The Rules of Black Inc: African-American men find themselves tested by stereotyping
The rules of black inc.
African-American men find themselves tested by stereotyping
Sunday, August 13, 2006
BY BRAD PARKSStar-Ledger Staff (New Jersey)
Don't stand too close. Don't talk too loud. Don't ever let your self get angry.
Be twice as courteous. Be three times as friendly. Make sure you dress better, too.
For African-American men in the corporate world, these are just some of what they loosely refer to as "the rules" -- a code of behavior they say applies to them much more so than anyone else, simply because of the color of their skin.
"There's a way all African- American males learn, particularly when we're in a professional environment, to modify our behavior," said Darryl Hughes, who lives in Neptune and works as corporate director for community and senior services at Meridian Health. "It's tone of voice, attitude, speaking style, dressing style. It's really our whole persona. We take measures not to be seen as the threatening black man."
It is, black men say, a fact of working life that hung on for decades after affirmative action began opening corporate doors to them, and that persists in an age when diversity training is a staple of the American workplace.
Because for as much as some things have changed, the image of the black male in America may be as bad as it has ever been: He is nearly seven times more likely to be incarcerated than a white male, twice as likely not to have earned a bachelor's degree, and nearly three times as likely to be unemployed.
And while black men in corporate settings are not described by those statistics -- they are law-abiding, well-educated and gain fully employed -- many still feel the need to compensate (and sometimes overcompensate) for them.
"You go out of your way not to fit the stereotypes, to say, 'Hey, we're not all like that,'" said Jeffrey Robinson, a business professor at New York University and a Piscataway resident. "I think about it all the time. We all do."
It's what leads to those small adjustments in daily behavior that, collectively, become "the rules." And many African-American men report following them: They smile more, so they don't seem angry. They avoid talking with their hands, to diminish their physical presence. They soften their voices. They dress up, even on casual Fridays.
It is, of course, difficult to characterize an entire subset of people in generalities that may not describe the experience of an individual. And just as there are black men who feel the conscious need to modulate their behavior, there are others who get along just fine by being themselves.
But one thing appears to be universal: Being a black man in the workplace comes with a set of issues that can never be ignored.
"Race always matters ... it just does," said Mark Ferguson, an investment banker who grew up in Newark's Baxter Terrace public housing project. "It's always in play for us."
GOING UP?
It is something that, for black men, finds its way into everything from the most important meetings to the smallest daily interactions.
There is, for example, what Albert McWilliams refers to as "the elevator thing."
McWilliams, the director of government relations for BASF and the former mayor of Plainfield, says he always goes out of his way to exchange pleasantries with co-workers in the elevator.
"You have to be extra-friendly or else you get viewed with suspicion," McWilliams said. "A black man cannot have the same rules of courtesy as a white man. You don't want to give people the impression you don't like them because they're white."
Then there's the other "elevator thing" many black men say they've experienced: when a white person, especially a white woman, moves farther away or clutches her purse tighter because a black man has entered the elevator.
"It's not unusual as a black male to feel you're threatening," said Ronald Barrett, a professor of psychology at Loyola-Marymount who is black and has studied African-American culture. "When you talk about darker skin color, different hairstyles and modes of dress, and certainly physical size, these are all factors known to increase white discomfort."
That's where "the rules" come in. They're about making others more comfortable. And there's a perception that those who know the rules -- and play by them -- have an easier time getting ahead in corporate America.
"People in my circle have really mastered it," said Randal Pinkett, a winner of Donald Trump's "Apprentice" and co-founder of BCT Partners in Newark. "We know the rules. We know how to play the game. We wouldn't have gotten where we are if we didn't."
IN THE SAND TRAP
The flip side can also be true: Not playing the game has a price.
Adrian Mapp, a Plainfield resident who is associate director in accounting at Bristol-Myers Squibb, says he's grateful for the opportunity his company has given him to support his family, but he describes himself as "stuck in middle management." And he notices that people who "look like me" are often stuck for the same reasons.
