And Deeply Disappointed.
America is applauding. I am not surprised — and I am not satisfied. Both things are true at the same time.
America is applauding Victor Glover. Conservative media is celebrating him. Fox News ran the clip on a loop. The Daily Wire called it a shutdown of identity politics. OutKick said he shoved the narrative down the toilet. The people who have spent years working to remove Black history from classrooms, eliminate diversity programs from federal institutions, and argue that race no longer has any meaningful role in American outcomes — all of them, simultaneously, celebrated the same Black man’s statement from the threshold of the most historic Black achievement in the history of American space exploration.
I am not surprised.
I am also not applauding. Not because Victor Glover’s achievement is anything less than extraordinary. It is extraordinary. It is the continuation of an unbroken four-hundred-year record of Black exceptionalism that this country has spent four hundred years trying to minimize, erase, and deny. Victor Glover orbiting the moon is the latest chapter in that record. He belongs in the same sentence as Katherine Johnson, Charles Drew, Mae Jemison, Guion Bluford, and every Black man and woman who built excellence out of a system specifically designed to prevent it.
I am proud of what he accomplished. I am proud because his achievement carries the fingerprints of every Black community, every HBCU, every Black church, every Black family that produced a child who believed the impossible was reachable. His achievement belongs to all of us.
And I am deeply disappointed. Not in the man. In the moment he was given and was not prepared to meet.
What He Said — The Full Picture
At a press event on March 29, 2026, three days before becoming the first Black astronaut to orbit the moon, Victor Glover was asked what it meant to him to make that history. These are his full words:
“I live in this dichotomy between happiness that a young woman can look at Christina and just physicalize her passion or her interests… And that young brown boys and girls can look at me and go, ‘Hey, he looks like me — and he’s doing what?’ And that’s great. I love that. But I also hope we are pushing the other direction — that one day we don’t have to talk about these firsts, that one day this is just — listen to this — that this is human history. It’s about human history. It’s the story of humanity, not Black history, not women’s history, but that it becomes human history.”
— Victor Glover, March 29, 2026
The viral clip that circulated across conservative media stripped the first half. The version that Fox News amplified, that OutKick celebrated, that the Daily Wire ran as a headline began at “not Black history” and ended there. The full statement is different. He acknowledged the value of young brown boys seeing themselves reflected in him. He said he loves it. He described the tension between celebrating representation and hoping that one day it will be unnecessary. He is not a villain. He is not a traitor. He is a brilliant man who navigated a genuine internal tension — and who handed his opponents exactly what they needed because he was not prepared for the moment history placed him in.
From space, he went further. Speaking to ABC News from the Orion capsule, he said: “Trust us, you look amazing, you look beautiful. You also look like one thing. Homo sapiens is all of us, no matter where you’re from or what you look like. We’re all one people.” On Easter, he delivered an unscripted message of unity and faith that moved millions. The man clearly has a generous, inclusive spirit. None of that is the problem.
The problem is what happens when that generous, inclusive spirit meets the specific political weaponry of this specific moment — and arrives unarmed.
He Is a Warrior. He Needed a Different Kind of Preparation.
Victor Glover has spent his entire adult life inside the most demanding, excellence-driven, predominantly white professional environments this country produces — the U.S. Navy, combat aviation, test flight, and NASA. He is a U.S. Navy captain with 24 combat missions and 3,500 flight hours. He is an engineer holding four advanced degrees. He has the kind of discipline, precision, and composure that comes from decades of operating at the absolute edge of human capability.
What he almost certainly did not have walking into that press room on March 29, 2026, was afrocentric media training. Training that asks: who is in this room and how will they use what you say? Training that understands the specific mechanics by which Black achievement gets appropriated, stripped of its context, and deployed as a weapon against the community that produced it. Training that knows, with precision, how a clip of six seconds travels differently from the full two-minute answer.
Military media training prepares you not to say classified things. NASA media training prepares you to explain orbital mechanics to a general audience. Neither one prepares you for the specific challenge of being a Black man at a historic milestone in a political climate where every word you say about race will be cut, clipped, and circulated before your rocket clears the launch pad.
That preparation gap is not his failure. It is a gap his community — his fraternity, his advisors, the Black institutions that celebrated his selection — could have helped fill. And it is a gap that produced consequences the moment his words met the machinery of conservative media amplification.
