my experience, the African people are immensely forgiving. They have forgiven the indignities that they suffered in recent times. To encourage the kind of attitude of fervent desire for reparation suggested here would go against the grain, certainly among Africans, because it is not in their nature.’ 1
— Lucius Cary, 15th Viscount Falkland (1996)
‘Good guys finish last’, ‘the good die young’, ‘the good pay for the meals but never close the deals’. Why? Because the good are full of compassion. Anyone trying to get higher up the food chain has to let their compassion slide and embrace moral ambiguity. At least on a temporary basis.
If there is one thing black people are better endowed with than anyone else (remove your head from the sewer of stereotype), it is compassion – and its cousins empathy, sympathy, kindness, concern, consideration and benevolence. ‘I-forgives-him-lawd-ism’.
The White Man called it correctly: black people are especially giving and forgiving … to just about everyone (with the notable occasional exception of each other).
I learned early on that, for me as a black professional, in order to rise through the ranks and really attain power, I had to leave that legendary, world-renowned, all-too-profitable (for others), very black brand of compassion at home. And I needed to adopt the most ruthless of mindsets possible: the mindset of the White Man who would tear your cheek from your face before he even considered turning his one first.
In order to get to the top (the real top, the White Man top), you have to exhibit a degree of cut-throat determination (which may figuratively, and sometimes even literally, necessitate the cutting of a few throats – although let’s be clear, this book does not advocate murder or attempted murder, not even manslaughter). Every collective ever to taste greatness and every group of people ever to rise to power have one thing in common: they are a pack of absolute bastards, with a long trail of victims ready to attest to this fact. And the reason for this is that compassion is the mortal enemy of progression.
Ask the Scots about the English, the Poles about the Germans and the Native Americans about the pilgrims. Ask the black South Africans about the white South Africans, the Gazelles about the Lions. Ask the Chinese about the Japanese, the Vietnamese about the Chinese. Ask the African Americans about the European Americans. Go and ask Africans about the Europeans (and the Arabs). And, as we have already noted, ask just about everyone about the British.
The history of human prosperity and progression is a history of the merciless exploitation of one person or people by another. Where there is great prosperity there is usually compassion-free flagrant atrocity and a really great public relations officer working overtime to gently perfume away the stench of shit.
Compassion is out of the question and out of the window. There is no alternative model.
Appearance Is Everything
Even though you are aiming to be a compassion-free morally bankrupt opportunist, you still need to exude the appearance of compassion.
You don’t get to David Cameron (beneficiary of slavers),2 Nicholas Sarkozy (beneficiary of dictators)3 and Silvio Berlusconi (benefactor of underage ‘prostitutes’)4 levels of extreme success and power with a heart or head full of compassion for others. You get to that level by being able to create the impression that you have a head and heart full of compassion for others. You get to that level by doing what you have to do for you, no matter the cost to others. The trick is making it feel like you’re doing it for them, even when you’re often doing it to them.
The perfect example of faux compassion is the British Empire. Why do people still want to align themselves with it today given its history of clear brutality? Three reasons:
• White supremacist brutality never prevails, because when it does it’s not called white supremacist brutality. It is called ‘you should be grateful we taught your kind to speak English’.
• The British Empire was much better at long-term public relations as a result of the fact that they became the global establishment.
• In the scorching true words of the late great moderate white of words, George Orwell: ‘niggers don’t count’.5
No matter what shenanigans and criminality it may have embarked on, Britain has always cloaked itself (and marketed itself) in the translucent cloth of philanthropy and humanitarianism, prospectively and retrospectively (even if that means destroying all evidence to the contrary).6 If you speak to the average Briton today, regardless of skin tone – vanilla, ox red strawberry ice cream, redbone, café au lait, mocha or even Nero Milano hot chocolate – they will often tell you that Britain only did great things in, say, Africa. What is even more bizarre is that Africans themselves bestow honours on Britain for their own subjugation and debasement.7
Like America in Iraq and Afghanistan, Russia in Crimea and Syria, and any number of white women in marriages with black football players, Britain was, of course, in Africa to do well as opposed to do good. But the genius of Britain is that it managed to convince both itself and its victims, the coloniser and the colonised, that it was a heroic and benevolent ‘world power’, i.e. White Daddy.
If this proves anything, it proves that public relations matter. You have to manage and manipulate your image and the overall narrative. You have to make people love you, even as you’re robbing, killing and castrating them. Always make them think that even when you’re being a bastard it’s for their own good.
This was true of Empire, it is true of the corporate empire, it’s true of exploitative white women,8 and it is true of you if you want to go places. You may be a bastard. But you must look, feel and sound as lovable as Ronald McDonald … even though in reality you are little more than an artery-clogging corporate whore.
Victimhood
Victimhood:
• Perhaps the only ‘hood’ the White Man doesn’t want to see you in.
• The only ‘hood’ white people will never gentrify.
• One of the enduring pet hates of white people when it comes to black people.
‘How bloody dare this uppity negro have the sheer audacity to feel like a victim just because I missold her a sub-prime mortgage, plunged her into financial ruin9 and then deported her to Jamaica “in error”?’10
No matter what life (i.e. white people) may have thrown at you and, no doubt, what it will throw at you, you better not feel sorry for yourself. You better not feel like a victim. Don’t worry. Be merry. Or else.
Sadly, to avoid becoming a victim, you have to be ready to make victims of others, kind of like a prison bully in the shower. And making victims of others is where things get even trickier.
Black people have no problem making victims of each other. It is the basis of the multi-billion-dollar gangsta rap industry as well as the private prisons industry (two industries which may or may not have a reciprocal relationship).
Black-on-black one-upmanship is as simple as eating hot chocolate cake in the middle of a break-up or evoking ‘black-on-black crime’ on Fox News. When black people are required to perform the same squalid manoeuvres in white spaces against white people? We’re quick to back down.
There are many reasons for this, but here is a critical one: there
