Whose Rules Are You Playing By?

Your cousin gets into Harvard. The whole family shares the Facebook post. Your aunt calls everyone she knows. Banners are put up. And you feel it too - that swell of pride, that sense of "we made it."

But here's what you don't realize is happening in that moment of 'celebration': you're measuring your worth by their standards, playing by their rules, accepting their definition of what success looks like.

The kid who stays home and starts a business that employs twelve people from the neighborhood? Nobody's calling the newspaper. The grandmother who keeps three generations fed and housed on a cashier's salary? No banners. The artist who captures your community's story in ways that move people to tears? Silence.

Yet Harvard cousin gets the parade. The trap with this kind of pride is that it's still asking permission.

You're essentially saying "look, we can be good enough for your institutions too." You're hoping they'll notice your kid is exceptional, hoping they'll make room at their table, hoping they'll finally see you as worthy of what they've built.

But the truth is that the table was never designed for you.

The framework that created these "reputed" western institutions - the ones that determine what counts as "making it" - those same frameworks spent centuries explaining why you didn't belong. They wrote the books, built the schools, created the tests, established the networks. The whole system runs on the assumption that their way of doing things is the right way, the only way, the way that matters.

When you celebrate your kid getting into their institutions, you're not celebrating your kid. You're submitting to the institution's willingness to let your kid in.

The difference matters more than you think.

When you operate from this framework you're teaching your kids that the highest achievement is earning approval from people who spent generations denying your humanity. You're telling them that real success means being chosen by systems that were built to exclude them.

This is not accidental. The ideological roots run deep. Those old biblical stories about Ham and Shem? They're as relevant today as they were then. White Christian theologians took the story of Noah's son Ham - who was cursed for seeing his father naked - and twisted it into divine proof that Ham fathered all colored people, destined to be "servants of servants" to their superior White brothers. This was nothing but deliberate mythology designed to justify slavery and racial hierarchy.

Through stories like these, they embedded the idea that some people are meant to serve while others are meant to rule. Not because of merit or effort or character, but because of divine design.

That framework didn't disappear when laws changed. It just got more sophisticated.

Now it hides behind "meritocracy" and "cultural fit" and "qualified candidates." It presents itself as neutral, objective, fair. But the same hierarchies persist, the same people end up on top, the same communities get left behind.

And when one of yours breaks through, the system points to them and says "see? It works. Anyone can make it if they just try hard enough." Your exception becomes their proof that the system is fair.

But in this game the house always wins. And the house is always White Christian.

Every time you celebrate someone "making it" in their world, you're reinforcing the idea that their world is where making it happens. You're telling your kids that the real achievements are the ones that get recognized by institutions that historically excluded them.

But what if making it meant something different?

What if success meant building institutions that serve your community instead of escaping to ones that don't? What if achievement meant creating wealth that stays in your neighborhood instead of extracting your best people to enrich someone else's?

What if the goal wasn't getting invited to their table, but building your own?

It's not about rejecting education or opportunity. It's about rejecting the framework that says their validation is what makes those things valuable.

The kid who goes to Harvard can still be celebrated - but for what they'll bring back, not for getting chosen. For how they'll use their education to strengthen your community, not for proving your community can produce people worthy of escape.

When you flip the framework your kids stop trying to become acceptable to systems that don't accept them. They start building systems that work for them. Instead of hoping to be invited, they do the inviting.

The revolution isn't in the rebellion. It's in the refusal to keep score by their rules. Harvard isn't the victory - what you do after Harvard is.