The People Can Fly: American Promise, Black Prodigies, and the Greatest Miracle of All Time

Whiting award-winning poet and Distinguished Chair of Humanities at MIT, Dr. Joshua Bennett creates a masterful synthesis of personal narrative and history that illuminates the promises and perils of being labelled a Black prodigy. The outside world's perception of Black promise comes and goes.It does so in ways that are undeniably advantageous for Black children.Yet here, Dr. Bennett explores the rarely examined pitfalls of being a Black prodigy in a society that has, too often, defined Blackness as the very absence of intellect.Bennett probes what it means to be othered, even if this othering is the same key to an individual's success in an unfair world, demanding that we build alternative futures that make space for the promise and hope of every child. In The People Can Fly Bennet shares his own academic journey-including spoken word performances at The White House and Sundance Film Festival, an NAACP Image Award, and a Guggenheim Foundation fellowship-mirrors the ebb and flow betwe