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Sometimes life can call for extreme measures. There have been times in my life when things seem-not boring, but plain. Boring isn’t the worst thing in the world. But plain to me almost feels like a malaise. One day you find yourself in a routine, doing things on autopilot. But meanwhile, while you’re doing things the things you’re doing aren’t helping you. I don’t like feeling as though that is how I’m living. And the reality is if you feel like you aren’t progressing there is a decent chance that you are not.
In the business review we just published I talked about likability quite a bit. And it was a discouraging revelation to face the fact that a fair share of my stagnation in life has come from people with opportunity or people who can create opportunities, not being willing to support me, because they don’t like me for one reason or another. This is one of the reasons why I didn’t/don’t like sales as an occupation. I had a colleague, and I’ve told at least two too many stories about this company that I used to work for at this point. I thought the company was decent but in hindsight maybe not so much now. This colleague at this company once asked me if I could present more like our other colleague. The other colleague he wanted me to mimic was a white man. But also, in addition to him being a white man, I had trained this man on how to do the job.
So, to emphasize what happened in that scenario, my colleague told me to be more like our other white colleague who I trained. I don’t think the guy who asked this of me did so with poor intentions, but he certainly didn’t think his request through at that time. I tried explaining to him that I cannot change the tone of my voice. My tone, texture and the way and what sound comes out of my mouth when I speak is pretty much set. Now I could be wrong about that but I don’t do impressions. How my voice vibrates with respect to my vocal cords, vocal folds, and wind or air flowing between them, and the lexicon I use, kind of is what it is. But, do you see how rude the request is? Can you act and sound more white so that way we can [hopefully] get more sales?
In sales training certain leaders sometimes say that people buy from people that they like. Which is honestly true. A decent example of this is women tend to perform better in sales roles than men. Sales is a male dominated field with a ratio of 3 to 1 male versus female, but women tend to perform better with regard to metrics and achieving outcomes that sales organizations care about. Imagine the following scenario: You’re a male decision maker (CXO and related) and you get a call from a salesperson with a female voice and name who identifies as a woman. Naturally as a man, on top of this being a generally serendipitous moment, you’re thinking, she sounds pretty, she has a nice name, she looks good on her LinkedIn profile; I don’t care what she’s selling-I’ll take a meeting. Oh yeah i’ll buy from her because she’s a woman and is making me feel feelings.
Now imagine you’re that same male decision maker and you get a call or message from another guy. Now your thought process is, who is this loser? I don’t want what he’s selling, he’s a man so I need to be a little bit more defensive. What is he selling? Is this a scam? Do I care? You naturally become more suspicious because at the end of the day what business do two men have with each other? There is a likability factor at play that doesn’t fully erodes someone’s ability to be successful but can be the difference between you hitting quota or being short; and statistically this likability imbalance negatively affects men more. Now be a black man. Or any man other than white. In addition to having to navigate a white man’s world as a non white man, there are a whole host of “nuances” at play that you may or may not be aware of at least in part if not in whole because you don’t fit the desired image. Men and women both fall victim to this. Men, being the subjective majority, face it more commonly, but women can certainly fall victim to bias, misogyny, sexism, harassment and various other forms of prejudice and power in the workplace.
Again, this matters most in the workplace/the world of professionalism because generating cash flow is how you feed and take care of yourself, advance in life, and establish yourself in one sense or another. Working for someone else is how most people generate that cash flow. So, how who you work for treats you and thinks about you matters with respect to whether you can afford your apartment, mortgage, healthcare, to start a family, so on and so forth. Your life is in these people’s hands and they know it. Assuming you are talented and qualified, and despite that fact, whether or not you can have a life depends on if an employer likes you. And not just them, but any consumer or parallel/related individual.
I worked at this other company for a couple weeks, a construction company. And I was the only black person there. Red flag number one. There were a few red flags which I’m not going to count in this article, but the COO of the company reorganized the call center floor to make sure he could not only see me but see my computer as well via a camera he set up that connected to his computer and phone. Besides me, there was one other guy who worked on the call center floor, and you tell me what race he was. He was white. The rest of the employees were white or Hispanic women. Sometimes you can get gaslit into thinking that the biases of someone else doesn’t matter. They completely matter.
It’s tough being a black person in America specifically, though not exclusively. There is only one way you “succeed” and that’s together. Black people naturally aren’t a group of people known for sticking together. We sold ourselves off into slavery. We kill each other every day in Africa and cities across America. The committers of black on black violence don’t care about the concept of black on black violence. To them black on black violence is their license to kill. Consider the case of Anthony Johnson and John Casor in 1655. Johnson sued to have Casor be returned to him as a slave for life. Anthony Johnson was a black free man from Africa and John Casor was an African slave. A black man contributed to the precedent and legacy of black slavery in America.
