If you are an African American leader at any level or in any capacity and experience any sense of joy, or even disinterested neutrality regarding the tragedy involving the Michigan football coach; then, leadership responsibility and accountability require a pause to examine what you truly stand for, and which ethical virtues and values are shaping your moral compass.

Part of the Black Leadership Required Reading List Must Include the Works of Frantz Fanon

Any serious Black leadership practice must include a required reading list, particularly for those preparing to lead schools, athletic teams, organizations, institutions, movements, or communities shaped by, and still being harmed by, historical and contemporary systems of domination, denigration, and exploitation. That reading list must include the foundational works of Frantz Fanon.

These texts are not merely historical artifacts. They are diagnostic tools, essential for understanding power, collective and individual psychological pathologies, the healthy psychology of self-affirmation and resistance, and the moral costs of oppression on both the colonized and the colonizer.

What you hold sacred is what you love.
And what you love is what you are willing to fight for.

At a minimum, that canon should include:

• Black Skin, White Masks
A searing examination of racialized identity formation, internalized oppression, and the psychological violence inflicted by white supremacy, essential reading for leaders who must understand how domination reshapes their own self-perception and social behavior.

• A Dying Colonialism
A critical study of how colonized peoples transform culturally, politically, and psychologically in the act of resistance, revealing that liberation is not only political, but also deeply human and profoundly healing for those deemed to be the “wretched of the earth.”

• The Wretched of the Earth
Fanon’s most uncompromising and comprehensive work on decolonization, power, violence, and moral responsibility. This book should be required reading for leaders who must grapple honestly with the authentic costs of freedom, justice, equality, and complete societal transformational change.

• Toward the African Revolution
A collection that connects theory to praxis, challenging leaders to move beyond rhetoric toward disciplined, ethically grounded action in the struggle for collective liberation, which remains the only true path to individual liberation.

Together, these works force leaders to confront uncomfortable truths:
that oppression is not only structural, but psychological, including our own psychology;

that who we choose to love is not random;
that standards of beauty are not produced solely by internal preference;
that personal and political liberation are inseparable;
and that both demand courage, clarity, and sacrifice.

They also remind us that moral neutrality in the face of injustice is itself a form of complicity.

For Black leaders, whether leading a Little League team, a school, a nonprofit, or an international corporation, there must be a commitment to authentic self-liberation, an ethical leadership practice, and both internal and external transformational change.

Don’t get lost in the glitter and noise.
Stay focused.
Stay disciplined.
Keep the main thing the main thing.
Make the next generation’s work easier.

Let’s be clear: shared skin is not shared struggle. All skinfolk are not automatically good struggle-partnership kinfolk. Under the daily pressures of domination, building healthy, reliable relationships is difficult. But ultimately, staying with the Michigan football metaphor, your team is your team, and clarity about that existential truth is itself an act of leadership courage.
Leadership wisdom demands discernment, because mistaking racial identity proximity for solidarity, a mistake I have made throughout my life, can be a costly error.

Fanon ultimately warns us that the gravest danger facing oppressed people is not only the violence of external domination, but the internalization of that domination, when the oppressed begin to police their own imagination and direct their deepest desires in the most self-harming, self-rejecting ways. In doing so, they narrow their sense of what is possible and mistake unaccountable accommodation for love. The danger, Fanon reminds us, is not merely seeking freedom, but unconsciously dreaming of replacing the oppressor rather than removing the system that produced him.

Authentic, correct, ideologically grounded, and psychologically healthy Black leadership does not cheer the ugly and disgusting behaviors of P. Diddy, nor does it celebrate the public spectacle or profit-driven amplification of those behaviors by Curtis “50 Cent” Jackson. Both actions distract from and ultimately undermine—our collective capacity to progress toward genuine freedom.

Leadership, then, is not about proximity to power or personal advancement; it is about refusing psychic colonization and modeling freedom in real time, every day, in our real lives.

If we truly understand Fanon, we know this: our children are not only watching what we say and do; we are teaching them how to see, how to love, or not love—themselves, how to resist, or submit to, cultural aggression, and ultimately how to imagine a future beyond societally imposed limitations.

That is the weight of leadership. That is why neutrality is a lie. And the claim that “how I live my personal life is my business” is also a lie. Leadership is public, formative, and consequential. That is why the work must always be done with discipline, courage, and moral clarity, knowing that we are always teaching by how we live.