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Preamble

Brace Yourself …

‘I’m terribly sorry. What I’m about to say is something so racist I never thought my soul could ever feel it. But I truly never wanna spend time with white people again …’

— Sinéad O’Connor

I wasn’t always the pillar of wisdom that I am today. Far from it. Once upon a time I was just like you: young, dumb and … living with Mum.

I used to believe that I would flourish if I just worked multiple times as hard as my white peers (as Mama used to say). I used to believe in a fair and equitable corporate world: almost a Disneyland of meritocracies; I used to believe that the concept of a racial caste system was something that existed only in the backwaters of India and history books. I also used to believe in Father Christmas, the Tooth Fairy, Mary Poppins, Tony Blair and a slew of other dubious white characters.

Of all the tomfoolery listed above, I’m least ashamed of the last sentence (other than the Tony Blair stuff, which really was naïve: should have seen that White Man coming). I was a happy fool, a Jonestown Kool-Aid sipper; a ‘change we can believe in’-er, if you will. Then I managed to break into the corporate world …

Straight outta university, straight into a mountain of debt and uncertainty, full of determination and armed with a degree, I was ready for the world, ready for my giant leap forward. One ‘minor’ challenge: I was an ambitious black person in a racism-riddled white-dominated society. And a black person with an education, a well-rehearsed polished accent and no criminal record is still a black person, still a nigger.

I would offer details of my rats, roaches and racism-riddled childhood and tell you how hard it was for my family and how we suffered and struggled. But that’s as predictable as top black athletes marrying austere, entry-level white women and going broke within weeks of their careers ending. Plus, if white corporate life in thick black skin has taught me anything, it’s that no one cares how hard you had it. Screw your sob story: it’s little more than comedy fodder. And, if you’re not careful, so is your career.

Nevertheless, to manage expectations:

• No, I wasn’t raised by wild bears in the woods. My mother wasn’t a crack-addicted prostitute.¹ And my father was not a hustler with a life worthy of a Lee Daniels epic.

• No, I never sold, transported or took drugs. I’d never even seen drugs in real life until I started working with ‘well-adjusted’ white people.

• No, I am not able to run 100m under a minute or cross a football onto another man’s waiting head or dunk a basketball.

• And no, I never got kicked or dropped out of school. In fact, I never even stabbed or knee-capped a supply teacher.

And neither had anyone in my family. Even if we had, that wouldn’t have been our biggest sin. For as far as society was, and is, concerned, our sins – the sins of my family and people like us – were much greater than all of these combined. We were much more serious a plague than, say, mumble rappers, global warming or even vegan hipsters: we were immigrants.

Black African immigrants. The exact type of black people white do-gooder types would feel the need to take a Comic Relief-style picture with. The lowest of the low. Let in to the country to ‘do the jobs our people don’t want to do’.

We – and those like us who didn’t qualify as our people (usually people with brown skin weirdly described as ‘black’) – cleaned a lot of toilets, swept a lot of roads, manned a lot of doors, fled a lot of immigration officials and kissed, sucked and wiped a lot of white ass. That was your place, and you’d better be happy with it. Or you could fuck off back to Mudhutistan.

So, after a childhood witnessing that pandemonium, I was determined to see to it that I emerged above cattle class. I wanted what had eluded us all along: to be middle-class, white-collar and paid-like-a-White Man; to be a professional, a contender within society, a winner. I wanted this so badly that I was willing to achieve it by any means necessary. I was happy to die trying – well, not really, but it makes for a hell of a catchy phrase. The problem, I learnt, for black professionals is that ‘succeed or die trying’ is not just a hyper masculine 50 Cent-inspired catchphrase: it is real. If your body and soul don’t part ways during the struggle, your mind and sanity almost certainly will.

I made a few minor adjustments to my identity – slight alteration to my name, changed address to a white friend’s place who lived in a more desirable area, started wearing a wedding ring despite being single, wore glasses though I have perfect eyesight – general stuff that helps white people feel more relaxed around black people, and eventually, after hundreds of applications and hundreds of rejection letters, humiliation, fake smiles and patronising nods, I was offered a job – a job with one of the best firms in the world, in fact. A firm whose very name was synonymous with integrity, profitability, professionalism and, most importantly, long-distance-jogging white people in expensive attire.

And as any remotely sane black person knows: where there are salad-loving and long-distance-jogging white people in expensive attire there is money to be made.²

Screw the glass ceiling; I’d cheated on fate. Hallelujah! Halle Berry! Show me the motherfucking hard-cold cash money! I’ve made it.

Such were my youthful thoughts.

I woke up to my first day on the job feeling the excitement a rosy-cheeked spoilt white child goes to bed with on Christmas Eve. I said my prayers with a smile and tears of joy running down my face and walked into the living room to meet my father ironing my clothes, something he hadn’t done in … ever. I took a shower and spent around five minutes in the mirror making sure my waves were tight.³ I threw on my suit and tie. And then my shoes. I looked open-casket sharp.

‘Let’s do this,’ I said to myself.