"When it comes to upward mobility, this is a relationship-driven organization. It's not necessarily your expertise that matters," Mapp said. "It's not that I don't have a good rapport with people in upper management. It just seems like either you're part of 'the group' or not. You're either going out and having drinks and going out on the golf course, or you're not. Well, I'm not a big golfer --I like the game, but I only started about five years ago. And when it comes to hanging out at bars after work, that's not something I'm going to do. I'm a family man."
Naturally, corporate game-playing is something germane to all races: No one is quite the same person in the corporate board room as they are in their own family room.
But some black men say they go off to those board rooms each day believing they have to conform to a higher standard.
"You're always conscious that you can never do anything off-line from what's expected," said Michael Washington, a Manalapan resident who is a technical analyst at Chubb. "You have to be in the top 100 percent of what's proper."
As McWilliams puts it: "The penalties for doing anything wrong are just far greater for African- Americans. If you garble grammar in a memo as a black person, people make certain assumptions about your education. If anyone else garbles grammar, it's just considered to be a typo. You have to pay attention to those little details or else it can hurt your career long term."
Yet, no matter where they find themselves on the corporate ladder, African-American men say race is a workplace issue they have to deal with in ways others don't.
"I don't think other groups spend as much mental energy on how they're being perceived," Hughes said. "Sometimes I wonder, am I being perceived as a valuable member of this organization who happens to be African-American? Or am I being perceived as a token so someone can say, 'Look, we got one'?"
It becomes an especially pressing issue when problems arise.
If a promotion is denied, an idea is ignored or a new client seems ill at ease, black men often find themselves wondering: Is it race?
"I'm always asking myself that," said Jeffrey Stokes, an operations manager for Public Service Enterprise Group. "When you have problems with people and they're not doing what you ask of them, in the back of your mind you're always saying, 'Is it because they're not understanding me? Or is it because I'm black?'"
CONSTANT DECISIONS
Answering that question in the affirmative leads to other issues, namely: What do you do about it? Let it slide? Make a scene?
Black men in this country have been dealing with this problem one way or another for hundreds of years, said Clement Price, a professor of history at Rutgers-Newark.
"Historically, people have seen the black man as the coward, the black fool, the minstrel character like Jim Crow who says 'Yessir' and 'Nossir,'" Price said. "But they have also seen the scary black man, the man of great strength and courage, someone like (boxer) Jack Johnson, who used to stick towels in his crotch to exaggerate the size of his manhood."
Most black men are somewhere in the middle -- neither Jim Crow nor Jack Johnson -- but they're constantly making decisions about where to fit within that spectrum, Price said.
Ferguson remembered a time when, as a vice president of an investment banking firm, he had been courting a potential client on the phone and developing a relationship over many months. When it came time to meet, Ferguson took his entire team, which included an older white man.
As they got off the elevator, the potential client went immediately to the white man, assuming that was Mark Ferguson, the V.P.
"Anytime something like that happens, it leaves you with a decision: Do I make this guy feel bad about this or do I just let him off the hook?" Ferguson said. "But this was a guy whose business I needed. So I let him off the hook. You have to learn not to sweat
certain things."
Hughes does the same thing when he gets what he calls "the reaction."
"It's the look you get when you first meet someone and you can tell they weren't expecting an African- American because of the way I talk," Hughes said. "And then I show up and you see the shock. It's a blink, a pause, a double take, a slack jaw. I've seen it all."
Hughes says he just moves right along, pretending it never happened.
Pinkett says he's gotten his share of "the reaction" and accepts it only to a point.
"Sometimes you have to call people on it," Pinkett said. "You can get lulled into saying 'Yes, sir' and 'No, sir' to everything, and it's a slippery slope. Because you keep doing it, and then you've sold your soul."
It is, he says, one of the toughest rules to master. Pinkett and Robinson, who were roommates at Rutgers in the early 1990s, have vague plans to write a book about it someday. In the meantime, the old roommates just talk about it among their own peer group.
"You'd think we would have moved past this stuff, because it's 2006, but we really haven't," Robinson said. "Sometimes I wonder, will it always be this way? Will it be like this for our kids?"
