When Looking Accomplished Becomes More Valuable Than Being Accomplished

Personal Reflection

The person I am today, or at least the person people have come to know, was not always this version of me. Today, I am an avid reader, an academic, and, I hope, an inspiring scholar-practitioner. I take scholarship seriously, perhaps more seriously than some people around me understand. But my current identity did not emerge fully formed. The potential was always there, but it required the right spark, the right opportunities, and the right people arriving at precisely the right moments. In many ways, my development was the product of a fortuitous chain of events that could have easily unfolded very differently.

I was an extremely hyperactive child throughout primary school, and even that description feels like an understatement. Today, I am sure I would have been heavily medicated. By high school, I was carrying a complicated mixture of fear, anger, insecurity, and frustration. I was shorter than many of my peers and know personally the toll of being bullied, while also navigating difficult family dynamics at home and growing up in a tough inner-city neighborhood where simply making it through adolescence required a certain kind of vigilance. I am very proud of myself, that wasn’t always the case. I attended a couple high schools, not by choice, and my academic trajectory was anything but predictable. When I finally reached college, I nearly failed out during my first two semesters. There was nothing about those early years that suggested an inevitable journey toward graduate education, scholarship, or a doctorate. Zero actually lol outside of a small group connected to my youth. 

Along the way, I also endured comments from some family, neighbors, teachers, professors, and others who had plenty to say about the way I spoke, how seriously I approached school, and what they believed I was capable of becoming. At different points, I was criticized for not being more studious, more focused, or more academically serious. There was always some version of the message that I needed to become something more before I could be taken seriously. So I did the work. I changed habits, developed discipline, found mentors, read more, studied harder, learned how to navigate academic environments, and eventually developed a genuine love of scholarship and intellectual inquiry.

That history is precisely why certain comments bother me now more than I sometimes want to admit. After such a long personal, professional, and academic journey, it is frustrating to have people dismiss my academic seriousness, suggest that valuing credentials makes me elitist, or remind me that simply having degrees does not necessarily make someone intelligent. Of course a degree does not automatically make someone intelligent!  I hate when people say that as a veiled barb to put people in their place. I have never argued that it does. Intelligence exists everywhere, and extraordinary wisdom often develops far outside universities. But there is something intellectually dishonest about moving from that reasonable observation to the suggestion that formal education, disciplined study, research, expertise, and academic achievement therefore mean very little. They do mean something. Full stop. I refuse to pretend otherwise simply because acknowledging the value of education has somehow become culturally uncomfortable and I truly hope this moment in our nation passes because I have dwindling patience for anti-intellectualism.

Perhaps what frustrates me most is the shifting standard. Earlier in life, I was told I was not academic enough. I was scolded for not being more serious, more focused, and more disciplined. Now that I have spent decades becoming those things, I occasionally encounter people who behave as though taking scholarship seriously is itself evidence of arrogance. That contradiction is difficult to ignore. At some point, you realize that for certain people, who you are may always fall short of whatever standard they decide to apply in that particular moment. I understand that reality, but understanding it does not require me to accept it.

Representation Without Accountability Is Not Progress

This is part of why something happening culturally has begun to bother me more deeply than I initially realized. For years, many of us have argued, correctly and necessarily, for greater Black representation in universities, graduate education, professional leadership, politics, media, and other institutions from which Black people were historically excluded or in which our presence was routinely marginalized, questioned, or treated as an exception. I remain completely committed to that work, because representation still matters, access still matters, and the continued underrepresentation of Black professionals in many influential spaces remains both a historical and contemporary problem.

At the same time, however, our commitment to representation cannot require us to suspend standards of truth, integrity, competence, or accountability simply because the person being questioned looks like us, shares our cultural background, or occupies a position that carries symbolic importance for the broader Black community. If anything, I would argue that representation makes integrity even more important, precisely because public achievement rarely exists in a vacuum when the individual belongs to a group that has historically had to fight for access, legitimacy, and recognition. None of us enters these spaces entirely alone, particularly when our presence is still too often treated as exceptional, our qualifications are sometimes questioned as undeserved, and our mistakes can be scrutinized in ways that are not always applied equally to others.

That reality creates an uncomfortable but necessary tension. We should absolutely challenge the unfair standards, implicit biases, and institutional barriers that require Black professionals to prove themselves repeatedly in ways that others are not expected to do, but challenging those inequities cannot mean lowering our expectations for honesty or abandoning accountability when legitimate questions arise. Solidarity should never require intellectual dishonesty, nor should representation become a shield against reasonable scrutiny. There is a meaningful difference between defending Black professionals from discriminatory skepticism and reflexively defending someone simply because criticism of that person makes us uncomfortable. If we are serious about the value of Black scholarship, Black leadership, and Black professional achievement, then we must be equally serious about protecting the integrity of those accomplishments.