As I flung open my bedroom door to leave, my entire family was standing there, waiting for me with pride in their eyes. They quietly shuffled into my room. My mother asked me to drop to my knees. The family each put a hand on me and prayed (not entirely dissimilar to what black payola prostitute-pastors do for racist politicians during elections).⁴

As I left, my mother offered some advice: ‘You have to work twice as hard as everyone else. Don’t forget where you came from. Don’t forget who you are.’

And with those wise words/clichés ringing in my ears, a lot of Jesus and the warm wishes of my family, I left to take on the world: the white corporate world.

I was due to start at 9.30, so of course I arrived an hour early – this is known as transcending via racism-driven low expectations – and was kept waiting eagerly in the immaculate reception, complete with awe-inspiring fountain.

The lovely receptionist invited me to take a seat but I decided to stand up while waiting. I thought it gave a better indication of my seriousness and focus. Like a colonial governor general with a head full of white supremacy (and a body full of lust for anything in black skin), I meant business and I wanted to let it be known to the ‘natives’.

Two men who looked eye-wateringly rich and white – at the time, interchangeable terms to me – were talking to each other as they walked in. They saw me, stopped and said, ‘Good morning.’ Friendly, I thought. Then they started to pat themselves down looking for something as they stood in front of me. Much to his personal relief, one of the men found what he was looking for in his wallet.

‘I thought I left it at home … there you go, mate,’ he said as he showed me his company identity card. His colleague found his and did the same. So did the next few people coming in after them. From there it snowballed; almost everyone showed me their identity cards as they passed by. Some would greet me, others wouldn’t even make eye contact, yet they all showed me their ID cards.

The naïve feeling of having broken into the white corporate world had lulled me into a false sense of security, so I was initially confused. Then it clicked: how could I forget? I’m black! They thought I was a security guard. A brother in a suit in such an environment is usually only there for a range of plausible reasons: manning the door, giving talks on ‘the importance of diversity’, wringing bleeding white hearts for cash for his latest youth-mentoring scheme or providing barely legal gigolo services to some bitter white divorcee.

As embarrassing as the realisation was, even this didn’t dent my enthusiasm. I was there for my expertise and intellectual prowess. I belonged there as much as they did. I was as good as them and soon I’d prove myself their better. On the bright side, no one tried to tip me. I often wonder if I would have accepted the tip if they had: I was as broke as Greece after all.

And then she turned up in all her Fox News-peroxide glory, smiling like that beautiful intersection between an abolitionist and a capitalist. Dripping with middle-class whiteness, Sarah⁵ the Sloane Ranger, my first ever boss, arrived to welcome me to the firm.

Luckily for my newbie zeal, my closet-racist-radar (or, as I call it now, my ‘shy Trump Voter/Brexiter detector’) didn’t go off in Sarah’s presence. She felt like a genuinely nice, non-racist white person (i.e. a bearable white person who probably grew up listening to Brand Nubian and Public Enemy and embraced the anti-white supremacy rhetoric). We kibitzed warmly as she took me to meet the rest of the department.

The lift door opened and, whooosh, welcome to Caucasiastan. I hadn’t seen that much white since the last time I watched the final scenes of Scarface. All 116 of my new colleagues were white. Very white. Whiter than a pre-Meghan Markle royal wedding. Or a Richard Ayoade film.

My black-dar didn’t register a single blip. There was not a discernible fraction of a drop of black blood in the room. No Tom Jones-like suspicious curls, no marginally wider than expected nostrils, no dubiously brown eyes and no slightly olive skin. Absolutely no sign that white mummy may have bagged herself a reefer-smoking Barack Obama⁶ in a bar one lonely night and unleashed her love for the hot cocoa on him. And in the interest of balance, there was no sign that white daddy met a sister and got his Thomas Jefferson on, either. No quadroon cousin passing for a Sicilian sibling. Nothing. The company was as white as post-gentrification Brixton.

This should have been surprising, given the oft-touted ‘rich’ diversity of the city where the company was based, but it wasn’t: I had expected that to be the case. The only diversity that concerned such firms at the time was – and still is – likely to be in an investment portfolio or a pack of M&Ms. Anything other than that: ‘Pristine virgin Aryan white, please. Thank you.’

Later on that morning, I was dispatched to go and attend a few hours of induction training. We were warmly welcomed and went through the usual jarring motions of enthusiastically introducing ourselves and profiling each other based on our hierarchy within the company. And then came the obligatory corporate propaganda video.

As the short film was about to start, a young man with a distinct Australian accent rushed into the room and sat beside me.

‘Sorry I’m late. Sorry I’m late. Aussie People’s Time! Aussie People’s Time!’ he said, evoking a chuckle from the room as the lights dimmed for the video.

When the corporate porn ended I started speaking to the Aussie guy. He seemed like a nice chap and we struck a chord. Feeling that profoundly black urge to prove that I was there on merit, I carefully explained my qualifications and background and what I’d be doing. I then learned that he’d be working in the same department as me, but in a different and far more desirable and lucrative role. Anyway, having shown him mine, I naturally wanted to see his. So, I asked where and what he studied at university.

‘University? Now that’s a big word from a big fella. No university for me. I didn’t have time for that, mate. I left school at fifteen, did the odd job here and there, but I’ve mostly been travelling for the last few years. Sold fish and chips on the beach in Cornwall for the last couple of weeks and here I am,’ he explained.

