He knew how to placate the White Man, how to pander to him and how to play him like a fiddle. He even knew how to put a White Man on ice. He mastered the White Man in theory, and then became the White Man’s master in practice.
And if you want to go places, you have to understand white people too. Especially the White Man. It is as straightforward as that. Get your Barack on, or get barracked.
White Men, specifically those of Anglo-Saxon stock from northern Europe (who went on to steal America and other areas of the world), essentially run everything that matters on the face of the Lord God’s green Earth. And whatever they don’t currently run, they are actively plotting and planning to take over. Where the stakes are high enough, they are probably bombing nations (under the unbelievably effective marketing guise of ‘protecting human rights’) in order to do so.
White Men are the emperors, the modern pharaohs, the owners and editors of the dictionary, the purveyors and deniers of credibility and rights. And wrongs. And book deals. And, most pertinently to this book, they are more likely than anyone else to be your boss and to control, as well as define, the corporate environment or institution within which you work and hope to excel.
Fuck what you heard: corporations are not people.1 They don’t have minds of their own. The actions of corporations are not driven by nature. Or even nurture. Corporations are just entities that reflect the interests and therefore the thinking, cultural norms and practices of their controllers and owners for the benefit of their controllers and owners.
If a corporation is controlled and owned by White Men, which is true of pretty much all major companies worldwide, then it will reflect the interests, thinking, cultural norms and practices of White Men. Which they do.
Nevertheless, in the interests of clarity, readers should be under no illusion: the proverbial White Man is not your enemy, far from it. He is much more than that: he is your owner. He owns all of us.
And I don’t mean ‘owner’ in the Ben Affleck-ancestry2 slave-master way – in which you could run up on him, slit his throat, crap in his birthday cake mixture or run away from him. The White Man of today has much more control over all of us than his enslaved African-owning genocidal criminal forebears.
You can’t touch today’s White Man: a drone will tear you limb from limb before you can even dream of getting to his throat or his cake mixture and you certainly can’t run away from him. He is in your company, your algorithm, your cuisine and, most importantly, your head.
Therefore, you have to understand how he thinks and acts in order to understand how to beat him at his own game and truly experience freedom and prosperity. As the old saying goes, ‘If you can’t join them, study them, think like them, act like them and then obliterate them.’
Why White People?
Let’s take a moment to provide a little succour to white fragility: the average white man or woman, Dave the Deplorable, the grime-quoting teacher who tried to ‘save’ you, or your perma-broke weedhead friends Will and Wendy, have little to do with the real White Man. And have little to fear from this book. In fact, they, too, stand to better themselves by reading it.
The average garden-variety white man or woman (especially if they happen to be working class – meaning broke) are, at best, on a slightly better version of the sinking ship black people have been on for a few centuries now. They, too, are sinking, just at a slower rate. They, too, need to fill up the holes and turn the ship around. This book will show them how.
Nevertheless, you cannot understand the White Man and the actions of the White Man if you don’t understand ‘white people’.
So, what do I mean by ‘white people’?
Well, just that. I mean white people. But in the ‘Africa’ sense of the term. This book ‘Africa-ises’ white people, which means: except where absolutely necessary, it describes and chronicles white people in a manner that neither reflects nor cares for the varying complexities, diversity, difference or differences in white people. No nuance, no care, no fucks given. This book just lobs them all together in one absolutely monolithic group. You know, like white people often do with ‘Africa’ or ‘black people’.
Some would argue, with absolute justification, that such a crass use of the term ‘white people’ is lacking in complexity and therefore offensive. They would probably go on to question why this book would do such a thing. Why doesn’t this book just ‘pander to the white woman’ as the great negro writer Marlon James suggested that all writers of colour have to in order to succeed?3 Why alienate the most powerful block of book buyers in the solar system? Was this written, produced and performed exclusively by Lauryn Hill? Does the writer hate white people?
Good lord, no. I, and Lauryn Hill, I presume, don’t harbour the least bit of disdain towards white people. In fact, I, like many a black man who makes a bit of money, love and admire white women (especially the ones who have mainstream publishing in a choke hold). I have a white wife, a white ex-wife and two white stepchildren (whom a white judge has ordered that I pay private school fees for). And, in my working life, I’ve found myself under more mediocre white men than Stormy Daniels. So, I clearly have the right, as well as the authority, to write about white people.
I know white people much better than they know themselves.
To be clear and ethical, I lob white people together and write about white people in a sloppy manner out of absolute laziness and an unwillingness to let facts, complexity and diversity get in the way of a potential bestseller.
| The Whytelaw Classification of the Caucasian | |||
| Type of white person | Other names | Defining qualities | Interesting fact |
| White Man – spelt with a capital W and M. | the Man, Da Man, White Daddy, master, massa, the boss, coloniser, enslaver, etc. | Money, absolute power, total authority, absolute impunity. | Runs the world. |
| White man (‘white man’) – spelt with a lower-case w (unless at the start of a sentence) and a lower-case m. | Lil white man, wannabe White Man, underboss, assistant to White Man, useful idiot, etc. | Some money, some power, some authority, patriarchal power. And pink skin weirdly described as white. | Often mistaken for a White Man, often mistakes himself for a White Man. Paid more than you by default. |
| White people – an all-encompassing term covering all white people. Where there is a need to differentiate, prefixes are added. | Whitey, YT, Ypipo, oyinbo, crackers, missionary, etc. | Sometimes money, and the sympathy of the police department. And pink skin weirdly described as white. | To varying degrees, they are the key secondary beneficiaries of the practices and malpractices of the White Man. |
| White Tragedies | (White) working-class masses, white trash, po’ white trash, redneck, hillbilly, slave overseers, the police, prison wardens, etc. | Pink skin weirdly described as white only. | Easily persuaded by the White Man to believe that black people and other ‘non-desirables’ are the source of their brokeness. |
| Hollywood Villain White People (HVWP)4 | Russians, ‘Putin’, Rasputin, Gopnik, Drago, Commie, Rad, etc. | Nuclear weapons. And pink skin weirdly described as white. | They’re in some form of perpetual squabble with the White Man over Lord-knows-what so the White Man will buy your script if you’re slandering the shit out of HVWP.Moves in silence and often outsmarts the White Man. |
| White people trapped in black skin | See Appendix 1. | ||
| White Chocolate | See Appendix 1. |
All White Men Are Not Equal
Readers will notice something extremely rare and strange for a book on the black experience: it doesn’t focus exclusively on America. It draws examples, inspiration and wisdom from much further afield. Especially ‘Great Britain’. And there is a reason for that …
If I had to eulogise the American White Man, forbid the precious thought, it would be a fairly swift and straightforward affair: ‘Compared to his British cousin, that devil was an angel.’
And take it from a scholar, everyone in the room – the Chinese man, the Indian man, the Caribbean