By Musa T. Bey

“Until the lions have their historians, tales of the hunt will always glorify the hunter.” – African Proverb

America has always told a false story about Black success. In the textbooks, on TV, in political speeches and Hollywood movies, the narrative is simple: America, the land of opportunity, is slowly but surely overcoming its past sins, opening its arms to all. And the proof? Black success. Black billionaires. Black presidents. Black celebrities. Black CEOs.

This narrative is more than wrong. It is a weapon. It is a carefully crafted ideological smokescreen used to conceal the ongoing structural war against Black life. Black success did not happen because of the system—it happened in spite of it.

It was not the Constitution, capitalism, or democracy that brought us forward. It was our ancestors’ refusal to die. It was rebellion. It was organizing. It was our collective will to survive, create, and fight back in the face of genocidal violence. Every so-called Black “success” has occurred not through inclusion in American democracy, but through combat with the systems that sought our annihilation.

I. Black Success Is Born of Rebellion, Not Inclusion

Let’s dismantle this illusion at the root: The United States was not designed to include us.

It was forged in genocide and slavery. The Founding Fathers didn’t “forget” Black people—they enslaved us. The Constitution didn’t overlook our humanity—it deliberately coded us as property. The Supreme Court didn’t “misinterpret” our rights—it declared we had none.

There is no moment in U.S. history where the state willingly extended full citizenship, full dignity, or full humanity to Black people. Any narrative that frames Black success as the logical conclusion of American “progress” is a lie.

We did not ascend through the systems. We escaped them. We defied them. We survived them.

From maroon communities in the swamps, to enslaved women teaching children to read under threat of death, to post-emancipation Black folks building towns with their bare hands, to the freedom schools of the 1960s—we have always had to build our own institutions because the state was either absent, violent, or actively destructive.

II. When We Build, They Burn

The clearest evidence that Black success is not welcomed by this system lies in the violent backlash that always follows our self-determination.

When we built Tulsa’s Black Wall Street, it was firebombed from the sky and destroyed by mobs with state complicity. When we gained political representation during Reconstruction, we were met with mass murder, lynching, and disenfranchisement through terrorism and “law.” When we formed revolutionary formations like the Black Panther Party, providing free breakfast programs, community clinics, and education, we were targeted by the FBI’s COINTELPRO and assassinated.

This is not anecdotal. It is structural. It is the pattern of American governance: any time Black people organize for power beyond the state, the state moves to eliminate, infiltrate, or co-opt them.

Black advancement is tolerated only when it poses no threat to empire—only when it can be controlled, tokenized, or commodified.

III. Black Faces in High Places: The Trap of Tokenism

The system is smart. It adapts. It evolves. Today, white supremacy doesn’t always wear a hood or badge—it hides behind boardroom doors, congressional halls, and PR campaigns. It uses Black representation to mask Black subjugation.

Yes, we’ve had Black presidents. Black billionaires. Black police chiefs. But what good is a Black face on a white power structure? What good is representation in an empire built on death?

Barack Obama became the figurehead of empire at the very moment when Black communities needed a revolutionary. Instead of dismantling the carceral state, he expanded surveillance. Instead of defunding war, he dropped bombs from drones. His election was used to declare “post-racial America,” even as police continued to murder Black people with impunity.

Jay-Z became a billionaire not through liberation economics, but through exploitation and capital accumulation. He is not a threat to the empire—he is proof of its ability to repackage itself in Black skin.

Representation without revolution is not progress—it’s camouflage.

IV. Black Capitalism: A Dead-End Road

The myth of “Black capitalism” is one of the most insidious weapons in the state’s arsenal. It teaches us that the solution to centuries of exploitation is not justice, but ownership. That if we just hustle hard enough, buy Black, build wealth, and invest in ourselves, we’ll close the racial wealth gap and “make it.”

But capitalism was never designed to be a path to freedom. It is a system of organized theft—of land, labor, and life. It doesn’t work for most white people either—but for Black people, it is deadly by design.

Capitalism produced the slave plantation. It produced the prison-industrial complex. It gentrifies our neighborhoods, poisons our water, underpays our labor, and turns our grief into spectacle.

When we are told to participate in capitalism, we are being asked to become junior partners in our own exploitation. “Black capitalism” doesn’t liberate—it just Blackens the chains.

V. Black Resistance Is the Engine of Our Survival

If we are successful today—if we survive—it is because of resistance. Not votes. Not venture capital. Not job interviews or internships. But rebellion.

It is because of Harriet’s gun. It is because of Nat’s uprising. Because of Sojourner’s voice and Malcolm’s fire. Because of Ella Baker’s organizing and the MOVE Organization’s refusal to submit.

It is because our grandmothers built mutual aid networks in the absence of welfare. Because our fathers taught political education in prison yards. Because queer Black folks carved out life-saving spaces under the threat of erasure and death.

We have created everything in the midst of violence. Music. Culture. Philosophy. Healing. We are not successful because we were included in the empire. We are successful because we refused to be destroyed by it.

VI. Measuring Success by Liberation, Not Assimilation

We must redefine what success means. Not by how many Black faces get rich while the masses remain in chains. Not by how many of us gain seats at imperial tables, but by how many tables we flip.

Success is not getting “a piece of the pie” in a system built on stolen land and Black death. Success is abolition. Success is sovereignty. Success is collective power.

The ultimate measure of Black success is whether we are free—free from police, free from prisons, free from wage slavery, from housing precarity, from surveillance, from imperialist war, from ecological collapse.

We must stop chasing validation from a state that sees us as threats to be contained. We are not here to be included. We are here to win.

VII. Conclusion: Black Success Must Be a Weapon Against Empire

The American empire wants to use Black success as a pacifier, a spectacle, a distraction. But we must reclaim it as a weapon.

If you’ve survived this system, use your platform to expose it. If you’ve gained resources, redistribute them to build dual power. If you have influence, use it to amplify revolutionary struggle—not to climb higher in a burning house.

Because the system didn’t give us anything. We took it. We bled for it. We died for it.

We are not the proof that America works. We are the evidence that we know how to survive what was designed to kill us.

Black success isn’t a celebration of America’s greatness—it’s an indictment of its crimes.

And our greatest success is yet to come: the abolition of the system that tried to bury us.

We are the storm. We are the dream unbroken. We are the rebellion that empire fears. And we’re just getting started.