The Love and the Limelight: A Reflection on Leadership Within the Black Community

There’s a unique kind of love that exists between a Black leader and their community, a love that feels ancestral, affirming, protective, and alive. When you lead with excellence, when your presence feels like safety, innovation, and possibility, people feel it. They respond.

Families move their children from private schools into public ones, not because the system suddenly transformed, but because you did. Your leadership, your Black woman brilliance, made that school feel like sacred ground.

That is love. That is trust. That is the community saying, “We see you.”

But for Black women leaders, there is always another layer beneath that love. A tension, watching and waiting.

The moment a Black woman without a ceiling demonstrates her collective courage and takes flight rattling cages within the system, something shifts. Celebration quiets. The temperature in the room drops. The applause grows thin, replaced by whispers, side-eyes, and suspicion. What felt like collective uplift slips into envy, disdain, or subtle undermining. And often, it’s not because the work changed it’s because you are a Black woman succeeding in ways people were never taught to hold with gentleness or joy.

Traci Ellis names this in her TEDx talk on the “Exceptional Negro” the figure who is allowed to excel only under certain conditions:as long as she doesn’t get too visible, too confident, too resourced, too celebrated, too free.

Black women, especially those who lead with clarity, courage, and compassion are often loved when they serve, but scrutinized when they shine. Misogynoir trains people to adore our labor while doubting our leadership. To benefit from our brilliance while questioning our right to be brilliant. To demand our gifts while withholding their full celebration.

This is the duality. Admiration braided with insecurity. Dependence mixed with resentment. Love complicated by unhealed narratives about who Black women are allowed to be.

Our communities have inherited generations of scarcity-mindset thinking, taught by systems that only made room for one “exceptional” Black person at a time. So when a Black woman rises, it can trigger old wounds, old stories, old fears:If she shines, will there be any light left for me? If she is praised, does that mean I am not enough?

This isn’t betrayal; it is trauma speaking. But it still impacts us.

As a Black woman leader, carrying this dual truth can be disorienting. You pour yourself into the work not for clout, but for collective freedom. You serve from love, and yet the visibility required to secure resources can bring resistance, envy, or quiet sabotage. It is a sacred, painful tension: to be both deeply loved and silently doubted by the same community you fight for. Still, I choose compassion. I choose to believe we are in a season of collective unlearning, unlearning scarcity, unlearning misogynoir, unlearning the belief that only one of us can rise at a time.

Netflix recently released the incredible documentary Being Eddie, a film that tenderly and truthfully chronicles Eddie Murphy’s life and career. What struck me most, beyond the brilliance of his comedic genius, was how clearly the documentary reveals the way society and the media positioned him in competition with his idol, Richard Pryor. Instead of celebrating the fullness of both men, their magic, their evolution, and the doors they kicked down, the world tried to force a rivalry that neither of them needed.

It’s a reminder of how often Black brilliance gets framed through scarcity, how we are pushed into comparisons, hierarchies, and narratives that diminish rather than honor. Eddie and Richard deserved to be embraced in their wholeness, not pitted against each other for the entertainment of a world that struggles to hold more than one Black legend at a time.

Our community is still learning how to celebrate Black women’s brilliance without fear, without comparison, without conditions. We are still healing from narratives designed to keep us small and suspicious of one another.

And yet,

we rise anyway.

We shine anyway.

We open doors that were never meant for us, and then we hold them open for everybody else.

Because our leadership is not about spotlight, it’s about legacy. And legacy is love that outlasts envy, outlasts doubt, outlasts the lies told about Black women’s worth.

We will keep shining, unapologetically. We will keep loving our people, steadfastly. And we will keep walking in our power—not despite the tension, but because the work is bigger than all of it.

Bigger than the noise. Bigger than the fear. Bigger than the constraints of “exceptionalism.”

Our legacy is collective liberation and that is something no shadow can dim.

Niki Cush is a 30 year retired educator and administrator. She is the Founder and Executive Director of The Glitter Sisiters Inc.