Sidney Poitier was more than a symbol. He was one of the great movie stars, full stop

To celebrate an actor of Sidney Poitier's greatness should require no qualifier, no asterisk, though before he died last week at the age of 94, a lot of people seemed eager to affix one.

Poitier was the first Black man to win an Academy Award for best actor, a blazer of representational trails that forever reshaped the landscape of American culture. His image exploded the world's notions of whose stories were worthy of attention, whose presence could fill a theater, who could be called a movie star. Had this Miami-born son of Bahamian tomato farmers never stumbled his way into a brilliant stage and screen career, the significantly more diverse landscape of American acting before us today — the landscape of Denzel Washington and Viola Davis and Jamie Foxx and Octavia Spencer and Mahershala Ali, to name just a few of Poitier's fellow Oscar winners — might look markedly different.

But for too long a time, Sidney Poitier stood alone. And as he knew all too well, exceptionalism could be