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THE 15 PERCENT DIFFERENCE
I think many whites, including (ironically) even liberal whites, donât get that even though our experiences as black people can be 85 percent the same as white people, some days that 15 percent difference is the only difference we feel.1 Technically much of this book will apply to any worker regardless of race, but that 15 percent difference for blacks is going to put just a little bit of a spin on the rest of our day.
For example, applying for a job is applying for a jobâno matter what your color or race, you need to fill out an application or submit a resume and go through some formalized process to actually get the job offer. But at some point, there are those 15 percent issues that put just a little twist on our experience. For example, if the receptionist who takes your application has had bad experiences with blacks, your resume may end up at the bottom of the pile, meaning you never even get the interview. Therefore, that 15 percent can be the difference between you getting through the door or not or the difference between you being happy or miserable once you get through that door.
This book aims to do a couple of things. One is to address the 85 percent commonality, and two is to give you helpful advice, tips, and perspective for when that 15 percent pops up. I know that many times just knowing that Iâm not alone is enough to get me through an experience or put perspective on a puzzling situation.
If you are called to be a street sweeper, sweep streets even as Michelangelo painted, or Beethoven composed music, or Shakespeare wrote poetry. Sweep streets so well that all the hosts of heaven and earth will pause to say, âHere lived a great street sweeper who did his job well.â
Notice that King didnât say if youâre called to be a doctor, lawyer, or chemical engineer. King said a street sweeper because he knew that it was a humble job but one that still required heart to do it well. Iâd like to think that one of Kingâs points was that the struggle for equality was not just for black Americans to get the best jobs in our society but rather for each of us to get any job or opportunity in our society that was best suited to our individual dream.
Maybe thatâs why it is easier to be a black civil rights attorney than a black tax attorney in a large, white law firm, or maybe itâs easier to be a teacher in an inner-city school district rather than the headmaster at a hoity-toity East Coast school. But each person has the right to deal with that 15 percent difference however he or she chooses. Maybe the black tax attorney gets her rocks off from calculating tax exemptions for the wealthy. Maybe the black headmaster loves a more extravagant lifestyle than a public school salary can offer. Therefore, when these 15 percent issues come up, it may all be worth it. It should be, because none of us can avoid it anyway.
Let me repeat: none of us can avoid it anyway. No matter what path you choose, if another person can look at you and tell youâre black, that will mold your experience with that person from that point forward. Notice I didnât say it will negatively mold it, just that it will.
Do You Instinctively Aim to Survive, Strive, or Thrive?
My observation, from thirty years of working, eight years of practicing employment law, and several years of being a diversity expert, remains that black folks have roughly one of three instinctive agendas in the workplace. And this delineation is true whether weâre talking minimum wage, blue-collar, just plain-ol'-shirt-on-your-back-when-you-go-to-work-in-the-morning-collar, or white-collar professional.2
Working while black requires you to have a mental awareness, a psychological game plan, so to speak. Youâve got to know if youâre in it just to survive, if youâre in it to strive to get ahead, or if youâre in it to thrive, be your natural brown self, and make the white folks move to your rhythm instead of constantly having to adapt to theirs.
There is no particular mentality that is best for every black person. Every job change, every career choice, and maybe even every change in supervision might force you to make a drastic shift in whether youâre in the game to survive, to strive, or to thrive; however, no matter what your initial motivation or instinct, you can always choose to be a driver, creating your own destiny.
Iâve created these categories based on my experiences in the working world. For me, there is no value judgment attached to being in the workplace as a survivor, a striver, or a thriver. Weâve all been visitors to each place at some point in our working careers. Some people settle into the lifelong comfort zone of being survivors. Some people were ambitious from the first step they took as toddlers, so they will be diehard strivers. Other people come out of the womb pushing their mamaâs limits, and those thrivers spend the rest of their lives doing the same to everyone else as well.
A survivor is there for the paycheck and lives his or her work life like a duck floating on smooth waters. Someone who is trying to survive wants to stay under the radar. His goal is to not draw attention to himself or do anything other than work, collect the paycheck, and get out the door when the clock strikes whenever. Survivors do not like negative attention. They do not like positive attention. They donât like any attention and are indifferent to the desire to distinguish themselves.
