I am the only black employee at my job. I work with an all-white staff. For many reasons this has been difficult for me. For one the lack of identification has been a real challenge for me as I do not see myself reflected in any of the people that I work with. My values, beliefs, traditions, customs, principles, culture and diet are just that, MY OWN! They are not shared or even celebrated. They are merely tolerated in an attempt to avoid civil litigation.
The clients that I serve are predominately black. I can tell my clients appreciate having a black person on the team as they take pride in seeing themselves represented within professional spaces. This does not happen often especially in the field that I work in. As a social worker, this field has been traditionally white and traditionally female-dominated. Very rarely do you see a black man in this profession. When my clients see that I am the one offering treatment, a form of kinship and community arises in their hearts. For many of them my presence alone has been a solid intervention. I believe this is because I give them a reason to dream again and for this I am grateful.
In many ways my culture and lived experience offers me an advantage when working with my clients of color. Truth be told I think my white coworkers resent me for this. They resent the rapport that I have with the clients as well as the respect they have for me. Many of my clients lack respect for my coworkers because deep down inside they know that my coworkers are not genuine. They lack an empathy, an understanding and a genuineness necessary to build trust, rapport and provide effective treatment.
I feel like my lived experience offers me a level of empathy, understanding and sincerity that is lacking in my coworkers. Truth is my experience looks a lot like the experience of the clients I serve as I come from a background of poverty, abuse, neglect, addiction and trauma, the same background that most of them come from. In my work I am able to use my experience as a tool to effect change and instill hope in the clients I serve. As I continue to do my own healing work, I am able to offer new tools and insights to clients who may have experienced similar trials and tribulations. My white co-workers hate me for this as this is an acquired privilege in which they don’t have access to. This is a world in which they are not centered. Though they might try and insert themselves by either magnifying minor slights or manufacturing meager pain, truth is they do not understand the nuanced pain that comes from personal experience, namely the experience of living as a black person in a white-centered world. In this respect I am privileged and my coworkers hate me for it.
In an effort to deal with their covert jealousy and resentment, they recreate a world within the office that brings them back into main focus and centers their experience over that of myself and the clients. Often times they will share stories of various trips or exotic adventures that they have partaken in hoping to bar me from the conversation. I get the sneaking suspicion that they get a cheap thrill out of talking about things they feel I know nothing about. It feeds their inherited thirst for superiority and supremacy. Being the only black person at the office, they assume that I have not done the things that they speak of and truth is they would be right. I have never eaten massaged kale or explored the glass bridges of some strange new city or engaged in rail biking in small towns. Hell, the only rail I know of is the one that you avoid on the subway if ever you should fall on the train tracks. I am from New York City and growing up, I didn’t have access to those experiences. Survival was my main focus. Everything else took a back seat. Although my coworkers do not fully know about my upbringing, they reason that because I am black I haven’t done half of what they have and truth is, they would be right although in many ways such implicit bias is insulting and disheartening to say the very least. Fact is white privilege has afforded them access to various opportunities as well as access to both adventure and exploration. Often times as a black man living in racist white America, the very nature of my freedom is a threat, something that warrants a gravestone and so I do not always have the courage and the confidence to try new and exciting things. The freedom of exploration could literally cost me my life as these days living while black is a crime punishable by death. Knowing this they often congregate together and discuss various trips while I sit on the sideline wondering if they know I know the passive aggressive game that they are playing.
I realize that on an unconscious level their coded behavior is proof positive of their deep-seated insecurities and overall discomfort with the acquired privilege that comes with my lived experienced. They make it their aim to try and reclaim center stage and it is painfully obvious. I have realized that many white people in general have a bad habit of colonizing spaces and asserting dominance as opposed to fostering a sense of unity and cooperation. Seizing spaces is in their blood. They often times view the experiences of others as inferior and only listen as an act of charitable courtesy. This perceived generosity is what helps to assuage and sanitize their guilt. They do not realize the diversity of wealth that comes from a trauma history. As the only black employee working with an all-white staff, it is hard to explain this fact. Instead I just smile as an umbrella in this rainstorm of diseased perception and bias. It is not my job to educate them on their sordid history and fact is, they wouldn’t care anyway because anything that cast them in a less than flattering light, they reject. We can attribute that to low ego strength as a result of being sheltered and insulated from the realities of human suffering. True for some not for all.
The reality is this: there is a privilege in my lived experience that often times incites the jealousy of those I work with. I cannot help this and nor do I want to. That is for them to manage. It is my job to assert my experiences, take pride in my experiences, celebrate my experiences and continue to use them as fuel to not only feed my own light but the dying light inside of others as well. For this I am grateful.
