Flippant remarks about “Join the FBI’s Cyber Team”
There are future Condoleezza-Rice-people in the United States right now—and some of them are male—and some of these males are crushing in the world of hacking. Such folk—some of whom (with no self-generated irony) will call themselves “black” without, of course, a disciplined definition of Black—in stark contrast to their discipline in the world of silicon-based technology. <img alt="Join the FBI’s Cyber Team" src="https://farm9.staticflickr.com/8636/16094331919_d12ec35e27_m_d.jpg" style="float:right;margin:16px;>
Clearly the marketing department of the FBI knows how to attract these brothers with the photograph in an advertisement that was emailed to me at the beginning of this year. The brother posed in the photo—our “Special Agent (Cyber)”—is flanked on the right (including his political right) by two pretty Bond girls: one looks like a sister-in-law of Kayne West and the other reminds me of the Ukrainian Amazon honeys featured in the documentary Love Me.
When I began my IT career I also assumed that my daily professional life would be frequently punctuated with scenes like the fantasy in the photo. I assumed that I would have to refuse such cross-cultural advances and have to make a Black-heroic effort to remain ‘culturally sound’—ha! I was wrong. (At least one of the mothers of my children will go to her grave never accepting this as true.)
Most of the office ladies I’ve encountered in my IT space with the not-so-super model looks were not prepared to meet the concept of me—let alone me—(and too many of them were not IT technical). Many of them reminded me of how an earnest child reacts when they bump into a big strange man in the stereotypical supermarket—lots of staring and taking extra care. I’m not blaming these ladies—I was supposed to compensate for the gulf of unfamiliarity between us and turn on the ebullient, high-energy patriarchal charm—right, my player brothers? Too many young Black men don’t think about what can go wrong when heroically and often unilaterally crossing a cultural gulf―especially to innocent children involved in the sexual diplomacy. And it is too easy to see what will definitely go wrong when blindly going for what we know.
Any-who, the next time I get an email from an IT recruiter, telling me about a job in Virginia, I’ll think about this fake-ass photo with its international, brain-draining flair.