African-American men find themselves tested by stereotyping
Sunday, August 13, 2006
BY BRAD PARKSStar-Ledger Staff (New Jersey)
Don't stand too close. Don't talk too loud. Don't ever let your self get angry.
Be twice as courteous. Be three times as friendly. Make sure you dress better, too.
For African-American men in the corporate world, these are just some of what they loosely refer to as "the rules" -- a code of behavior they say applies to them much more so than anyone else, simply because of the color of their skin.
"There's a way all African- American males learn, particularly when we're in a professional environment, to modify our behavior," said Darryl Hughes, who lives in Neptune and works as corporate director for community and senior services at Meridian Health. "It's tone of voice, attitude, speaking style, dressing style. It's really our whole persona. We take measures not to be seen as the threatening black man."
It is, black men say, a fact of working life that hung on for decades after affirmative action began opening corporate doors to them, and that persists in an age when diversity training is a staple of the American workplace.
Because for as much as some things have changed, the image of the black male in America may be as bad as it has ever been: He is nearly seven times more likely to be incarcerated than a white male, twice as likely not to have earned a bachelor's degree, and nearly three times as likely to be unemployed.
And while black men in corporate settings are not described by those statistics -- they are law-abiding, well-educated and gain fully employed -- many still feel the need to compensate (and sometimes overcompensate) for them.
"You go out of your way not to fit the stereotypes, to say, 'Hey, we're not all like that,'" said Jeffrey Robinson, a business professor at New York University and a Piscataway resident. "I think about it all the time. We all do."
It's what leads to those small adjustments in daily behavior that, collectively, become "the rules." And many African-American men report following them: They smile more, so they don't seem angry. They avoid talking with their hands, to diminish their physical presence. They soften their voices. They dress up, even on casual Fridays.
It is, of course, difficult to characterize an entire subset of people in generalities that may not describe the experience of an individual. And just as there are black men who feel the conscious need to modulate their behavior, there are others who get along just fine by being themselves.
But one thing appears to be universal: Being a black man in the workplace comes with a set of issues that can never be ignored.
"Race always matters ... it just does," said Mark Ferguson, an investment banker who grew up in Newark's Baxter Terrace public housing project. "It's always in play for us."
GOING UP?
It is something that, for black men, finds its way into everything from the most important meetings to the smallest daily interactions.
There is, for example, what Albert McWilliams refers to as "the elevator thing."
McWilliams, the director of government relations for BASF and the former mayor of Plainfield, says he always goes out of his way to exchange pleasantries with co-workers in the elevator.
"You have to be extra-friendly or else you get viewed with suspicion," McWilliams said. "A black man cannot have the same rules of courtesy as a white man. You don't want to give people the impression you don't like them because they're white."
Then there's the other "elevator thing" many black men say they've experienced: when a white person, especially a white woman, moves farther away or clutches her purse tighter because a black man has entered the elevator.
"It's not unusual as a black male to feel you're threatening," said Ronald Barrett, a professor of psychology at Loyola-Marymount who is black and has studied African-American culture. "When you talk about darker skin color, different hairstyles and modes of dress, and certainly physical size, these are all factors known to increase white discomfort."
That's where "the rules" come in. They're about making others more comfortable. And there's a perception that those who know the rules -- and play by them -- have an easier time getting ahead in corporate America.
"People in my circle have really mastered it," said Randal Pinkett, a winner of Donald Trump's "Apprentice" and co-founder of BCT Partners in Newark. "We know the rules. We know how to play the game. We wouldn't have gotten where we are if we didn't."
IN THE SAND TRAP
The flip side can also be true: Not playing the game has a price.
Adrian Mapp, a Plainfield resident who is associate director in accounting at Bristol-Myers Squibb, says he's grateful for the opportunity his company has given him to support his family, but he describes himself as "stuck in middle management." And he notices that people who "look like me" are often stuck for the same reasons.
