Three Decades of Segregation
Gosh, some white people are stupid (full disclosure: I am very white).
I got the gospel of Robert Anton Wilson very early, a writer on comedy, consciousness, and the occult, who pointed out that all demographic categories (Black, Jew, gay, hippie, straight) are so huge that no blanket statements about them have any truth value at all - so therefore the only way to deal with other humans is one-on-one from a presupposition of equality.
This was endlessly handy in my thirty years in New York City, because I had otherwise no fucking idea how to "interact with Blacks in the workspace" at all, due to the profoundly segregated nature of American society.
As a computer programmer, there were perhaps a dozen Black people I knew to talk to in an office during that time. I worked on a team with a Black person zero times. I had a Black boss zero times. Around 1987 I worked for the investment bank Drexel Burnham Lambert where the talented [redacted] was a Black American who headed a very successful team — in hindsight I would call him white-identified, for example, he only listened to classical music.
A couple of years later I interviewed at Bankers Trust, with a brilliant, ultra-high-energy Black woman named Marilyn Dix (spelling might be a little wrong, it’s been a long time). She was very highly-placed, if I recall correctly a managing director. A few years later I asked what had happened to her, and I was told that she had "not fit in with the corporate culture". I was still pretty ignorant back then, but I still felt a flash of rage.
Now, I was playing music and acting a lot during that time and I met Black people, made actual friends with, worked with, got stoned with, even argued with. If you can't have a good argument with someone then you aren't actually people to each other.
Both music and acting are studiously antiracist fields, at least in New York City — I literally can't remember one musician or actor I met during that time who didn't at least try to be completely egalitarian and avoid all racial bullshit (or at least, try to appear to be that way). That's a big deal.
But in my workplace, it was a lot of whites and Jews and almost no one else.
Fast forward over two decades of no black people. In the naughties, at Google, I knew a couple of Black people to talk to, but I never had a beer with any of them, and I can't name even one Black manager there.
Startups — no Blacks. Consulting — no Blacks. Cryptocurrencies — whiter than Maine.
And that's it. So that "dozen" number from above is bullshit. The number is about six. I can name three. It’s pathetic. In thirty years. I can very likely name three hundred white co-workers during that time. (Yes, I do have a fancy memory, and where's that $5 I lent you during the Reagan administration?)
At some point in the 90s they promoted Chinese and Indian humans to full personhood and they started appearing at all levels. That was mighty white of them.
You know, it just makes me angry. Fuck this shit.
This was a response to another Medium article. Thanks for letting me vent, The Only Black Guy In the Office, and if you ever need a place to stay in Amsterdam, drop me a line.
