How Far We Haven’t Come

by Leslie M. Scott-Jones

I had possibly one of the most disturbing conversations with a colleague and friend that I have ever experienced. The conversation alludes to the same kind of vitriol I felt when the recording of the British Academy of Film and Television Arts (BAFTA) awards reached me. There’s a thing in a Black existence that still permeates from enslavement and Jim Crow…struggle. All of us in some form or fashion have continued to believe, or at least act as though struggling to eke out some sort of accommodation, affirmation or consideration from this societal structure means that it was somehow valuable. We even look at it through ourselves. We struggle in our relationships, we stay longer than we should in spaces that don’t value us and when space cease to value us we are chastised for leaving rather than enduring harm for the sake of the greater good. As a people we have been conditioned to believe that if it hurts, we should desire it all the more.

So, when my dear friend told me that he didn’t think of himself as Black because due to his light skin he hadn’t been terrorized by police like other Black men, it’s hard to describe how I felt. Angry, for sure. Heartbroken. That a beautiful Black man would allow his self-worth, his self-esteem, how he participates in and takes ownership of a culture that he was raised in, to be determined by the amount of terror he has received from a system of oppression built with the express purpose to break him, is disgusting. I know I probably reacted too harshly. I yelled at him. “How dare you believe that simply because you haven’t been terrorized by police that you aren’t Black enough. How dare you allow how a system of oppression treats you determine how you feel about yourself. How dare you equate your value with how much you have to hurt. Even if your road is harder and longer, its value is not defined by the struggle it’s defined by your belief in yourself. It’s defined by the fact that when you get to where you’re going it had nothing to do with the obstacles someone else put in front of you and everything to do with your navigation around, under, over or through them. Your self-worth should be grounded in your divineness, not their oppression of it.” I can’t be sure that it got through. I can’t be sure that he didn’t lay down that night believing that because he hasn’t been shot and killed by police that he isn’t valuable. That he isn’t Black.

Similarly when an actor accepting an award at the BAFTA awards yells “Free Palestine” is silenced, and a man with Tourette’s yelling racial slurs at actors Micheal B. Jordan and Delroy Lindo is aired with no issue. And it’s ok cause he has an illness. It’s ok because the presenter after them offered the biggest non-apology I think I’ve ever heard in my life. Someone asking for attention to be paid to a genocide that has killed hundreds of thousands of Brown people, most of them children is silenced. Degrading two of the most respected and talented Black men (in our high holy month, no less) gets aired. And I don’t believe any sound engineer worth his degree didn’t hear it. You chose not to hear it. Tourette’s or not, you should apologize. Again I am wondering, why do we go to these award shows? Why do we subject ourselves to such disrespect? Why do we put more emphasis on their approval than we do our own? And don’t say money. Sinners is already one of the largest movies ever. It’s broken records over and over again. It’s already won the minds and hearts of the audiences that have seen it. People going to see it more than once. They didn’t have to appear to promote the movie. The movie has been making money since it opened and is on track to win other awards. My question is why do we continue to value their opinion of us rather than our opinion of us? We are a powerful and mighty people. We have history, culture, extreme intelligence, not to mention swagger that cannot be matched by any other people on the planet. Fight. Me. 

The same thing that made my friend believe he wasn’t Black enough until he was dead is the same reason we keep looking to a system that was built to destroy us for validation. We keep trying to prove our worth to a system that, doesn’t value us in the first place and second doesn’t care what position we’re in. 2025 taught us that all the system wants is workers that aren’t smart enough to realize they can change things, that will work until they die, and have enough babies to replace them in the workforce. They don’t even care if the bodies are Black anymore. This is the system we continually try to get noticed by? This is the system we want to force to give us a seat at the table? I don’t want a seat anywhere near that table.

We’ve got NAACP Awards, BET Awards and anything else we can create. Ya know why? Cause we created those. The Emmy’s and Tony’s and such will be fine without us. They did fine when Hattie McDaniel won in 1939 and they forced her to sit elsewhere and didn’t want to allow her into the hotel where the awards were being held. It wasn’t much better in 1964 when Sidney Poitier won for Lillies in the Field. Sure they let him sit with everyone and walk up onstage in front of everyone. And he could only win playing a Black man who had integrity and swagger, yet never had any romantic or carnal lusts. As long as he wasn’t fully human. No different in 2002 when Halle Berry won for a role where she was the sexual fetish of a white man who helped kill her Black incarcerated husband. Once again the Black man is dangerous and the Black woman is only good for the one thing they don’t want the Black man to do. Denzel won that same year for his role in Glory. He played a union soldier who died in battle. Again, the struggle being more important for us, because even though he played the “hero” he died in a battle which the north did not win. They failed to capture Fort Wagner and the heroism is in the struggle. Yet Saving Private Ryan, another war movie was about the triumph of saving a soldier and getting him home. It was nominated for 11 Oscars and won 5. That soldier made it home.

I want to be clear, I appreciate all this art. I am painfully aware of the real questions facing Black artists today as they navigate the world and try to get paid well for what they do. I am one of those artists. There are decisions you make in order to do work you care about, and those you make in order to work. I simply need us to be aware of these choices when we make them. Be sure of our boundaries and what lines we’re drawing in the sand and why. What does respect for our body and our body of work look like? What are we willing to do when we don’t get it? Most importantly I want us to go into these situations with our eyes open and our integrity intact. We have to be willing to walk away when the system does what it was born to do. We have to be committed to building for ourselves rather than relying on a system that was built to oppress and divide us.

When did we get the idea that sitting at their table would make it ours? When did we get the idea that their table was somehow better? It’s not. It’s a table full of hurt and trauma. It’s a table that even if we’re invited to sit down, the chair has spikes and we’re not allowed to let anyone see how much it hurts to be there. It’s a table where we aren’t welcome and yet we still try to sit down. The answer is horribly catastrophic; we believe, on some level, that the struggle means it’s worth more.