The Performance of Expertise

Social media has given us something earlier generations did not have to navigate at this scale: the ability to manufacture the appearance of expertise before possessing the expertise itself. A ring light, microphone, large following, confident delivery, carefully written biography, and a few television appearances can create authority remarkably quickly. Somewhere along the way, visibility became confused with expertise, confidence with competence, and personal branding with professional preparation. The ongoing controversy surrounding Cheyenne Bryant illustrates part of that problem because serious questions have been raised publicly about her academic credentials, professional licensure, and use of the title “Dr.,” while Bryant has defended the legitimacy of her education, work, and title. The issue is not whether someone without a doctorate can possess wisdom, because they absolutely can. The issue is whether credentials are being used to establish authority while verification of those same credentials is treated as unreasonable when questions arise.

When the Performance Becomes the Product

Then we have the situation involving Angel Victoria Murdock pushing this conversation into even absurd territory. Murdock built social-media content around supposedly attending Duke University’s Physician Assistant Program, including posts about classes, clinical rotations, studying, and ultimately graduation. Duke has since stated that it can find no record that she ever applied to or attended the program. Consider what that means culturally. Graduate education requires admissions standards, tuition, examinations, evaluations, clinical experiences, sacrifice, sleepless nights, and the possibility of failure, yet social media can reproduce nearly every visible symbol of that accomplishment without reproducing the work underneath it. We have created an environment where the performance of success can sometimes generate attention, status, followers, and opportunity before the actual achievement has ever occurred.

And then there is Malachi Love-Robinson, because apparently no discussion about the performance of expertise would be complete without “Dr. Love.” In 2016, at only 18 years old, Love-Robinson gained national attention after authorities discovered that he had opened the New Birth New Life Medical Center in West Palm Beach and was presenting himself publicly as a medical professional despite not being a licensed physician. His operation included many of the symbols we culturally associate with legitimate medical authority: the white coat, the stethoscope, the office, the professional biography, the website, the title, and, remarkably, actual patients. Authorities ultimately arrested him after an undercover agent visited the clinic, where Love-Robinson performed a physical examination and provided medical advice. He was later convicted in connection with practicing medicine without a license, fraud, and theft, and his legal problems continued well beyond the original “fake doctor” case. As absurd as his story may initially sound, there is something profoundly unsettling beneath it: Love-Robinson understood, perhaps better than we would like to admit, how much authority human beings attach to the visible symbols of expertise. Put on the coat, hang the credentials on the wall, construct the website, speak confidently, place “Dr.” in front of the name, and an astonishing number of people may initially assume the substantive preparation exists somewhere underneath it all. That is precisely the cultural problem I am wrestling with. We have become remarkably sophisticated at recognizing the appearance of accomplishment while sometimes becoming less disciplined about asking whether the accomplishment itself actually exists.

Credentials Still Mean Something

This hits differently for me because I know what earning a doctorate requires, and I also know what it means to work in environments where Black professionals can have their qualifications questioned before they even open their mouths. Years ago, I wrote that “faking it until you make it” is particularly dangerous for minoritized professionals because we often operate with narrower margins for error. That argument still holds. Opposing discriminatory credentialism does not mean abandoning credentials, standards, or professional preparation. A person can be mediocre and still deserve equal opportunity, because equality should include the right not to be extraordinary merely to be treated fairly, but fabricating or materially misrepresenting an accomplishment is something entirely different. If generations of Black scholars and professionals fought for access to universities and professions that excluded them, turning those hard-earned symbols of achievement into costume jewelry does not challenge elitism; it devalues the labor behind them.

Integrity Has to Be the Floor

Representation matters, credentials matter, lived experience matters, and expertise developed outside formal institutions matters too. A life coach does not need to pretend to be a psychologist to help people, just as an entrepreneur does not need an MBA to understand business. There is dignity in accurately naming what we know, what we have earned, and what we have not. The problem begins when appearance becomes the product and when accountability is reframed as betrayal simply because the person being questioned belongs to a historically marginalized community. We should be especially careful here because Black professionals already confront unfair skepticism, and highly visible credential controversies can provide ammunition to people who were never interested in treating legitimate Black expertise fairly in the first place. Solidarity should protect people from discrimination, but it should never require protecting dishonesty from scrutiny.

Not for nothing, it is a different level of “special” to push forward these types of lies in the face of overwhelming evidence. When did appearing educated become almost as socially valuable as actually becoming educated?

SMH.