Think Like a White Man. Dr Boulé Whytelaw III

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ 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 СКАЧАТЬ