There is a black woman Iâve known all of my adult life. Sheâs been my mentor, my boss, my guide, my lookout, my savior, and always my friend. Years before I knew I would become a lawyer or write a book (or even believed I could do either), she was the original person to teach me by example how to be a survivor, a striver, and the ultimate thriver. Now sheâs in her late fifties, and she has one of the best descriptions I can think of for what it is to be in the workplace on the survivor agenda. As she puts it now, âYou get to the point where youâre just in it for the health insurance.â
Being a survivor as a black person in the workplace can mean different things to different people at different points in their lives. Itâs the person who knows this particular boss canât stand her and is looking for any excuse to eliminate her job. Itâs the person who is working the only job he can find that pays more than five dollars an hour because he has a family to support. Itâs the person who has put his thirty years in and knows heâs gone as far as he is going to get in an organization before retirement hits.
A striver likes the radar screen. She wants to be on it, but only if itâs a good thing. If sheâs lucky, she aims to run the radar screen one day, even if no black employee in the history of her workplace has ever done it before. The black striver wants acclaim, promotions, and success. She wants to play the game because she believes she can win. She doesnât mind hearing about glass ceilings because, in her mind, glass can be broken. She sees to the top and doesnât care if she bumps her head or gets scraped on the climb.
A striver is one who believes that the system works and believes that benefits come by following the system. Look at newly minted black college graduatesâthat is probably where you are going to see the prototype of a striver. Strivers believe that an education, a plan, and pure, raw ambition will make the difference. These folks strive forward, strive to the top, strive to get a huge slice of what their parents may not necessarily have had a shot at.
The thriver is the black person who not only dances to his or her own beat but also creates his or her own rhythm. Thrivers donât care about the radar screen because they figure it was invented to track other people anyway, not them. Thrivers are the ones who are going to dress the way they want and talk the way they want; it is not an option for them to get in by trying to fit in.
Thrivers are easy to spot. The thriver is the black person who puts the white folks either a little or a lot on edge. White bosses assume (sometimes mistakenly, sometimes not) that if any black employee might file a complaint or sue them, it will be the thriver. Of course, bosses donât refer to them as thriversâmore likely theyâre called âtroublemakersâ or âthe mouthy onesâ or âthe ones with an attitude problem.â A thriver may just be the person referred to by name with an accompanying eye roll. Success for the thriver isnât necessarily the goal the way it is for a striver, although some are quite successful. Some are loud. Others are offbeat. The truly lucky ones work at places where they are not perceived as loud or different or ghetto or crazy or troublemakers or any of the other negative labels that often get attached to blacks who operate by their own internal agendas.
My woman friend whom I mentioned earlier as an example of someone in the survivor mode as she cruises toward the next stage of her life was an unabashed thriver when I first met her fifteen years ago. She was the person who taught me how to have a âFâk You Fundâ at all times so that if your employer ever tripped too hard, you could say âFâk you,â quit without a job, and have a three-month cushion to find a job where you wonât get disrespected. I canât say Iâve always had a fund that size, but I did inherit the attitude.
The Proof Is in the Pudding
Being black in America isnât simple, and going to work every day as a black person is not for the fainthearted. A few years ago, I made up a saying. It is a silly, nonsensical expression that I liked, and itâs stuck with a few friends: âThe proof is in the pudding, not the pudding mix.â That was my standard way of saying look to someoneâs results, not just what she says about how she is going to get the results. Being black in America isnât simple, but it is simple to constantly evaluate your circumstances to make sure youâre achieving what you want. Thatâs the puddingâcoming up with a work experience that makes you feel happy and successful. Unless you are rich, work for yourself, or are a homemaker, you have to work for someone else. Letâs face it, even if you work for yourself or you work for other blacks, you still need to figure out how to deal with whites in the work context, whether youâre dealing with customers, clients, vendors, employees, the governmentâyou name it. The proof is in the pudding, not the pudding mix.
This book doesnât provide fill-in-the-blank answers. (I wish I had those kinds of answers because I could have used them myself over the years.) This book attempts to ask good questions, outline common-sense scenarios, and provide real-life solutions. My division between blacks on whether they are in it to survive, strive, or thrive is by no means definitive. Itâs just a shorthand way of explaining the different approaches that black employees take when managing the workplace jungle.
