He was also subjected to a false claim by the current president, Donald Trump, that he was not a citizen. His accomplishments, acumen, and authority didn’t matter. That’s likely true for many of us; no matter where we attend school, no matter where we live or how much money is in our bank accounts, we’re still Black.
Therefore, I reject that axiom.
Tell Black children the truth, that they were created perfectly. They may not always be perfect, and they may not have fully become who they will be. That’s a journey. But there’s nothing wrong with them, and telling them that they have to be twice as good implies that there is.
Tell them that what’s wrong is that we live in a dysfunctional, anti-Black society, and as a result we are told that we must meet a Eurocentric standard that we will never reach. And that we wouldn’t win white approval even if we did. Black children should be who they are. There’s nothing wrong with attending a K-12 school where the majority of students are Black and a good portion of teachers are Black. There’s nothing wrong with attending an HBCU versus attending a PWI or an Ivy League school. There’s nothing wrong with dedicating your skills and your career to serving or helping Black people.
Many of us who struggle to be twice as good hold in the highest esteem Black people who were never slaves to that axiom. Heroes such as Ida B. Wells-Barnett, Pauli Murray, James Baldwin, Angela Davis, and Kwame Toure. They were never concerned with being twice as good as white people, and neither should we. Those freedom fighters and others like them were concerned with being the best people that they could be on behalf of Black people in a society that seeks to destroy us. That must be our goal as well.
My resolution for 2026 for Black children is to shed the weight of having to be twice as good.
My hope for Black children is that they realize they’re enough, and that as Black people, we know this too. Shed the shackles of Eurocentric norms. Remove the guilt from failing to achieve a standard that you can never meet. Rest in the reality that you are powerful beyond measure, and that who you are is who many wish they were. No one can be YOU better than YOU can. This is the message. So, go and be you, and watch how the rest of our community and the world are blessed by it.
And let the haters hate while you be Black and great.