"When it comes to upward mobility, this is a relationship-driven organization. It's not necessarily your expertise that matters," Mapp said. "It's not that I don't have a good rapport with people in upper management. It just seems like either you're part of 'the group' or not. You're either going out and having drinks and going out on the golf course, or you're not. Well, I'm not a big golfer --I like the game, but I only started about five years ago. And when it comes to hanging out at bars after work, that's not something I'm going to do. I'm a family man."
Naturally, corporate game-playing is something germane to all races: No one is quite the same person in the corporate board room as they are in their own family room.
But some black men say they go off to those board rooms each day believing they have to conform to a higher standard.
"You're always conscious that you can never do anything off-line from what's expected," said Michael Washington, a Manalapan resident who is a technical analyst at Chubb. "You have to be in the top 100 percent of what's proper."
As McWilliams puts it: "The penalties for doing anything wrong are just far greater for African- Americans. If you garble grammar in a memo as a black person, people make certain assumptions about your education. If anyone else garbles grammar, it's just considered to be a typo. You have to pay attention to those little details or else it can hurt your career long term."
Yet, no matter where they find themselves on the corporate ladder, African-American men say race is a workplace issue they have to deal with in ways others don't.
"I don't think other groups spend as much mental energy on how they're being perceived," Hughes said. "Sometimes I wonder, am I being perceived as a valuable member of this organization who happens to be African-American? Or am I being perceived as a token so someone can say, 'Look, we got one'?"
It becomes an especially pressing issue when problems arise.
If a promotion is denied, an idea is ignored or a new client seems ill at ease, black men often find themselves wondering: Is it race?
"I'm always asking myself that," said Jeffrey Stokes, an operations manager for Public Service Enterprise Group. "When you have problems with people and they're not doing what you ask of them, in the back of your mind you're always saying, 'Is it because they're not understanding me? Or is it because I'm black?'"
CONSTANT DECISIONS
Answering that question in the affirmative leads to other issues, namely: What do you do about it? Let it slide? Make a scene?
Black men in this country have been dealing with this problem one way or another for hundreds of years, said Clement Price, a professor of history at Rutgers-Newark.
"Historically, people have seen the black man as the coward, the black fool, the minstrel character like Jim Crow who says 'Yessir' and 'Nossir,'" Price said. "But they have also seen the scary black man, the man of great strength and courage, someone like (boxer) Jack Johnson, who used to stick towels in his crotch to exaggerate the size of his manhood."
Most black men are somewhere in the middle -- neither Jim Crow nor Jack Johnson -- but they're constantly making decisions about where to fit within that spectrum, Price said.
Ferguson remembered a time when, as a vice president of an investment banking firm, he had been courting a potential client on the phone and developing a relationship over many months. When it came time to meet, Ferguson took his entire team, which included an older white man.
As they got off the elevator, the potential client went immediately to the white man, assuming that was Mark Ferguson, the V.P.
"Anytime something like that happens, it leaves you with a decision: Do I make this guy feel bad about this or do I just let him off the hook?" Ferguson said. "But this was a guy whose business I needed. So I let him off the hook. You have to learn not to sweat
certain things."
Hughes does the same thing when he gets what he calls "the reaction."
"It's the look you get when you first meet someone and you can tell they weren't expecting an African- American because of the way I talk," Hughes said. "And then I show up and you see the shock. It's a blink, a pause, a double take, a slack jaw. I've seen it all."
Hughes says he just moves right along, pretending it never happened.
Pinkett says he's gotten his share of "the reaction" and accepts it only to a point.
"Sometimes you have to call people on it," Pinkett said. "You can get lulled into saying 'Yes, sir' and 'No, sir' to everything, and it's a slippery slope. Because you keep doing it, and then you've sold your soul."
It is, he says, one of the toughest rules to master. Pinkett and Robinson, who were roommates at Rutgers in the early 1990s, have vague plans to write a book about it someday. In the meantime, the old roommates just talk about it among their own peer group.
"You'd think we would have moved past this stuff, because it's 2006, but we really haven't," Robinson said. "Sometimes I wonder, will it always be this way? Will it be like this for our kids?"
posted by ThePowerMovement at 8:56 PM
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