He is a Phi Beta Sigma man. The motto of his fraternity is Culture For Service and Service For Humanity. He knows Black history. He listens to Gil Scott-Heron’s “Whitey on the Moon” every Monday as a reminder of the racial history of the program he serves. He is not ignorant. He is not indifferent. He is a man who has been navigating white institutions for his entire career, has developed a fluency in their language, and who, in that press room, reached for the most inclusive framing he knew — without fully accounting for how that framing would be weaponized the moment it left his mouth.
The Deeper Problem: When Human History Is Told by White Voices, It Becomes White History
Here is the argument that Victor Glover’s framing misses — and that this moment demands we make plainly.
“Human history” is not a neutral frame. It never has been. When the dominant culture is permitted to define what counts as human history, Black people disappear from it. Not by accident. By design. Repeatedly. Across every domain of human expression.
There are no Black faces in the standard visual tradition of the Bible — not in the paintings, not in the stained glass windows, not in the Sunday school illustrations that shaped the religious imagination of hundreds of millions of people. The geography of the Bible is Africa and the Middle East. The people in the paintings are European. That is not history. That is appropriation dressed as history — the deliberate substitution of a white narrative for a multicultural reality.
Hollywood has produced dozens of films about Jesus Christ over the past century. Count on one hand those that feature a Black director or a non-white Jesus. When Black directors have told the story — when the Afrocentric imagination has been permitted to engage with the same source material — the result is different, richer, more accurate to the actual world of first-century Judea. But those films do not become the canonical version. The canonical version is the one told by the dominant culture, for the dominant culture, in the dominant culture’s image.
This is not ancient history. It is the present moment. More than forty states have introduced or passed legislation restricting the teaching of American history that acknowledges the role of slavery, racism, and systemic inequality. Books by Black authors have been removed from school libraries. The 1619 Project — a documented, sourced examination of Black Americans’ foundational role in this nation’s history — has been banned in multiple states. The Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture has faced defunding pressure. Black history figures are being de-celebrated, their monuments questioned, their contributions minimized or erased entirely from public memory.
This is what “human history” produces when Black people allow white voices to define its content. Black history does not expand human history. It gets absorbed by it, then disappears.
Victor Glover said he hopes the day will come when his historic flight is remembered simply as human history. That day is not today. It may not be in his lifetime. And the reason it is not today is precisely that the people currently in power are working — actively, legislatively, with documented intent — to ensure that the Black history that produced Victor Glover is not remembered at all.
You cannot wish away the need to name Black history by calling it human history. Not while Black history is being removed from classrooms. Not while the 2025 NASA astronaut class contains zero Black candidates. Not while the federal programs that expanded access for people who look like Victor Glover are being dismantled by executive order. Not while the administration that is erasing Black institutional presence from American public life is simultaneously celebrating the one Black man at the pinnacle of achievement for saying their words back to them.
What He Should Have Said
This is not what Victor Glover said. This is what the moment required.
“What it means to be the first Black astronaut on a lunar mission is this: it means Katherine Johnson calculated the trajectories for Apollo and wasn’t permitted to use the same bathroom as the white engineers whose lives depended on her math. It means Charles Drew invented blood banking and was turned away from the facility his own innovation created. It means Guion Bluford was the first Black astronaut in space in 1983, and a billboard greeted his family when they moved to Houston that said they weren’t welcome. It means that for sixty-five years of American space exploration, not one Black astronaut was assigned to a lunar mission — not because there were no qualified Black astronauts, but because this country made choices about who was permitted to make history. I am the result of a four-hundred-year record of Black excellence that this country has spent four hundred years trying to deny. This flight is Black history. It is also human history. It is both fully and at the same time. And anyone who wants to separate those two things needs to examine very carefully what they are trying to erase.”
That is what the moment demanded. That answer does not give conservative media a weapon. It gives Black America an inheritance.
I Am Proud. I Am Also Holding Him Accountable.
Pride and disappointment are not opposites. I am proud of Victor Glover. His achievement is real, extraordinary, and ours. It continues the unbroken four-hundred-year record of Black excellence that America keeps trying to write out of existence. When a young Black boy or girl looks up at the moon this week, they can see someone who looks like them going somewhere no one who looks like them has ever gone. That matters. That is the living proof of what this community produces despite everything arrayed against it.
And I am holding him accountable — not for being who he is, but for what the moment he was given required and did not receive. Accountability is not an attack. It is what you do for people you take seriously enough to expect more from. Victor Glover achieved more than most people ever will. The community that produced him is entitled to expect that achievement to come with accountability to the history that made it possible.
