The Only Black Guy in the Office
Snorting Coke Wasn’t In My Job Description
The burden of being the cool Black work friend
--
Update 6/7/22: Level has a new home. You can read this article and other new articles by visiting LEVELMAN.com.
Years ago, in my first office job, the internet startup company I worked for was run by mostly White, mostly heterosexual men. It wasn’t Silicon Valley, but it was definitely Silicon Valley. And as you might imagine, being the only Black person on staff was… an experience. They wanted everyone to bring all of their ideas to the table. Except in my case, I wasn’t really at the table — I was in a too-short chair near its far end.
I was working in sales at the time, but I always liked marketing, so during weekly cross-departmental meetings I’d pitch really insightful ideas for the marketing team to consider. The ideas often landed, but it wasn’t an isolated occurrence to say something in a meeting, then hear someone else be praised later for the same idea. Ugh.
Meetings aside, the office had that bro-ey feel that startup culture so often gets satirized for: foosball table; old-school arcade machines; a weird ongoing game where people would hide Taco Bell sauce packets in each other’s desks. (Don’t ask, I never figured it out.) On Fridays, people would do beer-thirty happy hours and compare their March Madness brackets or whatever. I’m not a basketball guy, so I didn’t take part, but I couldn’t help but notice that a lot of the people who were most involved in the reindeer games were climbing to the top. The boys’ club was in full effect.
There’s an ongoing pattern that me and my buddies keep finding, and love to compare notes about: Supervisors at these places want their Black employees to have fun, but not really. It’s lip service. If you actually have fun, then everyone’s in trouble — but if you keep your head down and do your work, then people get nervous, and someone will say, “We just want to check in to make sure everything’s okay, that you’re not mad or whatever.” That I’m not mad. Never mind the actual day-to-day shit that accumulates in a thousand tiny ways — as long as I don’t look like Surly Black Guy Considering a Lawsuit, they don’t have to think about the ways their culture…
