The Unspoken Bargain: On the Pain of Black Success and the Ghost of the Master's Wedge.

By Hilerie Lind

There is a weight that comes with being the one who "makes it out." It is a peculiar, heavy crown, one that is often placed on your head by the very people you love most, and yet it feels less like an honor and more like a target.

I’ve been thinking about my family. I’ve been thinking about my parents, who found their way to God after walking through the fire of familial addictions and wrongful imprisonment. I’ve been thinking about my mother, who became the first Black woman appraiser in Lorain County, a pioneer in her own right. And I’ve been thinking about the moment their success, their salvation, became a burden for their children.

Suddenly, my brother and I were no longer just kids. We were the children of the "saved ones." Every scraped knee, every adolescent misstep, was magnified under the harsh glare of community expectation. "They're supposed to be saved, but look at their kids." We were expected to be unblemished, perfect symbols of our parents' transformation, as if the grace they had found was a genetic trait that should have erased our own humanity.

Years later, when I earned my degrees, when I worked in government, when I ran for Mayor, that same dynamic returned, sharp as a blade. Every opinion I held, every stance I took, was measured against a new, impossible standard. "You're supposed to be so educated," they'd say. "You're supposed to be a politician." The subtext was clear: your achievements have purchased your silence. You have traded your authentic self for our approval, and we are here to collect.

This is the painful, unspoken bargain of Black success. In my academic work, I call the version that Black men often face a "Faustian Bargain"—a deal with the devil of capitalism for fame and access. But this is different. This is a bargain made with the community itself. The terms are: we will celebrate you, but you must become a flawless symbol. You lose the right to be flawed.

Where does this impulse come from, this need to police our own who rise? The great Toni Morrison taught us that the past is never dead; it's not even past. The roots of this bargain are buried in the blood-soaked soil of the plantation. The Master’s most effective tool was the wedge. By creating a hierarchy—pitting the enslaved in the house against the enslaved in the field—he planted a seed of suspicion that we have been watering for generations. Proximity to power, a new dress, a less strenuous job, an education—any form of "success" was suspect, because it was seen as a betrayal of the collective suffering. It was a zero-sum game then. We have carried that trauma into 2025, often seeing a sibling's success not as a collective win but as a personal loss. A deep-seated jealousy, born of historical terror, whispers that their light somehow diminishes our own.

The brilliant Zora Neale Hurston, who knew the intimate politics of the Black community better than anyone, once wrote, "I have been in Sorrow's kitchen and licked out all the pots. Then I have stood on the peaky mountain wrapped in rainbows, with a harp and a sword in my hands." She understood that joy and pain, success and struggle, are not mutually exclusive. The sword and the harp can and must exist in the same hands.

Michael Eric Dyson has spent a career analyzing the pressures of Black celebrity, the impossible demand that our leaders and artists be both exceptional and "just like us." But this isn't just a celebrity problem. It is a family problem. It is a church problem. It is a community problem.

The expectation that I, or anyone, should be fundamentally altered by a diploma or a title is a rejection of my wholeness. It is an attempt to erase the journey. I am still the same person at my core. I am still that girl born in Cleveland, raised in Lorain, a graduate of Clearview High School. I am still a graduate of the University of Akron, a Zeta, still a lover of Christ who allows God to lead me. I am still a community leader, a change-maker, still a mother, a General.

I can be all of those things and still be me. Achievement is not an amputation. It is an expansion. We must learn to celebrate the success of our people not as a debt they owe us, but as a testament to the resilience that lives in all of us. We must stop making our brightest pay for their own brilliance.