PicoBlog

As the US has moved millions of workers back to in-person workplaces in the past year, I can’t help but think about the toxicity of workspaces. From everyday racist microaggressions to open sexual harassment, the pandemic remote workspace has been a respite from the mental wear-and-tear of experiencing in-person marginalization.

But for Black workers like me, it’s not just those who operate in white-male-ways on the job who will fill so many with dread as some remote work gradually phased out in 2022. Not much discussed but just as toxic is the Head Negro (or Head N-word) in Charge. This is the “there can be only one” Highlander movie-series-mentality of one Black man (usually) in a leading position in a corporation, at a university or nonprofit, or with a startup. Their insistence on being the smartest person in the room, of working hard to prevent other Black workers from advancing in their careers, or ensuring that they do not look bad in comparison to their Black reports. 

HNIC syndrome can just as easily create toxic working conditions, derail careers, and wreck a Black worker’s mental health as working in any white-led racist, sexist, and homophobic work environment. HNIC syndrome is just as toxic because the Black men in these roles have bought into tokenism, and the heavy doses of narcissism and insecurities that come with internalized racism. They so want to wield authority in the same ways as the white men they attempt to emulate and ingratiate with glad-handing, and regularly micromanage those Black folx unlucky enough to be their subordinates. It’s sick and sickening to experience and witness.

My own eclectic set of jobs introduced me to a range of HNIC types. As a 19-year-old summer intern at Mount Vernon, New York’s psychiatric clinic in 1989, my Black supervisor once yelled at me in front of the office staff, psychiatrists, and patients in the waiting room because I “made her look bad.” The crime? I showed up eight-minutes late for work that day. Three summers later, her Black boss, the director of the clinic, had me write up a ten-page report on my immediate supervisor because he “want[ed] that bitch gone. Us Black men need to stick together.” My PhD advisor Joe William Trotter, Jr. spent most of the four years we were together at Carnegie Mellon University between 1993 and 1997 “running interference” (as he called it) to keep me from publishing too many “non-scholarly articles” and from presenting my work “all over the country.” All because “other people” — meaning the white professors in the Department of History — “were watching.” 

Even moving forward, HNIC syndrome remained alive and well in predominantly white and Black spaces in my life. “How are you going to contribute to my vision?” That was the first question a one-time director of Africana Studies at the University of Pennsylvania asked me during a job interview in 2005. At the end of a five-hour interview for a director position at the United Negro College Fund in 2010, my would-be boss said, “You ask a lot of questions.” In his mind, I didn’t know how to make “tough decisions.”

The department chair at one of my universities has exhibited an obsequious kind of HNIC syndrome. For nearly 10 of my 15 years as an adjunct professor at this mostly online public Maryland university, he refused to promote me because my student evaluation average wasn’t high enough. My department chair’s clueless assessment was insulting and maddening. Anyone Black teaching mostly white students in a college setting may be well-respected, but most likely never be popular — unless one is truly an obsequious toad. The evaluations I have received from students who’ve expected better grades over the years and research on this issue bear this out. 

My supervisor’s heavy-handedness and interference in my grading have been other signs of his HNIC syndrome. More than once he has commanded me to change a student’s grade for submitting assignments well after the end of a semester. There were also the times in which I had to re-grade a plagiarized assignment, even when it was 100 percent in another author’s words. 

This Black man’s main concern over these years has been keeping his job, which has meant pleasing his bosses by keeping enrollment and course numbers up. To achieve his goal, it has meant riding adjuncts like me hard to “always be nice,” to “never demean students,” to “always be flexible.” All buzzwords for “I will never take your side” in any dispute with any student, and “don’t bring me no bad news.”

 I have asked myself over the years, What is it about me that has left me vulnerable to a string of petty and narcissistic wannabes? Is the sexual assault I suffered at six and the physical abuse I endured growing up written on my forehead? Is it my lack of in-crowd connections? Do they assume because of how I sound that they could get away with their abusive behavior? Maybe it is all of these? I’ve come to realize that none of this is about me, even though this and other kinds of the workplace abuses I’ve experienced are also very much about me. Black men in particular (even as I have also seen this play out with Black women in charge) who pursue any positions of authority with the bluster and gusto of white men are by nature narcissistic assholes. I could be the most well-adjusted Black man in history from a loving and nurturing family, and I would still have faced bullying and verbal abuse.

But predators, even the most obsequious, cover-my-ass type HNICs, recognize prey when they see prey, especially dangerous ones. Because of all I’ve gone through, because I seldom let bullshit that affects my psyche or my work slide, I am an elephant with long tusks and an even longer memory. Me as a Black man with a doctorate, still relatively young and energetic, still wanting more for myself and my family, and not beaten down to the point where I’m willing to swallow shit and smile at the same time, yeah, I can be dangerous.

And I have been dangerous. The report I wrote for my HNIC boss in 1992 was actually two reports. I handed him the version he wanted, and handed his boss, a Black man who was the head of Westchester County’s Community Mental Health services, the version that included his regular verbal abuse toward the office pool. He especially went after our head office administrator, saying she was “the dumbest person that I’ve ever worked with,” arguing with her in front of staff and patients while calling her a “bitch.” If I hadn’t known any better, I would’ve guessed the two had been involved prior to a breakup, and were using the office as a way to work out their frustrations over their relationship. I left that leap in logic out of both reports. Either way, my reports led to my HNIC boss’ firing, and the office administrator’s demotion and transfer to another clinic. Even at 22 years old, I knew how to use my memory and my tusks to gore those who would eat me.

Still, working with these HNIC types has left me worn out, burned out, depressed, and sometimes hoping for their early demise. They have all made “me wanna holler,” to quote Marvin Gaye. Take my advice. Choose your would-be bosses wisely, including those Black and male. Insecurities are always something to look for in any interview process. Any nabob who is insecure in his position is a potential killer, of mind, soul, and career. While I have succeeded and survived them all, despite them all, the damage they have done to me and so many others is real. To any of them HNIC enough to read this, I say “Eat me!” (figuratively speaking, of course).

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