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CHAPTER 4

Compassion or Progression? Decision Time

‘In my experience, the African people are immensely forgiving. They have forgiven the indignities that they suffered in recent times. To encourage the kind of attitude of fervent desire for reparation suggested here would go against the grain, certainly among Africans, because it is not in their nature.’ ¹

— Lucius Cary, 15th Viscount Falkland (1996)

‘Good guys finish last’, ‘the good die young’, ‘the good pay for the meals but never close the deals’. Why? Because the good are full of compassion. Anyone trying to get higher up the food chain has to let their compassion slide and embrace moral ambiguity. At least on a temporary basis.

If there is one thing black people are better endowed with than anyone else (remove your head from the sewer of stereotype), it is compassion – and its cousins empathy, sympathy, kindness, concern, consideration and benevolence. ‘I-forgives-him-lawd-ism’.

The White Man called it correctly: black people are especially giving and forgiving … to just about everyone (with the notable occasional exception of each other).

I learned early on that, for me as a black professional, in order to rise through the ranks and really attain power, I had to leave that legendary, world-renowned, all-too-profitable (for others), very black brand of compassion at home. And I needed to adopt the most ruthless of mindsets possible: the mindset of the White Man who would tear your cheek from your face before he even considered turning his one first.

In order to get to the top (the real top, the White Man top), you have to exhibit a degree of cut-throat determination (which may figuratively, and sometimes even literally, necessitate the cutting of a few throats – although let’s be clear, this book does not advocate murder or attempted murder, not even manslaughter). Every collective ever to taste greatness and every group of people ever to rise to power have one thing in common: they are a pack of absolute bastards, with a long trail of victims ready to attest to this fact. And the reason for this is that compassion is the mortal enemy of progression.

Ask the Scots about the English, the Poles about the Germans and the Native Americans about the pilgrims. Ask the black South Africans about the white South Africans, the Gazelles about the Lions. Ask the Chinese about the Japanese, the Vietnamese about the Chinese. Ask the African Americans about the European Americans. Go and ask Africans about the Europeans (and the Arabs). And, as we have already noted, ask just about everyone about the British.

The history of human prosperity and progression is a history of the merciless exploitation of one person or people by another. Where there is great prosperity there is usually compassion-free flagrant atrocity and a really great public relations officer working overtime to gently perfume away the stench of shit.

Compassion is out of the question and out of the window. There is no alternative model.

Appearance Is Everything

Even though you are aiming to be a compassion-free morally bankrupt opportunist, you still need to exude the appearance of compassion.

You don’t get to David Cameron (beneficiary of slavers),² Nicholas Sarkozy (beneficiary of dictators)³ and Silvio Berlusconi (benefactor of underage ‘prostitutes’)⁴ levels of extreme success and power with a heart or head full of compassion for others. You get to that level by being able to create the impression that you have a head and heart full of compassion for others. You get to that level by doing what you have to do for you, no matter the cost to others. The trick is making it feel like you’re doing it for them, even when you’re often doing it to them.

The perfect example of faux compassion is the British Empire. Why do people still want to align themselves with it today given its history of clear brutality? Three reasons:

• White supremacist brutality never prevails, because when it does it’s not called white supremacist brutality. It is called ‘you should be grateful we taught your kind to speak English’.

• The British Empire was much better at long-term public relations as a result of the fact that they became the global establishment.

• In the scorching true words of the late great moderate white of words, George Orwell: ‘niggers don’t count’.⁵

No matter what shenanigans and criminality it may have embarked on, Britain has always cloaked itself (and marketed itself) in the translucent cloth of philanthropy and humanitarianism, prospectively and retrospectively (even if that means destroying all evidence to the contrary).⁶ If you speak to the average Briton today, regardless of skin tone – vanilla, ox red strawberry ice cream, redbone, café au lait, mocha or even Nero Milano hot chocolate – they will often tell you that Britain only did great things in, say, Africa. What is even more bizarre is that Africans themselves bestow honours on Britain for their own subjugation and debasement.⁷

Like America in Iraq and Afghanistan, Russia in Crimea and Syria, and any number of white women in marriages with black football players, Britain was, of course, in Africa to do well as opposed to do good. But the genius of Britain is that it managed to convince both itself and its victims, the coloniser and the colonised, that it was a heroic and benevolent ‘world power’, i.e. White Daddy.

If this proves anything, it proves that public relations matter. You have to manage and manipulate your image and the overall narrative. You have to make people love you, even as you’re robbing, killing and castrating them. Always make them think that even when you’re being a bastard it’s for their own good.