America is applauding. The same America that is removing his history from classrooms, defunding the programs that produced him, and celebrating his words as a repudiation of Black identity is applauding. That applause should not sound like success to us. It should sound like a warning.
The first is never just about the person who achieves it. The first is a confession — a documented admission that a barrier existed, that it was deliberate, and that a specific human being broke it. Every time we name the first, we force America to hear its own confession. Every time we let the first be absorbed into “human history” without its Black context, we let America off the hook it earned.
Say the first. Every single time. Not because we are defined by our firsts, but because someone fought, bled, and in some cases died to make each one possible — and they deserve to be named in the story of what their sacrifice produced.
Victor Glover is orbiting the moon. He is extraordinary. He is ours. And he missed the moment his community needed him to meet — not from malice, but from a preparation gap that the institutions surrounding him, including ours, could have done more to close.
That is the full truth. I will not choose between pride and disappointment. Both are true. Both are required. And only the combination of both is honest enough to honor what this moment actually is.
Thank you for taking the time to read and reflect. I write to help people think clearly about money, business, real estate, and life — not from theory, but from decades of lived experience.
If you are navigating a financial decision, building a business, considering homeownership, or simply trying to make better use of your time and resources, I invite you to engage further.
Subscribe to The Power Is Now TV to connect with me live every weekday, Monday through Friday, from 10:00 AM to 11:00 AM PST, as we record television shows across the Power Is Now TV Network. As a subscriber, you can participate in live tapings, engage in real-time discussions, and connect directly with industry leaders.
Visit ThePowerIsNow.com to access real estate magazines, books, podcasts, television shows, and exclusive media content focused on homeownership, business, and wealth-building.
For personalized support, consulting, and advisory services in real estate, mortgages, business, and personal finance, visit EricFrazier.com to schedule a consultation and learn more about my work as your trusted advisor in business and wealth.
Eric Lawrence Frazier, MBA
Your trusted advisor in business and wealth
www.ericfrazier.com | www.ericfrazieruk.com
NMLS #451807 | CA DRE #01143484
Schedule a consultation: https://calendly.com/ericfrazier/real-estate-mortgage-consultation-clients
I Am Proud of Victor Glover.
And Deeply Disappointed.
America is applauding. I am not surprised — and I am not satisfied. Both things are true at the same time.
America is applauding Victor Glover. Conservative media is celebrating him. Fox News ran the clip on a loop. The Daily Wire called it a shutdown of identity politics. OutKick said he shoved the narrative down the toilet. The people who have spent years working to remove Black history from classrooms, eliminate diversity programs from federal institutions, and argue that race no longer has any meaningful role in American outcomes — all of them, simultaneously, celebrated the same Black man’s statement from the threshold of the most historic Black achievement in the history of American space exploration.
I am not surprised.
I am also not applauding. Not because Victor Glover’s achievement is anything less than extraordinary. It is extraordinary. It is the continuation of an unbroken four-hundred-year record of Black exceptionalism that this country has spent four hundred years trying to minimize, erase, and deny. Victor Glover orbiting the moon is the latest chapter in that record. He belongs in the same sentence as Katherine Johnson, Charles Drew, Mae Jemison, Guion Bluford, and every Black man and woman who built excellence out of a system specifically designed to prevent it.
I am proud of what he accomplished. I am proud because his achievement carries the fingerprints of every Black community, every HBCU, every Black church, every Black family that produced a child who believed the impossible was reachable. His achievement belongs to all of us.
And I am deeply disappointed. Not in the man. In the moment he was given and was not prepared to meet.
What He Said — The Full Picture
At a press event on March 29, 2026, three days before becoming the first Black astronaut to orbit the moon, Victor Glover was asked what it meant to him to make that history. These are his full words:
“I live in this dichotomy between happiness that a young woman can look at Christina and just physicalize her passion or her interests… And that young brown boys and girls can look at me and go, ‘Hey, he looks like me — and he’s doing what?’ And that’s great. I love that. But I also hope we are pushing the other direction — that one day we don’t have to talk about these firsts, that one day this is just — listen to this — that this is human history. It’s about human history. It’s the story of humanity, not Black history, not women’s history, but that it becomes human history.”