And there it was. He had no qualifications, no experience and had only been in the country a couple of weeks. Yet he was in a position I and my more qualified noir-as-fuck friends and family would have given a kidney (or two) to be in.

The parts of my family who were not shipped round the globe for enslavement purposes were, a few quick centuries later, conscripted from ‘the colonies’ (i.e. their own land that white people had at the time stolen), moved to different parts of the world to fight white-on-white tribal conflicts (popularly known as World Wars) that had nothing to do with them, and spent forty years in the West in seemingly inescapable poverty and the modern equivalent of indentured servitude for me to get a foot in the door of the corporate world. No matter the qualifications we had – these are Africans we are talking about here: they had more degrees than a thermometer – we just didn’t seem to ‘qualify’. Yet kangaroo-humping Crocodile Dundee rocks up and gets a choice job in a week?

As my days, months and years of corporate experience accumulated I learned that this was no fluke or exception to the norm. This was the norm. It didn’t end at recruitment (it didn’t begin there, either). It seeped right the way through corporate life. In fact, it seeped right the way through life, period.

It must be said: not everyone I met in the corporate world is going to immediately combust in hell. There was some goodwill. In fact, quite a bit. Many people wished me well and wanted me to do well. Almost everybody had warm (albeit somewhat confusing) nuggets of advice. But the advice was often so cryptic to my cattle-class black ears it could have been written in codeine-induced Egyptian hieroglyphics:

• ‘If your face doesn’t fit, call it quits.’

• ‘A spliff a day helps ease the institutional racism away.’

• ‘Every negro has to be an entertainer: always keep them laughing.’

• ‘Play the game.’

• ‘Think like a white man, son.’

As a starting professional coming from a deeply impoverished black background I didn’t know what any of the statements above meant in practice. The last two were the most baffling of all.

Play the game? Think like a white man?

What on earth did they mean? What the hell is ‘the game’? On a blackness scale of one to ten, I was somewhere between Stormzy’s foreskin and Phil Spector’s soul – how do I ‘think like a white man’?

The unspeakable difficulty of being a black person, a black professional, in a white-dominated corporate environment is unique and poorly documented. For centuries, owing mainly to white supremacy-driven commercial practices and crimes (e.g. slavery, colonisation, white ‘liberal’ internationalism, genocide, etc.), all the associated pseudo sciences used to justify and reinforce such practices (drapetomania, phrenology, race itself as a concept, etc.) as well as the ruthless exploitation of religion and religious figures (selective Bible quotation, Christ, Richard Dawkins, neoliberalism, it’s-for-their-own-good-ism, etc.), black people have worked almost exclusively with their bodies. Hence black people were, and still very much are, more likely to be found engaged in poorly remunerated and low-skilled manual labour that doesn’t require much education⁷ or thought. Just sheer back-breaking donkey work. Highly skilled and highly paid professional roles? Like dressage, river dancing and opioids, that is just for white folk.

Not dissimilar to big-booty white women, the black professional class is a very welcome recent phenomenon. There has long been the odd one or two here and there, but it has never been a large enough population to be described authoritatively as a ‘class’. Black professionals are now truly a class and white female booty appropriators have all but wiped sisters out of a market they once almost monopolised (like the iPhone did to Nokia).⁸ The problem is that, for the most part, black professionals are a class of people roaming through a mine-infested wilderness like starving wild bears with blindfolds on. A lucky few will make it to the other end of the woods, but most are likely to be blown to smithereens.

This book will help you take the blindfold off once and for all. Like a good shepherd, I, Dr Whytelaw III, the first and last word on white people, the alpha and omega of the White Man, will usher you safely through the woods. Have no fear. Walk with me.

1 Although that would have been ideal if I’d been on a quest for success as a creative because nothing, absolutely nothing, propels a black-centred piece of art or literature to prominence like a Nazi-lite black mother clutching a crack pipe with her dark crusty lips while beating the black out of her children. See Precious, Moonlight, Menace II Society and Monster’s Ball for examples.

2 Wealth generation tip: if you are trying to sell a residential property, hire white people to jog back and forth round the property whenever a viewing is scheduled. I estimate that ‘jogging white people’ add 15% to the value of any property.

3 Keeping YT in the loop, ‘waves’ are a difficult-to-achieve and even-harder-to-maintain sex-magnet black hairstyle in which short black hairs curl on top and into each other to form a pattern that looks like ocean waves. Appropriation attempts will prove futile.

4 Feel free to do an internet search using the words ‘Donald Trump black pastors’.

5 Reminder: all names in this book have been changed to protect the treacherously litigious.

6 More info on Barack Obama’s marijuana smoking days with the ‘Choom Gang’ here: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/barackobama/9290972/Barack-Obamas-marijuana-smoking-days-with-the-Choom-Gang.html.

7 In areas such as elite sport this remains the case; however, the pay is sometimes more rewarding.

8 Kim Kardashian, an off-white white woman with a fake black backside is to today what booty-free Pamela Anderson was to the 80s: the global standard of beauty.