Ed Dunn on “Who Screwing Who at the Workplace?”
Ed Dunn, the technical power behind Fooky.com, writes in his Blog about subjects that even rasx() avoids. In this latest Blog post (that you cannot leave comments for—or link to directly) “Who Screwing Who At the Workplace?,” at dreamandhustle.com Ed Dunn writes:
During my career, it seems every time I get a new job somewhere, I have to deal with mediocre co-workers and managers who want to assume they automatically superior to me because of titles and roles. Whatever. They love me at the interview and want me to start immediately but let me honest. The reason they want Ed Dunn over other candidates is based on the belief they can pay my Black ass less than my White counterparts and assume I have a dependency style loyalty because they think I need a job.
Super bad rasx() only hinted at this state of affairs in “Bryan Wilhite: An IT Fundamentalist Speaks”—these hints are sprinkled here and there but Ed Dunn goes straight for the jugular. You see, the way North American culture has responded to information technology is very strange to me. My approach to this career is very primal and has very few moving parts: people work together for the sake of the project and the ability to use the technology speaks for itself. However, there are a few real-world complications. The most prominent is that the technology may be speaking for itself but it does not mean that the people in charge are listening to the roots of the IT rock. Once these leaders (who traditionally of whiteness) stop listening then we enter a nether world ruled by white music.
Business people live in a world of perception management. When the divine numbers come out, these numbers might end up in an unholy accounting scandal. Here in the rasx() context, these deceptions date back to the days when Byzantine emperors put on magic shows for the barbarians of Northern Europe in order to scare them into submission with theatricality. My message to Ed Dunn is to not try to fight drama with drama—you are now fighting within their conceptual framework, locking yourself into boundaries of wood and Formica instead of Black stone under the Holy Water of heaven. However, let my words in no way suggest a formulaic solution to this problem.
You see, Black people in IT have a fundamental problem: we can offend the wrong people quite easily by showing them time and time again that we are of a markedly superior intelligence—but demonstrating intelligence is the life blood of real IT industry. We can’t use classic Negro techniques of “playing dumb” in order to survive—and simultaneously we must risk provoking the subconscious drive of survival that limits the imagination and distorts the perception of the white racist in denial. There is more than meets the bluest eye when I refuse to eat a fattening, toxic lunch, refuse to play hackysack, refuse to play that stupid-ass hockey-table game, etc. And, oh yeah, fuck twitter—to me twitter is a voluntary, self-surveillance program for children of divorce who crave any kind of attention. It is evidence that youth culture, as interpreted by dweebs over 30, is ruled by the deep psychological problems of aspiring Hollywood actors. It has no appeal whatsoever to a Black man who grew up under involuntary surveillance provided by the LAPD—this “cool app” starts at puberty, dude. Check today’s celebration in “Wi-Fi’s Chilling Effect on Crime.”
What is really sad is getting into a team-working situation where, say, Paul Sheriff (who is a staunch Orange-County-style conservative who is vehemently against H-1B visas), finds out you know something he does not. There are white guys out there who will drop the priorities of getting the project done for the sake of immediate business needs in order to reinforce a political ideology on which the core of their identity rests. Don’t go for that bullshit that patriotic engineers are “too practical” to write poetry. When the Sheriff gets together a posse of blind followers through a few Iago-style comments here and there, then every single mistake Brother Smarty Pants makes is blown out of proportion. What happens is that the self-described “white” IT guys are allowed to make plenty of “human” mistakes but any single mistake the “arrogant” Black guy makes is a major embarrassment and a long-term financial threat to the prosperity of the company. (What’s really strange about this is that this state of obvious injustice can make Brother Smarty Pants an even better IT professional—but it also threatens to drive Brother Smarty Pants insane as well—especially when “my people”—especially “my women” have no sympathies or understanding of what is happening to Brother Smarty Pants. Where you think all this money is coming from, baby?)
My experience shows me to avoid such open intellectual warfare because, brother, you will always be outnumbered and always outgunned. We need to understand the danger of creating a hard target for siege and attrition. Stick and move! Stick and move! And most importantly, in our effort to fight for justice, where there is no justice, we end up teaching an enemy. My recommendation is to publish often (not everything but just enough) and seek patents later. Instead of trying to win a case in a secret, non-court—publish for the public domain when all else fails. A Black investigation of Open Source culture is needed here. We need to check out how The Grateful Dead made they money by giving so much away “for free.” My instincts feel like we are not going to use any form of Black private property to “win” this shit. Blackness needs to get beyond imperial concepts of private property (as the solution for all problems) and back to the entire universe… Private property can be blown up—and who is the motherfucker with the biggest bombs? Stick and move! Stick and move! Has Ed Dunn tried to take his business international?
Also from a completely different angle, there is an unintended side effect of professors of Black history: by recounting in detail the oftentimes ingenious ways white oppressors ruled over the oppressed we teach an enemy, their children become our students in secret.
Ed Dunn is one of the major topics of discussion in episode 009 of AG Speaks (even though I had stupid trouble trying to remember his name during the interview). Ed Dunn is interviewed here in the kinté space.