There is a long tradition in Black life — from the maroons who built autonomous communities without waiting for recognition, to scholars like Arturo Schomburg who authored their own archives when institutions refused — of claiming sovereignty through practice. Not waiting for permission. Building the thing anyway. And in building it, claiming the right to exist, to know, to author meaning.

This is not defiance for its own sake. It is necessity. It is clarity. It is the practice of flourishing in conditions where legitimacy, in the forms we are told to pursue, may never arrive.

This year marks the 100th anniversary of Black History Month — a tradition born not as remembrance alone, but as a future-making project.

When Carter G. Woodson created Negro History Week in 1926, he was not simply documenting the past. He was reshaping how Black people understand ourselves, how we locate power, and how we expand what is possible inside complex systems. That same urgency animates this moment: a century later, we are still in the work of authoring our own futures.

A note from the field: There is a cost to waiting for legitimacy to arrive

Not long ago, I tried to turn Ijeruka into a venture-capital backable AI company.

I’m laughing as I write this now. If you know what Ijeruka is, you can imagine how total this abandonment was. I took something intentional, grounded, rooted in a specific people and a specific way of knowing, and I tried to make it legible to a system that has no framework for what I was actually building.

It made sense. According to a dominant logic.

But sense and truth are not the same thing.

This didn’t happen suddenly. It was the end result of something quieter: a shrinking capacity to trust my own judgment, combined with an inability to hold discomfort, reinforced by deceptively insidious habits that outsourced my authority and perspective.

I had been receiving consistent feedback that Ijeruka was “too niche.” That there was “no funding” for builders like me. That I needed a clearer model, a bigger market, a more legible value proposition. None of these opinions were “correct” or “incorrect”, but the way I internalised each piece of feedback landed like a small verdict on my judgment. And each time, instead of staying with the slow, hard work of searching myself — Is this true for me? Does this align with what I actually know? — I minimised or outsourced the questions entirely. I began searching for templates. I looked at what worked at scale. I tried to find the shape that would make the doubt go away.

As I pivoted, praise, affirmation and the feeling of finally being “understood” came pouring in. But the doubt didn’t go away. It deepened. Because I was trying to solve a structural problem (”How do I make something uncharted legible to existing systems?”) by abandoning the very thing that made it worth building in the first place.

Reactive vs creative will

This is what reactive will looks like when it’s taken the steering wheel.

In Ijeruka’s recent workshop, ‘Building Creative Will’, I explained that reactive will is not bad. It develops when we need to respond to pressure — expectation, fear, urgency, the need to survive and prove ourselves. It often sounds like: I should. I have to. This is what makes sense. This is what’s expected of me.

It’s efficient. It’s protective. It’s often how we’ve achieved much of what we’re proud of.

But there is another capacity available: creative will.

Creative will isn’t about pushing harder or being more disciplined. It is the capacity to choose from coherence. It tends to feel slower, more spacious, less dramatic. It sounds like:

“This feels right, even though it’s uncertain.”

“I’m willing to stand here without forcing clarity.”

“This represents me, even if it’s inconvenient.”

The difference isn’t what you choose. It’s who is doing the choosing.

When I was trying to turn Ijeruka into an AI company, multiple inner forces were pulling at once: fear (what if this doesn’t work?), ambition (what if it could be bigger?), responsibility (what if I’m being naive when people are counting on me?). These are not problems to fix. They are energies, each carrying intelligence.

But I had fused with one voice — the voice of fear and urgency — and stopped listening from the position that could hear them all. I stopped being the person sitting at the head of the table, the one who invited all three voices in and could decide what to do with what they offered.

Instead, I became the fear. And from that position, the dominant logic looked like truth.

What I came to understand is this:

the cost of waiting for legitimacy, or chasing it first, is often self-abandonment.

This is not a moral failing. It is a survival strategy. When systems teach you that your judgment is irrelevant or dangerous, when your ways of knowing are repeatedly positioned as insufficient, when the world tells you that legitimacy comes from external validation in forms you cannot access, you learn to distrust yourself.

Legitimacy, is not a neutral recognition of merit. Societies define as “legitimate” those actions congruent with its existing values and norms. This creates a framework where entire ways of knowing, being, and building are rendered invisible or illegible.

For Black people navigating these systems — whether as entrepreneurs, practitioners, creatives, or leaders — the psychological toll is real. The systemic withholding of legitimacy is not just an external barrier. It becomes an internal one. You internalise the verdict. You begin to believe that your uncertainty is a sign you’re wrong, rather than a sign that you’re moving into uncharted territory (which isn’t necessarily a bad thing). You interpret the absence of a template as evidence that your original contribution doesn’t belong.

But here is what the tradition of Black authorship teaches us:

The absence of a template is not evidence of illegitimacy. It is evidence that you are authoring something that requires you to develop a different lens.

In the 1940s, John H. Johnson—a Black publisher who had been denied institutional access and banking partnerships—decided to create a magazine that reflected Black life with dignity and nuance.

He didn’t wait for a publishing house to invite him in. He didn’t wait for investors to validate his vision. He built Ebony magazine anyway, using methods that were unconventional, sometimes improvised, always determined. He paid employees to buy copies at newsstands to create the appearance of demand. He made personal appeals to government officials. He founded his own mail-order companies to fill ad spaces, making the magazine look established even when it wasn’t.