— Victor Glover, March 29, 2026
The viral clip that circulated across conservative media stripped the first half. The version that Fox News amplified, that OutKick celebrated, that the Daily Wire ran as a headline began at “not Black history” and ended there. The full statement is different. He acknowledged the value of young brown boys seeing themselves reflected in him. He said he loves it. He described the tension between celebrating representation and hoping that one day it will be unnecessary. He is not a villain. He is not a traitor. He is a brilliant man who navigated a genuine internal tension — and who handed his opponents exactly what they needed because he was not prepared for the moment history placed him in.
From space, he went further. Speaking to ABC News from the Orion capsule, he said: “Trust us, you look amazing, you look beautiful. You also look like one thing. Homo sapiens is all of us, no matter where you’re from or what you look like. We’re all one people.” On Easter, he delivered an unscripted message of unity and faith that moved millions. The man clearly has a generous, inclusive spirit. None of that is the problem.
The problem is what happens when that generous, inclusive spirit meets the specific political weaponry of this specific moment — and arrives unarmed.
He Is a Warrior. He Needed a Different Kind of Preparation.
Victor Glover has spent his entire adult life inside the most demanding, excellence-driven, predominantly white professional environments this country produces — the U.S. Navy, combat aviation, test flight, and NASA. He is a U.S. Navy captain with 24 combat missions and 3,500 flight hours. He is an engineer holding four advanced degrees. He has the kind of discipline, precision, and composure that comes from decades of operating at the absolute edge of human capability.
What he almost certainly did not have walking into that press room on March 29, 2026, was afrocentric media training. Training that asks: who is in this room and how will they use what you say? Training that understands the specific mechanics by which Black achievement gets appropriated, stripped of its context, and deployed as a weapon against the community that produced it. Training that knows, with precision, how a clip of six seconds travels differently from the full two-minute answer.
Military media training prepares you not to say classified things. NASA media training prepares you to explain orbital mechanics to a general audience. Neither one prepares you for the specific challenge of being a Black man at a historic milestone in a political climate where every word you say about race will be cut, clipped, and circulated before your rocket clears the launch pad.
That preparation gap is not his failure. It is a gap his community — his fraternity, his advisors, the Black institutions that celebrated his selection — could have helped fill. And it is a gap that produced consequences the moment his words met the machinery of conservative media amplification.
He is a Phi Beta Sigma man. The motto of his fraternity is Culture For Service and Service For Humanity. He knows Black history. He listens to Gil Scott-Heron’s “Whitey on the Moon” every Monday as a reminder of the racial history of the program he serves. He is not ignorant. He is not indifferent. He is a man who has been navigating white institutions for his entire career, has developed a fluency in their language, and who, in that press room, reached for the most inclusive framing he knew — without fully accounting for how that framing would be weaponized the moment it left his mouth.
The Deeper Problem: When Human History Is Told by White Voices, It Becomes White History
Here is the argument that Victor Glover’s framing misses — and that this moment demands we make plainly.
“Human history” is not a neutral frame. It never has been. When the dominant culture is permitted to define what counts as human history, Black people disappear from it. Not by accident. By design. Repeatedly. Across every domain of human expression.
There are no Black faces in the standard visual tradition of the Bible — not in the paintings, not in the stained glass windows, not in the Sunday school illustrations that shaped the religious imagination of hundreds of millions of people. The geography of the Bible is Africa and the Middle East. The people in the paintings are European. That is not history. That is appropriation dressed as history — the deliberate substitution of a white narrative for a multicultural reality.
Hollywood has produced dozens of films about Jesus Christ over the past century. Count on one hand those that feature a Black director or a non-white Jesus. When Black directors have told the story — when the Afrocentric imagination has been permitted to engage with the same source material — the result is different, richer, more accurate to the actual world of first-century Judea. But those films do not become the canonical version. The canonical version is the one told by the dominant culture, for the dominant culture, in the dominant culture’s image.
This is not ancient history. It is the present moment. More than forty states have introduced or passed legislation restricting the teaching of American history that acknowledges the role of slavery, racism, and systemic inequality. Books by Black authors have been removed from school libraries. The 1619 Project — a documented, sourced examination of Black Americans’ foundational role in this nation’s history — has been banned in multiple states. The Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture has faced defunding pressure. Black history figures are being de-celebrated, their monuments questioned, their contributions minimized or erased entirely from public memory.
This is what “human history” produces when Black people allow white voices to define its content. Black history does not expand human history. It gets absorbed by it, then disappears.
