Back in 2016, in a video posted to her Facebook Jada Pinkett-Smith, responding to and supporting the #OscarsSoWhite controversy said, “Here’s what I do know. Begging for acknowledgment, or even asking, diminishes dignity, and diminishes power. We are a dignified people, and we are powerful, and let’s not forget it.”

It’s an age-old sentiment that’s resurged in recent years’ conversations about diversity in awards shows: Why should Black people beg for the scraps of attention from these old, white and exclusionary organizations? Why not acknowledge ourselves, support ourselves and celebrate ourselves by ourselves?

A variant of this argument was common among disgruntled white people during the integration of American culture in the mid-to-late 1900s: Why don’t Black people make their own awards, their own baseball teams, instead of encroaching on white spaces?

In spite of these objections, Black people pushed their way into these spaces and made history as they did it (Sissieretta Jones as the first Black woman to perform at Carnegie Hall, Hattie McDaniel as the first Black person to win an Academy Award). Even today, Black people continue to set firsts in media and awards shows—Beyoncé as the first Black woman to headline Coachella, Moonlight as the first film with an all-Black cast to win the Oscar for Best Picture—which is the product of that initial work.

Even in those first strides, though, there were Black people who were skeptical of pursuits to fit into mainstream measures of success. James Baldwin—later quoted by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.—put it best in his 1963 book “The Fire Next Time”: “Do I really want to be integrated into a burning house?” Black folks saw the stacked odds, the racism ingrained in these institutions and wondered if they might be better off creating their own spaces, seeking approval within themselves rather than without. Many admirable awards shows have risen out of this desire to uplift our own, such as the BET Awards and the NAACP Image Awards.

But who watches these shows? Who is in the crowd—and who is on Twitter talking about them the morning after? Black-specific content often draws Black audiences, perhaps due to the sentiment that the entertainment “isn’t for white people,” (despite the fact that Black people consume primarily white content all the time). This isn’t necessarily surprising—much of the reason why diversity has been so hard to achieve in media, and thus, in awards shows, is the notion that white audiences simply won’t relate to or show up for Black characters. Theories like the racial empathy gap—observed in studies such as “Racial Bias in Perceptions of Others’ Pain” by Sophie Trawalter, Kelly Hoffman, and Adam Waytz, where white respondents reacted more strongly to light-skinned people being harmed than dark-skinned people—strive to explain these discrepancies. Cultural phenomenons like Black Panther and The Cosby Show seem to indicate steps in the right direction, but Black-focused content remains disproportionately consumed by Black and brown people.

To toss aside organizations that have been the gold standard for decades, then, seems naive. Black-centered awards celebrations are important, but they also often boil down to “preaching to the choir”. Black artists achieving these mainstream markers of success signifies growth, progress, and history in the making. Moreover, the winning of awards like Oscars functions as a career and box-office boost in a way that Black awards shows never have. Black actors and performers navigate an industry that functions less like the BET awards and more like the Oscars; showing producers that Black characters can win Oscars, too, makes finding work and success easier for every Black performer.

Black people need to see Black people winning. But I’d argue that white people need to see it just as much, if not more. It’s a way of saying, “We can do what you do, and better—and on your turf!” Pinkett-Smith isn’t wrong: we are dignified and powerful. But the call for more diverse nominations is less “begging for acknowledgment” and more demanding it—for ourselves and for everyone after us.

As for Baldwin’s question—King’s solution to being integrated into a burning house? “Become the firefighter.”