The Other Side of “Black Excellence”

By: DeLisha Tapscott, Ed.D.

Nobody really tells you what happens when you become “the one who made it.” 

The phrase itself is complicated because “making it” is not a single destination, nor is it a journey that begins from the same place for everyone. For some, “making it” meant leaving a neighborhood where survival was the daily priority. For others, it meant growing up solidly middle-class, where the expectation of upward mobility was the entire point of their parents’ sacrifices. 

For many Black families, “making it” is not simply about earning more money; instead, it is about becoming the first person in a family to gain access to institutions, opportunities, and forms of stability that were historically denied, making individual success inseparable from collective expectation. When you “make it,” people name the visible markers. They name the degree, the job, the salary, and the access. They talk about how far you have come and what you have accomplished. However, what they do not talk about is how quickly your life stops being about your own aspirations once those things begin to change. 

The assumption is often that more money creates ease and allows you to move through the world with more freedom. That is true in some ways. At the same time, an increase in income can change what people expect from you. The degree, the salary, and the access do not just belong to you; they can also become evidence that you are now the person who knows, the person who can help, and/or the person who can step in when something goes wrong, even if nobody ever says that directly. Money, in this context, is never just individual. It is deeply embedded in informal systems of obligation, care, and survival.

This dynamic is not a complaint about success, nor is it a claim that having resources is a hardship. It is an observation about the invisible architecture of responsibility that Black families build around whoever is positioned to hold things together, complicating narratives of Black excellence by recognizing the unseen labor and obligations that often accompany academic or career achievement.

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For me, that positioning did not begin with me; it was already present in the women before me. My mom, Diane, is the oldest daughter, and over time, she became the person everyone relied on when something needed to be handled. It did not matter that she lived in Maryland while most of our family was in Connecticut. When my nana, Dorothy Louise, got sick, my mother brought her into her home and cared for my nana through the end of her life. When funerals happened, my mother organized them. When my uncle needed help navigating unemployment, my mother did more than explain the process. My mother filled out the forms, completed the weekly requirements, and applied for jobs for him because he did not have a computer. Even now, years after my nana passed, she is still the person people call when something needs to be figured out or stabilized. 

My husband’s mother holds a similar role. She is also the oldest daughter, also financially stable, and also the person people turn to when something needs to be organized or sustained. Seeing that pattern across both sides of my life made something clear. While both women happened to be the oldest daughters, what seemed to matter most was not birth order but capability. They were the people others trusted to navigate systems, manage crises, and keep things moving, which meant responsibility increasingly found its way to them. 

That context shapes how I understand my life now because much of my adulthood has been defined by crossing thresholds that were new within my family, which, as a Black woman, also meant that access came with expectations of caregiving, problem-solving, and helping others navigate those systems, from higher education and professional opportunities to levels of financial stability, healthcare, and institutional access that previous generations either could not reach or could not afford. 

Long before I had a degree, a title, or access, I had already become someone my family could call when they needed help understanding the world around them. Today, that includes helping manage my mother’s healthcare, appointments, and the many day-to-day logistics that keep things functioning. 

Like me, my friends are the ones their parents call, the ones their siblings depend on, and the ones people reach out to when something needs to be handled. Sometimes it is financial. Sometimes it is logistical, sometimes it is emotional, but most of the time, it is all of those things at once. 

What stands out is not only the responsibility itself but the absence of preparation. Nobody explained that this would be part of what comes with earning more or having access to systems that others around you did not. There was no clear explanation of how to transition between jobs, negotiate a salary, or understand what we were worth in environments that were not designed with us in mind. We learned alongside others who were also learning.

When you grow up understanding that your community’s priority has always been to push you forward, you learn to carry the expectations that momentum creates. At the same time, you do not learn how to navigate the guilt of leaving others behind or the pressure of pulling them forward with you. Instead, you learn how to show up and carry what needs to be carried, while simultaneously not learning how to step back.

This is where things become complicated. Before you decide what you want to do with your money or your time, you are already thinking about who might need something and what could come up, especially those who faced different obstacles or lacked the same access. Not because someone is always asking, but because experience teaches you how quickly circumstances can change. 

A doctor’s appointment can become a copay or a prescription. A setback can become a request for help, a family crisis can become an unexpected expense, hours spent on the phone, or a problem that lands on your desk simply because you are the person people trust to figure it out. Before you have even made a decision about what to do with your time, money, and energy, part of all three has been reserved for possibilities that have not yet happened, and that’s because you are always planning for the possibility of being needed.

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Over time, that way of thinking becomes routine. This is not only about money, but it is also about a shift in position that reflects class, even if it is not named that way. The change shows up in how people interpret what is possible for you once your income changes. It affects how your time is valued and how your decisions are understood. While you may still feel like you are figuring things out, others may relate to you as if you have already arrived, and that gap creates tension.

Part of what makes that tension difficult to navigate is that there is no shared language for class in Black communities. Naming differences can feel like creating distance or separating yourself from a shared experience. Because of that, people often move around it. We know how to talk about race, discrimination, and survival, but many of us have far less language for talking about what happens when people who share a racial identity no longer share the same realities. They downplay what they have or avoid conversations around financial mobility all together. As a result, many of the decisions people make about obligations related to what to give, when to help, how much to share, and where to draw boundaries, are negotiated internally rather than discussed openly.  

You exist in the in-between, the professional world you are learning to navigate and the community you are trying to support, never feeling fully anchored in either.

As that tension builds, it changes how success feels; it is no longer only about what you have gained. It is also about what you are expected to hold. You may be making more than you ever have before, but it does not always feel like freedom. It feels like responsibility that does not pause and decisions that are shaped by more than your own needs.

This isn’t about rejecting care or deciding not to show up for the people you love. It’s about being honest about how tightly care, obligation, and money are tied together, especially when nobody has really given us language for how to move through that. A lot of us are trying to figure out what it means to have limits in systems that taught us to always be available, and to understand what sustainability looks like without it feeling like we’re turning our backs on people.

What I have come to understand, though, is that responsibility expands to fill whatever space we leave unexamined. So for me, the question is no longer whether I will show up for the people I love, but how to make sense of what happens when mobility changes what others need from you, what you expect from yourself, and how you understand your place within the communities that raised you. I do not think many of us were taught how to navigate the distinction because we inherited models of sacrifice, endurance, and collective care that helped our families survive.

DeLisha Tapscott, Ed.D., is a writer, researcher, and cultural worker whose work examines digital culture, kinship, and Black womanhood and girlhood through storytelling, education, organizational leadership, and analyses of race, gender, and power. She is the co-founder of Black Girl Narrative, a cultural production hub that produces storytelling, research, and archival projects centering Black women’s lived experiences across digital, visual, and narrative forms. Alongside her cultural work, she serves in executive leadership at an international feminist organization, where she focuses on strategy, systems, storytelling, and organizational care. She is also a co-editor of the forthcoming book Black Doctoral Students’ Experiences in Academia: Narratives of Collective Responsibility, Community, and Care.