This was true of Empire, it is true of the corporate empire, it’s true of exploitative white women,⁸ and it is true of you if you want to go places. You may be a bastard. But you must look, feel and sound as lovable as Ronald McDonald … even though in reality you are little more than an artery-clogging corporate whore.

Victimhood

Victimhood:

• Perhaps the only ‘hood’ the White Man doesn’t want to see you in.

• The only ‘hood’ white people will never gentrify.

• One of the enduring pet hates of white people when it comes to black people.

‘How bloody dare this uppity negro have the sheer audacity to feel like a victim just because I missold her a sub-prime mortgage, plunged her into financial ruin⁹ and then deported her to Jamaica “in error”?’¹⁰

No matter what life (i.e. white people) may have thrown at you and, no doubt, what it will throw at you, you better not feel sorry for yourself. You better not feel like a victim. Don’t worry. Be merry. Or else.

Sadly, to avoid becoming a victim, you have to be ready to make victims of others, kind of like a prison bully in the shower. And making victims of others is where things get even trickier.

Black people have no problem making victims of each other. It is the basis of the multi-billion-dollar gangsta rap industry as well as the private prisons industry (two industries which may or may not have a reciprocal relationship).

Black-on-black one-upmanship is as simple as eating hot chocolate cake in the middle of a break-up or evoking ‘black-on-black crime’ on Fox News. When black people are required to perform the same squalid manoeuvres in white spaces against white people? We’re quick to back down.

There are many reasons for this, but here is a critical one: there is a value associated with white people that just isn’t associated with black people. Whites rule everything around you. No one wants to bite the hand that has the potential to choke you. And that represents a clear psychological disadvantage for the black professional – one that must be levelled in order for the black professional to truly reach their potential.

Levelling the Psychological Playing Field

A great modern way a black professional can level the psychological playing field when in head-to-head opposition with white professionals is to listen to hip-hop. Not any old hip-hop. Certainly, no fluffy teddy bear Mos Def and Talib Kweli or Best of Will Smith shit. Nope, you need the most violent, degrading and shocking hip-hop you can find. Hip-hop that sounds like Willie Lynch conceived it, Joseph Goebbels wrote it, George Bush Snr produced and Apartheid-Nazi-Rhodesia-Breitbart Records distributed it.

It’s quite easy to find it too: turn on the radio.

The black professional just needs to make one simple change to these rap records: when your favourite rapper evokes imagery of inflicting some degree of unbelievable savagery which will inevitably be against black people (other than the rare occasion a rapper gets into it with Eminem), replace that imagery in your mind with a white person. Repeat this as often as possible. A few entry-level suggestions:

• For those passive aggressive ‘hints’ (perhaps about your timekeeping), Stormzy’s ‘Shut up’ should do the trick.

• For appraisals, throw on ‘Hold Me Back’ by Rick Ross.

• For ‘quick chats’ when you suspect it’s bad news: ask for five minutes to pop into the loo and throw on ‘Bad News’ by G Unit.

• When you’re scheduled for a redundancy-risk discussion you may want to throw on ‘Pray’ by MC Hammer.

• If you’re feeling a little too lazy to change the lyrics, then pop on ‘100 Years’ by Plies.

Alternative Method of Levelling the Psychological Playing Field

If you find altering hip-hop lyrics to be a little demanding, there is another equally effective method of levelling the playing field: it’s called switching on the news (or social media) and witnessing the latest white-on-black outrageousness. And let what white people are capable of sink into your soul.

In conclusion, you have to decide: compassion or progression? Victimhood or victory? Rags or riches? Success or sympathy? You or them?

187 Quick Dos and Don’ts: 18–34

18. Do arm yourself with one of these names for when you’re asked who you foremost admire: Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, Winston Churchill and Thomas Jefferson (but under no circumstances reveal that the latter is your great-great-great-great-great grandfather). If you must veer into the ethnic, straight choice: Mandela, MLK or Jesus Hussain Christ.

19. Don’t ever return a bust of Winston Churchill (in the event that you somehow manage to find one on your desk) or describe Churchill as anything less than an absolute hero. Even if he tortured your grandfather.

20. Don’t mistake the office party for a house party or a BBQ. Dance, but not too well. A Barack-on-Ellen-style frail-white-grandmother shuffle should suffice, a Michelle-on-Ellen-style ‘Tip Drill’-video-worthy throw-down will ruin you.

