People exaggerate on one side to distract from their deficiencies on the other side instead of fixing the deficiencies and being honest.
Don't lie to others and especially don't lie to yourself.
Are you really a queen? Are you really a king? Are you really a boss?
Of what?
We're living through the consequences of centuries of white people presenting themselves as superior. They rewrote history to spread that lie. They rewrote science to spread that lie. They rewrote religion. They rewrote social standards and norms. They designed a global social order that fed, grew, and protected that lie.
The solution for us is NOT to copy that strategy of exaggerating our human worth at the expense of other humans.
What's wrong with being a normal human? There's more power in claiming human-ness than there is in claiming false royalty, false divinity, false superiority, or imaginary magic. Truth is always more powerful than lies.
You get stronger than others by lifting more weight, not by some inherent specialness that others don't have access to. If the Bilalian people, the descendants of America's enslaved Africans, have some special strength it is because we have had a heavier burden placed on us than anyone else in history. Our special strength is not because we have a superior nature, but because we've been carrying more weight.
Some of us are getting crushed under this weight and claiming to have the strength that comes from carrying it.
Bilal, the dark-skinned, enslaved African, was being crushed under the boulder of inferior value. He embraced an expression of faith that gave him the strength to lift that spiritual burden off of himself. As a result, his would-be slave master laid him out in the hot desert and crushed him under a physical boulder. If he would have surrendered, he could have lived the rest of his life under a boulder. But he fought, and his faith lifted that boulder off of his chest in the desert, freeing him to rise through the ranks of the social order to get to the top.
Bilal had a heavier burden to lift than others around him. He did not have a superior nature. He had a superior expression, which came from the strength he had gained from his circumstances. This super expression of his common human nature moved him from being seen and valued as less than human to being one of the highest ranking and one of the most respected members of society. His process qualified him for the recognition of Muhammed the Prophet, who asserted that he heard the footsteps of Bilal walking ahead of him in paradise. Prayers and The Peace be on Muhammed, the messenger of G'd.
We don't have to lie or exaggerate in order to satisfy that yearning in our soul. All we have to do is refuse to allow this boulder to crush us, and stand upon the truth. The potency of our expression is superior because we are Bilalians.
"African American" is no longer sufficient to identify us. It was a transitional term, not meant to last forever. It does not do us justice for a number of reasons. WE ARE BILALIANS!