Out of the clear blue sky, Dr Whytelaw contacted me in early 2014 to help him package and share his message on how ‘we’ – by which he meant ‘black people’ – transit from ‘civil rights to silver rights … from marching to money-making … from fighting for freedom to actual freedom’. He explained that he had the ‘blueprint to overthrow the White Man [not to be mistaken for a “white man”, he stresses] once and for all’. When I asked for brief details, he elaborated: ‘We will use the White Man’s own weapons and tools to defeat him and we will start in the whitest place possible: the corporate world.’
I pointed out the wise words of the great poet Audre Lorde: ‘the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house’. After a long and frustrated pause Dr Whytelaw responded: ‘Nigga, you sound like an idiot or, even worse, a poet. Why would we want to dismantle a house we built? We don’t want to dismantle anything, we want to throw the blue-eyed squatter out and live in it ourselves.’
On the back of the statement above, I made it clear that I despise the N-word and would rather he didn’t use it around me. His response: ‘Nigga, nigga, nigga, nigga, nigga, nigga, nigga. I’ve held back my language and repressed myself all my life. And what did it earn me? Anxiety, high blood pressure and, fair enough, a lot of money. Anyway, nigga, I will use whatever word keeps me alive, happy and wealthy.’
How he got my details remains a mystery to me. Nevertheless, after months of trying to convince me that there is no such thing as a ‘white fatwa’, he got me to agree to help bring his vision to life.
Dr Whytelaw is a fascinating person. An unhinged black man with no political filter or time for political correctness whatsoever – a degree of freedom I would normally only associate with the most comfortable of comfortable white men. A truly unique compendium of racial knowledge and insight. Charming, witty, forthright and, according to him, ‘always right’.
During moments of creative and racial disagreement he would firmly reassure me that he ‘is to white people what Warren Buffet is to stocks, what Bill Gates is to computers, what Colonel Sanders is to stealing secret recipes from black women …’ And rightly so. He is an authority, and his theories (which he would demand I label ‘facts’) are nothing short of ground-breaking.
In early February 2019, Dr Whytelaw texted me to say he was about to embark on an ‘urgent scientific field trip’ to ‘discover, research and document’ a ‘remote white tribe’. No one has heard from him since.
This book is the fruit of all the discussions, lessons and ideas which emerged from hundreds of hours of meetings with Dr Whytelaw. This is his gift to the world, even though much of the hard work was mine.
HOWEVER, PLEASE NOTE THAT ABSOLUTELY NONE OF THE OPINIONS, THOUGHTS OR ADVICE OFFERED IN THIS BOOK ARE MINE OR ANYTHING TO DO WITH ME.
I’m only in this for the money.
1 Born, respectively, Carlos Irwin Estévez, Ralph Lifshitz and Caryn Elaine Johnson.
Assumptions
This book is written with the following assumptions about you, the reader:
1. You are classified as black:
• Meaning you were born with at least a single drop of wild black African blood in your veins which has physically manifested itself in you (e.g. brown skin, impressive genitalia, natural rhythm, a proneness to police brutality, punctuality issues, healthy distrust of people classified as white, etc.).
• You do not have a gang tattoo on your face, a catalogue of violent or pornographic YouTube videos or a lengthy criminal record owing to a former career in rap music.
• You are a professional (or you aspire to be one) and therefore have an intimate understanding of the necessity of Prozac (or aspire to such an understanding).
• You can handle the truth.
2. In the event you are not (blessed enough to be) classified as black:
• You are a voyeur of black people for personal, professional, political, perverted or policing reasons
Or
• You’re just some bored racist devil.
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