Victor Glover said he hopes the day will come when his historic flight is remembered simply as human history. That day is not today. It may not be in his lifetime. And the reason it is not today is precisely that the people currently in power are working — actively, legislatively, with documented intent — to ensure that the Black history that produced Victor Glover is not remembered at all.
You cannot wish away the need to name Black history by calling it human history. Not while Black history is being removed from classrooms. Not while the 2025 NASA astronaut class contains zero Black candidates. Not while the federal programs that expanded access for people who look like Victor Glover are being dismantled by executive order. Not while the administration that is erasing Black institutional presence from American public life is simultaneously celebrating the one Black man at the pinnacle of achievement for saying their words back to them.
What He Should Have Said
This is not what Victor Glover said. This is what the moment required.
“What it means to be the first Black astronaut on a lunar mission is this: it means Katherine Johnson calculated the trajectories for Apollo and wasn’t permitted to use the same bathroom as the white engineers whose lives depended on her math. It means Charles Drew invented blood banking and was turned away from the facility his own innovation created. It means Guion Bluford was the first Black astronaut in space in 1983, and a billboard greeted his family when they moved to Houston that said they weren’t welcome. It means that for sixty-five years of American space exploration, not one Black astronaut was assigned to a lunar mission — not because there were no qualified Black astronauts, but because this country made choices about who was permitted to make history. I am the result of a four-hundred-year record of Black excellence that this country has spent four hundred years trying to deny. This flight is Black history. It is also human history. It is both fully and at the same time. And anyone who wants to separate those two things needs to examine very carefully what they are trying to erase.”
That is what the moment demanded. That answer does not give conservative media a weapon. It gives Black America an inheritance.
I Am Proud. I Am Also Holding Him Accountable.
Pride and disappointment are not opposites. I am proud of Victor Glover. His achievement is real, extraordinary, and ours. It continues the unbroken four-hundred-year record of Black excellence that America keeps trying to write out of existence. When a young Black boy or girl looks up at the moon this week, they can see someone who looks like them going somewhere no one who looks like them has ever gone. That matters. That is the living proof of what this community produces despite everything arrayed against it.
And I am holding him accountable — not for being who he is, but for what the moment he was given required and did not receive. Accountability is not an attack. It is what you do for people you take seriously enough to expect more from. Victor Glover achieved more than most people ever will. The community that produced him is entitled to expect that achievement to come with accountability to the history that made it possible.
America is applauding. The same America that is removing his history from classrooms, defunding the programs that produced him, and celebrating his words as a repudiation of Black identity is applauding. That applause should not sound like success to us. It should sound like a warning.
The first is never just about the person who achieves it. The first is a confession — a documented admission that a barrier existed, that it was deliberate, and that a specific human being broke it. Every time we name the first, we force America to hear its own confession. Every time we let the first be absorbed into “human history” without its Black context, we let America off the hook it earned.
Say the first. Every single time. Not because we are defined by our firsts, but because someone fought, bled, and in some cases died to make each one possible — and they deserve to be named in the story of what their sacrifice produced.
Victor Glover is orbiting the moon. He is extraordinary. He is ours. And he missed the moment his community needed him to meet — not from malice, but from a preparation gap that the institutions surrounding him, including ours, could have done more to close.
That is the full truth. I will not choose between pride and disappointment. Both are true. Both are required. And only the combination of both is honest enough to honor what this moment actually is.
Thank you for taking the time to read and reflect. I write to help people think clearly about money, business, real estate, and life — not from theory, but from decades of lived experience.
If you are navigating a financial decision, building a business, considering homeownership, or simply trying to make better use of your time and resources, I invite you to engage further.
Subscribe to The Power Is Now TV to connect with me live every weekday, Monday through Friday, from 10:00 AM to 11:00 AM PST, as we record television shows across the Power Is Now TV Network. As a subscriber, you can participate in live tapings, engage in real-time discussions, and connect directly with industry leaders.
Visit ThePowerIsNow.com to access real estate magazines, books, podcasts, television shows, and exclusive media content focused on homeownership, business, and wealth-building.
For personalized support, consulting, and advisory services in real estate, mortgages, business, and personal finance, visit EricFrazier.com to schedule a consultation and learn more about my work as your trusted advisor in business and wealth.
Eric Lawrence Frazier, MBA
Your trusted advisor in business and wealth
www.ericfrazier.com | www.ericfrazieruk.com
NMLS #451807 | CA DRE #01143484
Schedule a consultation: https://calendly.com/ericfrazier/real-estate-mortgage-consultation-clients