The Privilege of Mediocrity

GLANCE ACROSS THE American cultural landscape and you’ll find a growing number of people of color who have gained the right to dictate the terms of their art, from Shonda Rhimes and Jennifer Lopez, who signed big-figure development deals with Netflix, to the showrunner Misha Green, whose “Lovecraft Country,” canceled by HBO after one season, was nominated for 18 Emmy Awards and who signed an overall deal with Apple. All of this success, however, relies on the doctrine of the exceptional individual. For long-established communities of racial minorities and recent immigrants alike, the promise of the American dream rests in what the philosopher Michael J. Sandel terms “the rhetoric of rising”: a faith, largely illusory, that you can get as far in this country as your talents will take you. You might have to work twice as hard for half as much, but you are still the master of your fate. The phrase “Black excellence,” for instance, gained traction in the late 1960s, after the legal victories of the civil rights movement revealed a society still deeply entrenched in racial inequality and division. In November 1969, the activist Whitney M. Young Jr., then the head of the National Urban League, wrote an editorial with the headline “Black Excellence Can Lead to an Open American Society” in which he called upon Black Americans to fight for their own freedom through “discipline and responsible action.” Violent protests, Young argues, are unpersuasive. “We must pursue Black excellence,” he writes, “the special responsibility to excel: To outthink, outperform and outdo those who would deny to Black people freedom.”

‘We have the burden of feeling like if our shows fail, then it’s a referendum on the viability of Asian Americans as a whole,’ says the actor Daniel Dae Kim.

Black excellence, however, only works as a means of upward mobility in a society largely free of racist structures and racist people. Perhaps, as Sandel argues, the very premise of meritocratic striving is flawed. “What if the rhetoric of rising no longer inspires,” he proposes, “not simply because social mobility has stalled but, more fundamentally, because helping people scramble up 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 ready to entertain such a bold reframing of our civil order. Indeed, people of color are often the most outspoken supporters of the hustle and grind of American success. After all, just enough of us got rewarded by following this path of hard work and determination that it only underscored the viability of the myth. How can meritocracy be a myth when your cousin or your best friend’s sister-in-law made it big by outworking white folks? How can it be a myth when a Black and, in his words, “skinny kid with a funny name” worked so hard that he ended up in the White House? When a Black and Indian American woman did the same?

In the light of these hard-won individual efforts, the concept of a salvific mediocrity seems perverse. In 1963, when James Baldwin published “My Dungeon Shook,” his searing and searching open letter to his teenage nephew, he did not counsel mediocrity but its opposite. “You were born into a society which spelled out with brutal clarity, and in as many ways as possible, that you were a worthless human being,” Baldwin writes. “You were not expected to aspire to excellence: You were expected to make peace with mediocrity.” How dare we, some 60 years on, suggest making peace with mediocrity? But Baldwin could not have predicted the costs of our constant strivings, for we’ve lived to see something he could not: the psychic toll of aspiring to excellence in a society that fails to recognize and reward it even when achieved.