"All [stories] are about certain minorities: the individual is a minority. The universal in the [story] is reached only through the depiction of the specific man in a specific circumstance."

— Ralph Ellison, The Paris Review, 1955

Barack Obama made it to America's ultimate "white" space, the White House, and occupied that space for eight years. Now, in his place, the default has returned in, what I believe, the personage of a misogynist, "white" supremacist.

When I escaped the corporate plantation almost 40 years ago (I use the terms "escaped" and "plantation" in the literal sense) it felt very much as I imagined my ancestors felt when they chose to, as the Negro Spiritual intoned, "steal away." I was indeed searching for freedom. Seeking a place where I could flourish as a "black" man without the need to constantly protect myself from the "white" gaze. This is not an uncommon situation.

In a 2015 article in the Atlantic, author Adia Harvey Wingfield wrote:

"To be a black professional is often to be alone. Most black doctors, lawyers, journalists, and so on—those in white-collar positions that require specialized training and credentialing—work in environments where they are in the racial minority.

This comes with challenges. Beyond outright discrimination, which many still face, there are psychological costs to being one of just a few black faces in a predominantly white environment. In a study of black professional workers in a number of different occupations, I found that these employees worked to carefully manage their emotions in ways that reflected the racial landscapes they inhabited."

There were a series of events that precipitated my fateful decision to bolt from my window-less office that felt more oppressive as one day melded into another. I had told anyone who would listen that my future goal was to be a published author and filmmaker/TV producer. I was informed that I was in good company, as the author of the novel, The Blue Max, which had been turned into a Hollywood film starring George Peppard and James Mason, had written his manuscript while occupying my same window-less office.

However, all I could see from my vantage point, as the days dragged on, that if I didn't escape, I'd end up like all of the other mangers and support staff who, except for one other co-worker in a department of more than 200, were all white, corporate clones — middle class and soulless. I needed my independence, and two events made this clear.

The Haircut

During the time I began my corporate career, the afro was in. In my neck of the woods we called it a "bush." A glorious mane of black hair, rounded, picked out and sheened (think, Clarence Williams III's character, Linc, in ABC's television series, The Mod Squad).

I had an hour commute to work, and to meet my 8:30 a.m. arrival time, it meant getting up at the crack of dawn to shit, shower and shave, eat breakfast and then, the pièce de résistance — getting my do together; a half-hour to 45 minute process, on a good day.

For me, and for most of my contemporaries, one's hair was your crown; you wore it in a way that was loud and proud. No more James Brown pre-"black 'n proud" conks, or close-cropped hustlers. For me, and for many others, even in the lily-white world of advertising and corporate communications, it was the bush or nothing at all.

A white co-worker had once invited me into her office to ask secretively, without any self-awareness of her own white privilege, "Can I touch your hair?" There was no malice, I thought, so I let what could have been a teachable moment pass, because I thought the environment and the situation dictated conformity. How one chooses to assert one's individuality in a corporate culture and institution steeped in "white" supremacy and European standards of beauty and ways of being, does so at one's own peril.

I had grown tired of the daily hair routine, so after a long week of wall staring, I decided to make a change. You would have thought that suddenly it was as if I had become Huey Newton or Bobby Seale or Eldridge Cleaver all rolled into one, just because not only did I go to the barbershop that Saturday for a haircut, but I actually had my head shaved. We take black men like Samuel L. Jackson or Michael Jordan, whose pate is hairless, for granted today. But when I showed up Monday morning sans hair, I became an oddity. Everyone who walked by my office did a double-take and had to come back for a second look, making idle conversation just so they could examine my appearance. Now I knew how the animals felt being in the zoo.

There have been studies that show that "men with shorn heads are seen as more dominant, confident and masculine than men with hair." I felt just the opposite; I had become my own Samson and Delilah. It was a decapitation by my own hand.

The Workshop

It was during this time that upper management decided to bring in outside consultants to conduct a workshop on team building and increasing creativity among the rank 'n file managers. We did yoga and meditation as a way to enhance creativity, to get in touch with the inner-self, to harness inspiration. At some point during the team building portion, things started to go downhill for me.

We broke up into pairs. I was paired with a co-worker, a white male who I didn't know (remember, there were a cadre of more than 200 professionals and support staff in the department). As we stood opposite one another. I don't remember the instruction given, but I found myself on the receiving end of an extended head rub. Bald or full-head of hair, it seemed that white folks, if given the opportunity, needed to demonstrate their perceived superiority by doing whatever they could to infantilize me. I internalized my anger.

Rather than liberating me, my haircut only increased my chains.

Now it came to the final exercise. A group of us had to form a tableau, where each individual had to fit into a group picture, each striking a pose, to achieve a sense of harmony and balance. I was the last to go. As I observed "my place," where I might complete the picture, there was a natural spot at the bottom of the frame. Unconsciously, perhaps, I was responding to all of the group portraits of the European Renaissance masters where it seemed that the negros, when they were depicted, were to be perceived by the viewer as less than, not central to the content or meaning of the scene.

So where did I assume my place to balance out the scene? At the bottom, with all of my white co-workers, whose status within the organization was on par with mine, lording over me.

In trying to achieve balance, I was denying my own sense of self. That's what had been bothering me all along, and I knew I had to go, regardless of the consequences.

For all of the supposed focus and praise in the U.S. on rugged individualism, group coercion is very strong. There is a premium placed on social cohesion. One only has to look at the nature of our politics: Republicans, it is said, fall in line, while Democrats fall in love. Either way, the group (tribe) is dominant at the expense of the individual, particularly when it comes to media portrayals, story concepts, being black, being an individual with ideas and concepts that places one outside the "white" mainstream. There is always an institutional (group) pressure to conform. Go along to get along. Don't rock the boat. Just keep your head down. Stay under the radar.

I know some very successful black men who understate their success because of jealously they experience on both sides of the color line.

To bring this full circle, it was Jackie Robinson whom Colin Kaepernick quoted in explaining his actions. Robinson said, "I cannot stand and sing the anthem. I cannot salute the flag; I know that I am a black man in a white world." The NFL is 70 percent black as far as players go, but out of 32 teams, there are only seven black head coaches — and no blacks in ownership positions. In a review of the 2006 book, $40 Million Dollar Slaves, Warren Goldstein quotes from the author, William C. Rhoden:

"Consequently, most black athletes lost their connection to a 'sense of mission … of being part of a larger cause.' Young athletes, in particular, 'dropped the thread that joins them to that struggle' and became, instead, a 'lost tribe,' adrift in the world of white coaches, boosters, agents, club officials, network executives — those profiting from black muscle and skill."

So, what else is new? Jelani Cobb, in the latest edition of the New Yorker, writes in a commentary titled: Starbucks and the Issue of White Space, that we now have a "Presidency that strives to make the United States itself feel like a white space. Implicit biases often have a way of becoming explicit ones."

He who pays the piper calls the tune. What remains to be seen is whether the group coercion in this instance will happen in reverse. Will the black players who are the majority, and their white allies, stand up, by sitting down, thumbing their noses at Trump and ownership and #TakeAKneeForAPrinciple?

I could have stayed in corporate America, as many of my friends and acquaintances chose to do, and fought my way up the corporate ladder, but, "for what does it profit a man to gain the whole world and forfeit his soul?" (Mark 8:36)

Before I be a slave (corporate or otherwise), I will be buried in my grave.

visioneer

Writing since May 2018 · 1 story contributed