Teaching Black History Shouldn’t Start with Teaching ‘Black Firsts’

Stay Empowered With Our Daily Newsletters

• Climate
• Money
• Health
• WIB Weekly
• Education
• Religion

Sign up

Growing up, much of the Black history I was taught focused on the people and events surrounding so-called “Black Firsts”: Jackie Robinson was the first to play Major League Baseball; Sidney Poitier was the first to win an Oscar; and W.E.B. Du Bois was the first to earn a Ph.D. from Harvard University. 

Lately, though, I’ve shared with anyone who would listen that teaching Black history shouldn’t start with teaching about Black Firsts. In my opinion, being the first Black person to do something in the U.S. isn’t Black history. 

I don’t say this to diminish the talent, skill, fortitude, or courage of people who broke color barriers, regardless of the industry. My point is that, as Black culture critic and intellectual Tre Johnson tells us, Black genius isn’t something that miraculously appears when a Black person integrates and excels in a white space.

Black people, Johnson argues, have always been capable of accomplishment, excellence, and achievement outside of white recognition. The genius, he says, was already there.

Black Excellence, White Gaze

The Negro Leagues, for example, produced dozens of Black players besides Robinson who could have become stars in the majors. Poitier had established himself as a brilliant actor in New York’s American Negro Theater before he won an Oscar in 1964. DuBois was known at Fisk University as an innovative thinker on race and philosophy before he even set foot at Harvard. 

The problem is that when we position Black Firsts as Black history, we center white institutional spaces and therefore require the white gaze to validate Black genius. In that framework, Black achievement outside of a white space is invalid because, by definition, Black spaces were — are — deemed inferior.      

Therefore, the idea that a Black person can succeed amongst white people is considered proof of exceptional talent or ability, in contrast to what whites actually believe Black people are capable of.

In other words, Black people cannot truly be exceptional unless they are measured against the accomplishments of white people.

I’ve personally wrestled with this idea for a while. But sportswriter Howard Bryant’s book, “Kings and Pawns: Jackie Robinson and Paul Robeson in America,” validated my belief in Johnson’s theory. 

The “Real” Standard

Examining Robinson’s experience integrating the major leagues, Bryant finds that Brooklyn Dodgers owner Branch Rickey’s decision to sign the Negro Leagues star to an MLB contract was more a social experiment than an act of social justice. Rickey and the rest of the baseball power structure wanted to know if a Black man — a member of a social class they all believed was physically and mentally inferior — could succeed in a white man’s game. 

The experiment was rigged against Robinson from the start. At 28, he was relatively old for a rookie, and he was subjected to a constant barrage of racist insults and indignities. Still, his contract stipulated he could not verbally retaliate or lash out. 

Yet Robinson not only succeeded, but excelled. He won baseball’s Rookie of the Year award in 1947 and the National League’s Most Valuable Player Award two years later. That same year, he was chosen as a starter in the MLB All-Star Game.

As the first Black man to achieve those things, Robinson was considered exceptional because he had done so while competing against white players — the “real” standard for excellence. 

‘Serving and Comforting Whites’

But the ugly truth is that institutions like Major League Baseball, the Academy Awards, and Harvard University are anti-Black; they’ve always been. It doesn’t matter if Black people are “allowed” to participate, win, or even run white institutions. The organization’s fundamental agenda and systems of control never change. 

Social scientists Glenn Bracey and Wendy Leo Moore lay it out in detail: “Simply put, white institutional space is created through a process that begins with whites excluding people of color, either completely or from institutional positions of power, during a formative period in the history of an organization.” Whites both populate and control those institutions, they write, so they “embed white norms into the fabric of the institution’s structure and culture, establishing white ability as the default.”

Translation: In elite institutions that whites have created, white supremacy is part of their DNA.  

As a result, “racially biased institutional norms are wrongly defined as race-neutral and merely characteristic of the institution itself,” Bracey and Moore write. That creates a “robust culture that privileges whites by vesting power in white leaders’ hands,” creating an overwhelmingly white membership and “orienting activities toward serving and comforting whites, and negatively sanctioning non-white norms.”

They See Us

In short, America still celebrating Black firsts in 2026 says more about America’s anti-Black racism than it does about Black genius, which never needed white spaces or validation to exist and thrive. That’s especially true since that “exceptional” individual is likely one of a handful of Black people whites allow in.

Black history isn’t what we do among white folks within their spaces. Black history is what we do for each other within our own communities. 

To be clear: we honor historian Carter Woodson for creating Negro History Week for us. We recognized the genius of Sidney — and Denzel, and Halle — before the Oscars did. We hold in esteem Dr. King, Dubois, Malcolm, Rosa, Harriet, and countless others because of what they sought to do and did for us. 

As we continue to use our genius to do for us in our spaces, however, trust that we don’t have to be the first to do it in their spaces for them to see us.

Rann Miller is an educator, opinion columnist and author or Resistance Stories from Black History for Kids. You can follow him on twitter @UrbanEdDJ and on Instagram  @urbanedmixtape.