A white male friend of mine recently talked about a mutual friend of ours who is a white woman and disabled. She has been in a wheelchair her entire adult life. My male friend commented that in terms of life difficulties, it is probably harder for our friend than for those faced with racial discrimination because her limitations are physical. I pointed out that in some ways itâs probably the opposite, because ultimately, as difficult as her situation is, no one is going to argue with her about whether she can go up stairs or through a door. Her disability is a physical fact, so she doesnât have to explain or doubt herself. Ultimately, no one blames her for being upset if she canât enter a building or use a bathroom. When youâre talking limitations relating to race, you never know whatâs really going on (unless a person uses the n-word, which is something even the stupidest white person knows not to do in public anymore). Sometimes you can feel resistance, insensitivity, or futility, but you canât see it or prove it. The existence of a physical limitation doesnât have to be explained. When a person is blind, for example, and walks into another person accidentally, no one speculates whether the person is just clumsy or has a defective cane. But if black people say they received bad service at a restaurant because of their race, some white people usually rush in to offer their own bad experiences at the same restaurant or speculate that maybe the server might have been having a bad day. My point is not that it is better to be physically disabled than black (and I wonât touch on the difficulties of being both), but that to be black in working white America is to have your experiences constantly negated and challenged by whites who canât, or donât want to, understand. Part of this understanding is to remember that if the average black person is wrong some of the time when he says race is an issue, then that means some of the time heâs right. If there is anything more stressful to a black person than sensing something is about race when you canât really know for sure, itâs having a white person act like youâre blameworthy to even consider whether race is an issue.
If youâre a reasonable person, you know that just because you feel something is off does not necessarily mean that it is about race. But sometimes you just donât know. Again, that 15 percent factor constantly creeps up.
Most of the time, you never really know. Hopefully, what you get from reading this book is the comfort of knowing that it is OK to not always know. And on those occasions when you wonder, questions are good, because the path to finding out what you need to know can be as useful as the answer you come up with.
The advice-giving books (also known as âself-helpâ and âhow-toâ) still leap off the shelves. We all want to know the exact steps to take to make our lives better. I know Iâve bought several dozen in my life on how to lose weight, gain a relationship, obtain a job, unload a bad habit, and more. Iâm a particular fan of the âComplete Idiotâ and âFor Dummiesâ guides. A relative of mine used to tease me for buying those books, saying he refused to buy a book that said he was an idiot. I explained that he missed the point. The purpose of a good self-help book is to take you back to yourself and the beginning of your knowledge about something. Itâs not that any of us is an idiot or stupid about anything. Essentially, weâre all to some degree ignorant, innocent, or naive about some aspect of our lives.
A baby struggles to breathe on day one and then gets that skill down pat. Then walking becomes the skill to master, then riding a bike. At some point the baby, now an adult, learns to drive a car. In other words, life is a series of lessons to find ways to propel ourselves forward.
Again, the bottom line does end up being about not allowing yourself to be a victim even when others try to engage in victimizing behavior. Thatâs why while almost all blacks may instinctively operate from the gut level of being survivors, strivers, or thrivers, ultimately, what we should all aim to be are driversâ drivers of our lives, our career paths, and our destinies. Whether you run a forklift or you run the financial division of a Fortune 500 company, you want to be the driving force behind how you got where you are, the nature of your experiences while you are there, and whether you want to continue to stay or move forward to something else.
The thing to remember is that all black employees deal with that 15 percent difference, and it can be some comfort to know youâre not alone. The key is how you choose to deal with it.
The 15 Percent Difference Today
That 15 percent difference is that feeling, that gut instinct that you usually canât support with facts, that makes you think that being black is a source of contention in your workplace. Maybe itâs a difference in how you feel your supervisors treat you compared to your coworkers who arenât black. Maybe itâs the subtle comments that your coworkers make about things at work or in the news that put you on red alert. Maybe itâs the decisions that top management make over and over again that give the impression that your being black will be a detriment to your upward mobility.
Whether itâs based on fact or fear or itâs a carryover from the last three jobs you worked where it was an issue, itâs a difference that haunts you and permeates everything you do in a way that probably only another black person can really get. Thatâs why during a good period or under a particularly good employer, that difference may feel like 2 percent, while during a really rocky period where there is no trust for the people you work with or for, that difference can feel like 80 percent.
Never was that difference more profoundly felt, most likely, for any black employee in Corporate America than when Senator Barack Obama ran for president. If it didnât start when he announced his candidacy, it probably kicked in when he won the Iowa caucus and there was a collective feeling of, âOh my God, a black man is being taken seriously in running for president? Hey now!â
Even though Obamaâs campaign technically had nothing to do with the jobs of most black Americans, it in fact had everything to do with them. Thatâs part of what that 15 percent difference is aboutâhaving anything majo...