The movie Bring it On came out when I was about eight years old. The film stars Gabrielle Union and Kirsten Dunst as cheerleaders in rival cheer squads and it’s basically one of the films that built the formula for every teen comedy in the aughts. The film culminates at a national cheer competition where the Toros, a team of mostly white teenagers (led by Dunst) go head to head with the East Compton Clovers, a team which is entirely black (led by Union).

Now as a kid, my movie going rubric was very simple: the lead character needs to come out on top because the lead character is the lead character. That was the basis of storytelling for me, so the rule had to be applied everywhere, right?

So imagine my shock when the East Compton Clovers took first place in nationals at the end of the film. My eight-year-old head didn’t really understand what was happening. This movie wasn’t about them, I kept saying to myself, so how did they end up getting the happy ending?

My confusion followed me out of the theater and sat with me on the drive home. My aunt, who took me to see the film, sensed something was off and asked me what I thought about the film.

“It was okay,” I shrugged in the back seat. “It's just a little weird that the Toros didn’t win in the end.”

“I get what you mean,” she replied. “But I didn’t really want them to win. Didn’t you want the Clovers to win, since they were black?”

My confusion turned into bewilderment at this point. Rooting for a team because they were black? That idea didn’t line up with what I had been taught in school. Weren’t we supposed to judge people by who they were and not what they looked like?

Fast forward a few years and the world had changed from what I knew it to be as an elementary school kid. The War on Terror has waged on sandwiched between episodes of Survivor and The Bachelor, AIM and MySpace have faded into obscurity as some website called Facebook reigned, YouTube stopped being just a place for cat videos and a black man ran for President of the United States.

Barack Obama’s run for president was one of the first wake-up calls I had about what it means to be black in America. I had grown up with this notion that we as a nation had seen the error in our Jim Crow ways and had grown to accept people based on the content of their character. Our evolution had been so extreme that, in fact, we were getting ready to place our votes for the first black leader of America. This black man who was traveling the country with his black wife and two black daughters was uniting people on the promise of hope for a better America for everyone. This was post racial America.

Or so I thought.

Everyday, some new racial insult was hurled at this person who I saw as the symbol for what America was supposed to be. Hanging effigies were burned as they swung from outstretched trees, racist animated images of the senator from Chicago ran in newspapers like Garfield comic strips and the cries for birth certificates rang through the halls of Capitol buildings as the ability for this smart black man to exist as a smart black man were called into question.

Closer to home though, I had to fight for my own right to support the then senator from the Chi. As the country was divided by the thought of a black president, so were the people around me. There were numerous discussion of the readiness of the country for a black president as if the country would implode as soon as anyone non-white stepped into the White House. There were arguments for him to show his birth certificate because “he has nothing to hide, right?” But the kicker for me came in the form of a question posed to me by a fellow classmate:

“Carrington, you know you don’t have to vote for him just because he’s black, right?”

A wave of emotions came over me. Shock at the question turned into awe that someone would ask me that, which then turned into anger, because what in the entire f*ck did you just say to me?

But of course, those feelings manifested themselves into silence as I turned away and continued to mind my black ass business.

That moment haunted me for the rest of the week, though. I knew I didn’t have to vote for him just because we were both black. He was smart! He was a good politician! He went to Harvard!

But him being black didn’t hurt either.

My mind immediately flashed back to that eight-year-old leaving the movies confused by what post racial America was. I wanted the world to treat Barack Obama like they’ve treated any politician who has decided to run for President. That wasn’t too much to ask, right?

But I also wanted people to see how Barack Obama being black was important to who he was as a person. I wanted them to see that he was the embodiment of change for America simply because he wasn’t like anything we’d had before. Barack Obama couldn’t be treated like any politician who had run for President before him simply because he wasn’t like any politician who had run before him. The criticism he faced that the black community deemed unfair didn’t get thrown at him because of his policies or his stance on the issues. People were allowed to hate him because he was black, so why couldn’t I love him for the same reason?

It was that moment that I realized that, in a way, I was supporting Obama because he was black. He became the embodiment of “working twice as hard to get just as much,” a phrase I heard all my life, but never really understood. He showed me that there would be pushback for my success, regardless of my qualifications, simply because of the hue of my skin color. I was learning my first lesson on the bullsh*t that comes with succeeding and winning, while black.

Simultaneously, Obama showed me the power that comes with succeeding while black. As racists were throwing insults, I was seeing communities rally together for change. People my age were seeing exactly how much influence we had when it came to changing the world. I witnessed my grandparents cast their vote for a man they thought they would never get to see in their lifetime. It was astounding to me to see so much light still radiating from so much bullsh*t.

But that’s what black people have been doing for our entire existence on this planet. As we were being crammed onto slave ships and sold for profits, we were singing hymns and creating a shared culture that would last over generations. Scholars were building black institutions for higher learning while simultaneously fighting for recognized emancipation. While a famed preacher from Atlanta was robbed of his life and humanity, the Godfather of Soul was helping to heal a city through music. Black people shine through bullsh*t because that’s what we do. We do it because there’s simply no other option.

So fast forwarding to the night of September 17th, 2017 and I’m sitting in my New Jersey apartment as Issa Rae tells the world that she’s “rooting for everybody black” at the Emmys. Of course, uproar ensues because of “race baiting” and “reverse racism.” But it immediately made me think about that eight-year-old boy who was slapped with what race relation in America really looked like, and how he had to learn what rooting for everyone black really meant.

And naturally, it only took Donald Trump an entire week to remind me why I needed to root for everyone black in the first place.

Being a black person in America is political by nature, and no matter what profession you choose to join, or how good we are at what we do, black people are black people before anything else. We aren’t allowed to leave politics and race relations at home because they follow us around in our daily lives. So when we win, we’re not merely checking off a box and putting a W in the win column, we’re literally moving the culture forward with every milestone that we make. Whether it happens on the stage or on the field, in the boardroom or the cubicle, the mere act of succeeding while black is a statement in and of itself. It says that I excelled in spite of what societal conventions were built to stop me, and that is impactful as hell.

So as knees are taken across the country, I’m rooting for everybody black because in this crazy fucked up world, all we have is each other. And if we aren’t rooting for ourselves, who else is going to?