When black people come together we can engage in a crabs in a bucket/barrel mentality. I wrote about this concept in college and it helped me get my Master’s degree. Any people group can do this, not just black people; but, this phenomenon can be more apparent amongst black people. When crabs are collected and alive, sometimes a fisherman or fishmonger may put the crabs in a bucket or a barrel for storage. When this happens a phenomenon occurs where a few crabs may try to climb out of the bucket or barrel and the rest of the crabs will pull them down off the ledge to keep them in the bucket or barrel. You can extrapolate this occurrence to humans. For black people (specifically not exclusively) this can look like family, friends, and similar not supporting you, engaging in shine theory, and or being quiet/closeted haters.
So, for black people, the problem starts at home and in our own community. I have conservative values but semantically I don’t align with black conservatives. I don’t like how they have a tendency to tear other black people down. That said, I do think they are on the right side with respect to the ideology of staying away from other black people that don’t demonstrate upward or forward mobility. Evidently we can have a difficult time helping ourselves. Now, that’s not grounds to decide to give up on black people but realizing some of us can’t be helped is a lesson worth remembering. That said, this is why ending affirmative action was a detrimental decision. Because at least with affirmative action employers and institutions with comparable opportunities had to consider the plight of a black person; now they could care less because they aren’t incentivized to. And guess who supported ending Affirmative Action, Clearance Thomas, a black man who weaponized being black to his advantage during his confirmation hearing for Supreme Court Justice; at one point referring to the hearing as a “high tech lynching”, when being questioned about Anita Hill. Again to clarify, the same black guy who agreed that black people shouldn’t be afforded a certain level of socio-economic equity is the same black guy who weaponized his blackness against a black woman (the situation was more nuanced than that but consider this interpretation for allegorical purposes). We do it to ourselves and then have the nerve to wonder why things are the way they are in America.
As a black man trying to establish himself, and let me say, establishing myself is a desire of my heart. I want to be stable to a certain degree. The first thing that usually comes to mind when I think about this, is spending time with my loved ones, hosting parties, experiencing comfortable romance, and things most people would consider as relatively normal. As a black man who wants those and adjacent things, to be confronted on more than one occasion with the idea and or reality that I’m being held back because someone doesn’t like me enough for whatever reason to give me an opportunity; that’s a radicalizing realization.
And what I mean by a radicalizing realization is that, when faced with that kind of reality you have two choices, you can surrender to your plight and give up your hopes of a life for yourself; because at the end of the day someone has to give you money (pay you for your work/services and or buy whatever you’re selling) for you to be able to go get food, pay a mortgage, and raise a family. Or, you can choose to do something extreme and break out of the malaise of “nothing is going to get better for me/I don’t know why things aren’t getting better for me.”
In a way I feel vindicated because I have felt this way for some time specifically about corporate America. I may not have had the vocabulary but the feelings have certainly been there. I’ve always struggled with the idea of an office job. I mean, I’ve had several corporate roles at this point, I’m a thought leader on business, and I still apply to positions regularly; but, I don’t know how else to describe the routine of go to work, maybe go to the gym/spend time with loved ones, go home, pay bills, maybe eat a decent meal, maybe get a good night sleep, and start all over again; than as a malaise.
If that routine works for you, great, to each his own. What is good for the goose, isn’t necessarily good for the gander. I have known that I am part of the gander but now I need to become more extreme and figure out what being part of the gander means to me and what I’m willing to do about it. I arrived at this place after my book was snubbed. I entered “Get Your Mind Right” into the Best Indie Book Awards or BIBA. My book made it to the final round in each of its categories. I entered the book into six different categories. My book didn’t win a single category. I’m assuming this was a snub because their rules say that in the final round, in addition to how the book is written, and its overall quality, the judges also consider other nuanced (there’s that word again) factors.
I find it difficult to believe that these judges read or encountered my book on six different occasions and on every occasion, they decided that “Get Your Mind Right” is one of the best books in the competition; but, despite that, in six categories there was a book that was better. It’s hard to do that math. I feel like Jay-Z when he was defending Beyonce at the Grammy’s before she won album of the year. How can the book be the best book you ever read six different times, but still not be good enough to win a single category? I want to know what the nuances are. But the point is I don’t have to know because I can guess.
I have to stop before I say too much, which I likely already have. If you’ve been disenfranchised in any way, especially on more than one occasion, now is the time for you to go to the extremes. Now is the time to radicalize. Things aren’t going to change unless you change them. What I just described is literally how nations fall. My heart goes out to young adults 18-29 years old.The old way of doing things doesn’t have your best interest at heart. In fact, the old way of doing things is suppressing you and keeping you from seeing any genuine material victories. Now is the time to think outside of the box. Take the lessons of your elders with you, but don’t limit yourself to the confines of their worldview.
The last story I’ll tell is about Tamera Mowry. There is a relatively recent clip of her on the Jennifer Hudson Show talking about raising her kids, her career, so on and so forth. At the 3:42 mark of the video Tamera Mowry tells this story about how she is teaching her daughter that no matter what, in life there will always be somebody who doesn’t like you and that’s perfectly fine. What matters is focusing every day on being the best person you can be and appreciating the people who do like you, and value you and your contributions. This ministered to me because it was timely and because it was motherly advice. My mom is with the Lord now and I lost her at a young age. Hearing Tamera give that advice made me feel cathartic, like maybe that’s what my mom would have told me if she was here today.
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