The People Can Fly

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 between being deemed promising and “a problem.” He bolsters this personal narrative by observing how disability within his own family complicates societies perception of genius, and by diving into the under-examined history of young intellectuals like Oscar Moore, Thomas Wiggins, Stephen Wiltshire, and others. Together, Bennett lays out an arresting portrait of a world that obscures genius behind a disorienting facade of otherness and exceptionality.

With arresting prose and grace, The People Can Fly is an eye-opening reflection on what it means to be labelled gifted in today’s world; and a personal history and love letter to all the Black prodigies who have disturbed the veil of racism, and the children who will continue to do so.