Whether you wish to ‘help your family’, ‘smash the glass ceiling’, ‘bring hope and change to the masses’, ‘make a shed load of money’, ‘become the first black person to achieve such and such thing that white people have the opportunity to do daily’, accruing power is likely to be your ultimate or underlying objective.
As a professional, you need to acquire power for yourself: no one is ever going to give it to you, and it is only through having power that you are likely to get to where you need to be to manifest your wildest and blackest dreams.
The Path to Power
So, if power is the prize, how do you go about attaining it? There are two ways to gain power in a professional setting. The first and most obvious of these is performance.
You have to be competent, especially if you are a black professional. If you’re not competent, this fact will most certainly be used against you. In fact, as I’m certain you have heard, read and probably experienced, as a black professional you must be multiple times more competent than anyone else for even base recognition.2 This is not a myth or the cries of a person with a ‘chip on their shoulder’. Or the moans of some uppity black radical. It is 100% true.
Emphasis was purposefully placed on the need to be competent as a black professional because, in reality, competence is not a universally required quality. Some people can get away with being flagrantly incompetent just by being very good at the other way of acquiring power: politics. Some people are able to be rubbish at both and get away with it all the way to the top.
The Infinite Potential of the Talent-free White Male
In order to attain a clear grasp of politics in action, let’s go back to the ‘post-racial’ fantasy days of 2011 … April 2011, to be precise.
The Story of Barack and Donald
Expertise is never total, therefore every expert has their weak spot. And, as we know, Barack Obama is a master in the dark arts of understanding white people – second only to me – but he, too, had his weak spots.
Perhaps Barack wasn’t familiar with the adage, ‘hell hath no fury like a White Man dissed in public by a black person’, or perhaps he just forgot the Ninth White Man Commandment (‘A White Man must be respected, feared or, at least, loved’).
In April 2011, he publicly roasted Ultra White Man Donald Trump – to his face – by obliterating the Trump-led Birther Movement,3 simply by revealing his birth certificate. By November 2016, as the results of the election rolled in, Barack was firmly reminded: a publicly humbled White Man is a White Man on a revenge mission.
In 2011, Donald Trump was a garden-variety bloated American relic from the 80s. He was a reality-TV-show host, a serial bankrupt, Twitter troll and a dissed and dismissed joke.
Then came 30 April and he experienced something he hadn’t ever had to tolerate: a black person powerful enough to put him firmly in his place.
So, what does a White Man do when he has been reduced to a racist laughing stock? Simple, he gets more racist, more vicious and runs for president.
As far as party and presidential politics were concerned, Trump was:
• Irredeemably inexperienced;
• Irredeemably tainted;
• Irredeemably unsuitable;
• Irredeemably irredeemable.
Donald Trump was one of, if not the very worst, candidate ever to run for anything, anywhere. Yet, of course, he won. And won decisively. (Men like Donald Trump do become president in, say, African nations but they’re never ever elected. Africans are far too smart to vote for guys like Donald Trump.)
Yes, he was, and still is, a heady cocktail of -isms, phobias and testosterone, but he knew his customer exceptionally well. So, he decided to feed his customer their drug of choice, which just so happened to be the most addictive of all drugs: white supremacy. Good old-fashioned George Wallace-style racism.
Screw the fact that he was as compromised as an American businessman-turned-politician caught on tape drenched in a Moscow prostitute’s urine: he knew that after eight years of stable, prosperous and scandal-free negro rule,4 white people needed some good ol’ southern-fried racism. So he made it clear that the racist they needed was him. And lo, white people put him in the White House.
Politics
This is where things get tricky. Organisations will train you on your role, assist with performance, and you can, in good faith, ask other people when you get confused. Playing politics, however – whether at country or company level – is a filthy game (even when family values-spouting Tory politicians are not involved). It is the most difficult part of professionalism; there is no training for it. In fact, no one can really explain to you what it is or even if it exists. You will just find yourself in the middle of it and having to deal with it. And you’ll know you’re in the middle of it when you’re up in the middle of the night crying into a bucket of ice cream.
To ask someone about politics in the workplace is to admit to political weakness or naïvety, which will eventually be exploited.
So, if you need to be politically savvy in order to excel as a professional, what do you do in practice? The answer is paradoxically simple yet complex. You need to treat every working day with the shrewdness and forced optimism of a desperate political campaign. Metaphorically kiss some babies, hug the bigot, ‘reject and denounce’ Louis Farrakhan’s support,5 form alliances with strange bedfellows, change your accent if need be (like Hillary Clinton or Maggie Thatcher), show those pearly whites … Do whatever it takes.
Politically speaking: you need to make everyone ‘go black’. For you at least. And, hopefully, like a Kardashian, never go back.
You want them, white people, to be thinking Nat King Cole when they see you. Not Nat Turner. To think pre-financial crisis Gordon Brown and not Bobby, Chris or Orlando Brown. Pound sterling and not Raheem Sterling. The more white people love you, the easier and more prosperous your career will be. The more power you amass, the more cash you will stash.
Either master the politics and acquire the power you crave or be prepared to shine shoes for a long time to come. It’s a straight choice: play the game, or be played.
In all organisations there is a balance between politics and performance. Some organisations are near total political jungles, others only suffer a small dose of politics; but there’s no workplace where politics is entirely absent.
Power is the prize. Performance gets you in the game but it is politics that keeps you in the game and eventually gets you on the podium.
The Whytelaw Law on Black Progression
Here is the Whytelaw formula for calculating how far and how fast a black person will proceed in any given corporation.
(2Y × Performance) + PoliticsX = Black progression (Hpy)
Formula explained:
Y depicts how many times harder black people have to work than white people. Pegged at one, as we know that the efforts of black people are never ever held in greater esteem than the efforts of white people. It’s multiplied by two as it is scientifically proven that black people have to work at least twice as hard.
Performance means level of effort plus ability to act upper middle-class white. This ensures we don’t give the White Man the impression that we don’t believe in the concept of taking some responsibility for one’s own situation.
Politics is self-explanatory.
X is the level of white supremacist intensity within the organisation.
Hpy