What if we’ve been looking for leadership in the wrong place?
Eddie S. Glaude Jr., author of We Are the Leaders We Have Been Looking For, argues that Black communities cannot keep waiting for the right Black face in the right high place to save us. We cannot keep waiting for the right Black face in the right high space to save us. Not the right billionaire, celebrity, politician, or the right commentator because the evidence of what happens when we do is everywhere.
Stephen A. Smith has $100 million and uses his platform to make the policies dismantling Black students’ futures more palatable. Nicki Minaj stood on a Turning Point USA stage calling the architect of those policies her “number one fan.” Daniel Cameron stood in a grand jury room and made sure no one was charged with Breonna Taylor’s murder.
These are not individual failures.
They are the predictable outcome of a political imagination that outsourced Black liberation to Black proximity to power. Glaude’s central argument is this: the leaders we have been looking for are already here. They are not celebrities or billionaires, they are the people already doing the work in the communities most affected by the systems we need to dismantle.
This is the heart of the book:
We keep looking up for leadership while it is already building beside us. Jill Collen Jefferson documented 70 modern-day lynchings because no one else would. Brittany Packnett Cunningham built Campaign Zero because Ferguson needed a policy response, not just a protest. None of them waited for permission, or for a billionaire to fund the infrastructure, or asked “why doesn’t the community like me?” They asked what truth required them to build next, and they built.
Who should read this:
Anyone who has been waiting for the right Black celebrity to use their platform for the community.
Anyone who needs the structural argument for why leadership is not a destination but a daily practice.
Anyone ready to stop looking up and start building beside.
This is part of our Unmuted Reads series, where we feature books that provide structural analysis of Black wealth, power, and legacy. Follow @IMPACTMagazine for a new book every Wednesday.
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