Think Like a White Man - Dr Boulé Whytelaw III

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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 Feel free to do an internet search using the words ‘Donald Trump black pastors’.

      5 Reminder: all names in this book have been changed to protect the treacherously litigious.

      6 More info on Barack Obama’s marijuana smoking days with the ‘Choom Gang’ here: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/barackobama/9290972/Barack-Obamas-marijuana-smoking-days-with-the-Choom-Gang.html.

      7 In areas such as elite sport this remains the case; however, the pay is sometimes more rewarding.

      8 Kim Kardashian, an off-white white woman with a fake black backside is to today what booty-free Pamela Anderson was to the 80s: the global standard of beauty.

      PART 1

      UNDERSTANDING THE WHITE MAN

      ‘Racism is still with us. But it is up to us to prepare our children for what they have to meet, and, hopefully, we shall overcome.’

      — Rosa Parks

      CHAPTER 1

       Why Think Like a White Man?

       ‘Let us take the negro as we find him, as God designed him, not a white man, nor the equal of a white man …’

      — Admiral Bedford Pim (1826—1886), a Royal Navy officer, Conservative MP, Arctic explorer, barrister and author (and ardent racist)

      In hundreds, if not thousands, of years from now, scholars, historians and tin-foil-hat-wearing crackpot conspiracy theorists (the latter almost certainly able to trace their lineage back to a Trump voter) will research and debate the Barack Obama phenomenon with intense fascination. I can hear the arguments now: it was his oratory, his emotional intelligence, the alarming imbecility of his predecessor or the fact that he was a man of principle and faith, which propelled him to such heights. But they will all be wrong and/or too polite to tell the unspeakable truth.

      What propelled Barack Obama to prominence, his superpower, was his key talent: simply, his immense understanding of white people. Without that, he’d probably have peaked as a butler at the White House, a veteran of Ronald Reagan’s war on drugs or a long-distance runner (he is, after all, ‘part Kenyan’ … according to Boris Johnson).

      Crucially Barack was part of the tiny, micro-fraction of black people who managed to crack the code of the most important, difficult and powerful of all white people: the White Man. Watching Barack bob, weave and hadoken through white people, feed them sweet lies as opposed to the bitter truth, comfort their fears and soothe their tears

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