On Reading: Black Genius - What Gets Extracted, What Gets Lost

For book club this month we read Black Genius by Tre Johnson. It’s a series of essays that pushes against narrow, institutional definitions of genius and instead highlights how Black people have thrived through resilience, ingenuity, and creativity. At the center of the book is adaptation. The ability to navigate pressure, to be yourself in a world not made for you, but one that still expects you to survive, create, and perform. From that come new styles, trends, language, improvisation, invention, and ways of moving through life.

What I thought about after reading this book was two things. First, it’s less that Black American’s genius is overlooked. It's very noticed but undervalued, downplayed, and even scorned until it can eventually be extracted. Second, I’ve been thinking about the genius of adaptation and the cost and distortion that eventually catches up to it. 

Observation 1: Adaptation Is Its Own Kind of Brilliance

One of the earliest concepts the book introduces is streemal. Streemal is “about melding street education and formal education into an awareness that ‘opens your eyes to the many inconsistencies of life and makes you scary to a lot of White folks’.” It’s a concept coined by Tre’s uncle. It’s not quite code-switching. It’s something broader. It’s more about the ability to adapt to a multitude of spaces while being fully yourself. That’s at the core of this book. Black genius lives in adaptability, not just in achievement. There’s an intelligence required to survive and even more so to thrive. This fused street and formal education highlights contradictions and gaps to take advantage of for success or avoid to stay safe. 

That “streemal” education brings perspective and clarity and makes clear the spaces we can play and can’t play and when those rules will change. Reading the room is a critical skill. I often say The Wire will give you many life lessons, one I think about most often is when Avon tells Stringer, “What did I tell you about playing those away games?” after Stringer tries to make deals in a world that’s not his and ends up scammed. Stringer thought he had a “streemal” education because he knew the streets and had taken a few community college classes. Really he was just knocking on the door, never being let inside to fully understand the other side. 

What Avon wanted was to play home games, stay safe in an environment he knew he could dominate. In sports the idea is home games give you a beneficial whistle from the refs, less pressure, and more margin for error, whereas away games require perfection or you lose. It’s hard to imagine yourself winning in systems not for you. 

One of the most interesting pieces of the book for me was the first chapter where Tre talks about comics. He goes through a history of lesser known black comics and heroes from artists making their own spaces. He didn’t find out about those as a child, instead reading Marvel and DC where representation was limited to the point that when he was inventing his own characters, they weren’t Black, they were white because that’s what belonged in those spaces. The confinement limits imagination. It shapes where you see yourself, what assumptions you make, and how narrow the art of the possible becomes. Breaking free of those constraints requires a vision of genius, not just to thrive in your own space, but to thrive in a new one. And it worked. We see more Black superheroes than ever, and while their older portrayals and even some of the current portrayals are flat, stereotypical, or lack that full understanding, we’ve broken in and expanded the imagination. 

Still, there are questions to ask: Who gets to write these portrayals, make the definitions, determine what games are home and away, and decide what the cost will be?

Observation 2: Black Culture Extraction: What Gets Loved Once It Can Be Separated From the People

The eyes watch us, a constant surveillance, at first to keep us away. But they can’t help but notice the genius that radiates. Still, when it’s ours, it’s downplayed and undervalued. It’s not a surprise, it’s a tenet of capitalism, buy low, sell high. Get the resources when they’re cheap. That’s what Black genius and the culture we create often becomes, an extracted resource to be commodified for safer, wider consumption. It’s a big reason why Black people are always making something new, we lose what was once ours, build anew, and the cycle repeats.

We create language, spaces, values, philosophies, media, art, dances, really everything. It gets picked up and adopted. Ebonics or as it’s now called African American Vernacular English (AAVE) has now become the language of the internet and Gen Z without real credit for its origins. Tiktok took off from dances made by Black teens that were then taken and made white teens famous. Hip hop became the biggest genre in the world and the labels removed artist development. Then they took a spray and pray approach of signing artists that allowed the music to be flattened. Eventually they divested and now are repacking it through Kpop and other more consumable wrappers. 

The language becomes a trend, the art becomes entertainment, the style becomes a product. Creators are told to adapt and soften or be ostracized. 

Paul Mooney once said “everybody wants to be a nigga, but nobody wants to be a nigga”. Once capitalism removes the context and decenters the creator, Black genius as a product becomes easier to sell. 

As Tre Johnson wrote in the book, “Black culture has been America's favorite shopping catalog since way before they dreamt up having Kendall (from Succession) rap on stage”.

Observation 3: Adaptation Has a Cost

Adaptation has a cost. That’s the harder contradiction running underneath the book for me.

Tre writes, “It’s no longer in vogue to be a platformed disruptor in today’s culture; now we’re way more focused on getting seats at the table or making them, than dismantling the table itself. That’s fine; that, too, requires a certain ingenuity and nimbleness to skirt danger.” I understand the reality behind that. Survival often requires ingenuity. Access often requires adaptation. But I do not fully agree with the conclusion. Not everything Black people do is genius. Not all survival and adaptability is genius. Adaptation can be a form of genius, but it starts to diminish when too much agency is traded away for safety, access, or survival.

That is the contradiction. Being Black is often a constant series of trades. Doing what is right, safe, acceptable, or legible can increase your odds. It can help you survive. It can help you get through the door. But the trade may be self-expression for survival, assimilation for self-possession, or access for distinctness.

To me, that is where the tension really lives. The problem is not adaptation itself. The problem is what it asks you to surrender. At a certain point, survival starts to look less like brilliance and more like self-reduction. You become the face in the room, but what got you there is softened, negotiated away, or stripped down until it no longer threatens the space you entered.

That is why I keep coming back to the idea that genius leaves the room when the cost is too great. The same traits that help you survive can become the traits that teach you to shrink. What made you shine can be turned into a weapon against your own distinctness.

The real genius, then, is not just in adapting. It is in figuring out how to remain fully yourself in a world not made for you. How to survive without disappearing. How to thrive without surrendering the thing that made you legible to yourself in the first place. And more than that, how to elevate yourself and others like you in a space that was never built with you in mind.

Conclusion

As Black Genius asks us to recognize brilliance in the places we are not trained to look, it widens not only the meaning of genius, but the scope of how we see the world, ourselves, and our actions within it.

The genius that comes from Black people’s adaptation to navigate and survive leads to a constant invention and evolution of self-possession, style, language, art, philosophy, and culture. And yet what we create for us does not seem to remain for us. The same surveillance that helps force the adaptations behind that creation also enables its eventual extraction, dilution, and repackaging, until it can be consumed free of context.

That is where my own thoughts kept going after the book ended. Black genius may begin in adaptation, but it does not remain untouched. At some point, capitalism does not just consume the work. It begins asking for the softening of the self behind it.

As Quincy Jones once said about making art, “God walks out the room when you’re thinking about money.”

And maybe that is the harder tension underneath all of this. Adaptation can be a form of genius, but when too much agency is traded away, something essential starts to leave with it.