21. Do order salad when at a business meal. Even if you – like most black people – hate the taste. It makes it seem as if you value your health and your life, therefore smashing multiple major black stereotypes with one tasteless leafy plate.

22. Don’t order two main courses (perhaps one as a starter and one as a main) because it would be ‘cost-effective’ when at a business meal.

23. Do master the names of at least three different types of fantastically expensive (and therefore) ‘sophisticated’ cheeses.

24. Do order cheese for dessert when at a business meal.

25. Don’t delude yourself: you know good and well that ‘cheesecake’ does not qualify as a type of cheese.

26. Do keep the fact that your parents were Panthers or Freedom Riders or were in the Mau Mau or Brixton Uprisings firmly to yourself. Despite feeling incredibly proud of them.

27. Do mention that your cousin’s girlfriend’s babysitter’s hairdresser’s cousin on her mother’s side fought in the Gulf War, Vietnam, Iraq, Libya or any other pointless, counter-productive and probably illegal war that white people approved of.

28. Do seize any opportunity to pay white people the supreme ultimate compliment: ‘You’ve lost weight.’ Even if they have done the opposite.

29. Don’t wear ‘loud’ jewellery – ‘loud’ in this context meaning black. You’ll be maliciously mistaken for a rapper, a gangsta or a benefits ‘cheat’ (otherwise known as a direct reparation seeker). No more than one ring on your fingers, preferably on your wedding finger, no multiple finger rings, small earrings (but only if you’re a woman), no company logo medallions, no Tupak-style nose rings and certainly no 80s crack peddler-style chains. Don’t let Afropunk or Hidden Colors get you fucked up: no bone in your nose either.

30. Do wear a ring on your wedding finger when going for interviews and while you’re still on probation (i.e. job probation – not jail). Even if you’re hopelessly single – in fact, especially if you’re hopelessly single. It signifies commitment, maturity, stability and desperation.

31. Don’t sign off a professional email or phone call with the words ‘God bless’. In fact, don’t ever evoke God in a professional setting. Except in the context of ‘God save the Queen’ or ‘In God we trust’ or ‘God damn, we stand to make a lot of money if we do such and such.’ But never in the context of ‘God rain down fire and keep these crackers off my back’ and, forbid the dreaded thought, ‘God is great’ – especially not in Arabic.

32. Do happily split the bill equally when you go out for group drinks or dinner, professional or otherwise. The few peppercorns you’ll save by ticking off the items you consumed on the receipt will lose you a fortune in missed opportunities as a result of looking cheap and socially inept.

33. Don’t be shocked when white people use other white people as a means of creating a picture of ‘diversity’ within your firm that just doesn’t exist. For example, a straight white Englishman in New York may be held up as a poster child for the firm’s commitment to ethnic diversity.

34. Do place a picture of extremely light-skinned children on your desk. Doesn’t matter who they belong to. Just allow people to assume they belong to you. This will hopefully garner sympathy when it is time for budget cuts. It’s the photographic equivalent of saying ‘please don’t shoot! There is a white person in my life and we have procreated together!’

1 See: http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/ld199596/ldhansrd/vo960314/text/60314-26.htm.

2 ‘How do we know David Cameron has slave owners in family background?’, The Guardian, 29 September 2015.

3 ‘Sarkozy charged over Libyan cash for campaign’, Daily Telegraph, 21 March 2018.

4 ‘Berlusconi found guilty after case that cast spotlight on murky premiership’, The Guardian, 24 June 2013.

5 ‘Not Counting Niggers’, George Orwell, 1939: http://orwell.ru/library/articles/niggers/english/e_ncn.

6 ‘Britain destroyed records of colonial crimes’, The Guardian, 18 April 2012.

7 In 2014, while celebrating the hundredth anniversary of Britain’s forced amalgamation of Nigeria, the then Nigerian president, Goodluck Jonathan, bestowed an honour on the man who completed the amalgamation and tasked his lady partner with finding a name for the newly formed country: Lord Frederick Luggard. Luggard was himself described by the Conservative Mayor of London as a ‘savage kill-the-natives type’ (The Churchill Factor: How One Man Made History, Boris Johnson, 2014).

8 ‘Emmanuel Eboue lifts the lid on bitter divorce battle that left him with nothing and how he hasn’t seen his three kids since June’, Daily Mirror, 24 December 2017.

9 ‘Bank accused of pushing mortgage deals on blacks’, The New York Times, 6 June 2009.

10 ‘Windrush: More than just coincidental errors’, BBC News, 17 April 2018.