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Code Switch

My identity has always been tangled up in the fraught definitions of America’s racism, just as it was a few years later when I drove onto the world corporate headquarters campus nestled back in low, rolling New Jersey hills, along with thousands of other professionals. Like them, I was suited up and carrying a presentation for the day’s meetings. Unlike the others, I was black and female.

I shut off Smokey Robinson’s sweet crooning and took a minute to shape-shift into my oh-so-heavy white mask and to rehearse the code switching needed to get my ideas across to white colleagues. Then I walked briskly through the maze of corridors to my office.

It was 1977. My job managing part of the national marketing strategy for telephone companies’ business communications products was an ever-growing pile of assignments, most labeled URGENT or VERY URGENT, all due yesterday. That meant hammering out agreements with a team of engineers, lawyers, accountants, sales managers, and factories. The work was intense, but I was up to it. The real challenge was being respected as an equal in one of America’s largest companies, dominated by white males. Their normal old boy power was my mountain to climb.

But I was on it, as was my husband, Luther, who had gotten a Department of Defense job here in New Jersey after we fled that hellacious mess down south. At least up north in New Jersey people were more inclined to treat blacks fairly, which was some comfort. That didn’t include the police, who routinely made the news profiling men stopped for driving while black. At work the company’s legal compliance with affirmative action was an established procedure, though a human resources rep had called me about a form I’d turned in the first day at orientation. She had just one question, about my profile.

“Well, I mean, if it’s OK, can you tell me why you checked the racial category black at the bottom?” she asked. “I have to make sure it’s accurate for the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission report, is all. For the government, you know.”

“You are asking what race I am, is that it?”

“That’s not illegal, is it?”

I told her I marked black because I am black, and the form was correct.

“It’s just when I saw you, I didn’t think . . .” In a flurry of awkward thank-yous, she hung up.

At least she asked the gas attendant’s “What are you?” question with some respect.

When we started working in New Jersey last year, Luther and I made up our own continuing education program at home, because doing our work and keeping our noses clean was just the ante to get jobs like ours. To earn our seat at the table, we black first-generation college grads had to polish our facades and up our gamesmanship.

We inspected each other’s body language in the dining room while practicing presentations, editing out any Black English and mannerisms. During Sunday football Luther related quarterback calls and strategic blocking and tackling to being in the corporate game. “You’re dealing with power players. They don’t want to talk. They want to win,” he said.

We made plans and contingencies for our projects and practiced speaking in headlines. As I stood in the walk-in closet in my panty hose, Luther had me recite the headlines to use at work. “Just say what the problem is and the actions you recommend for fixing it. If they want details, they’ll ask. No chitchat.”

I read Dress for Success, ditched my Sears wardrobe, and bought tailored Pendleton suits. He taught me chess, poker, and Scrabble, so I understood how to think several moves ahead, not tip my hand, and maximize every play.

We even planned how we would sort the anytime, anywhere offensive race situations into which ones we had to let go and which to take on.

For instance, at an executive meeting atop a British bank tower with the Thames River in view, the client manning the tea trolley asked the man next to me how he liked his. “White and sweet, like we like our women?” He was the customer. I couldn’t call him out about race in the middle of making a deal if I wanted my job. But I did have to carry that insult back home in the pit of my stomach.

My business headshot.

There was the Atlanta company trainer who said if a customer refused to deal with my kind, even to the point of pushing me out a door as the trainer had done to me, the correct response was to go back to the office and send a white male back. I said I wouldn’t; the company had to back me up.

Or another time, a Swiss colleague at an international management dinner for twenty told nigger jokes our Denver coworker taught him. I pushed away my plate and walked out. After human resources got involved, he was made to apologize.

A corporate president was taken aback at the recommendation that more minorities be hired at top levels. “But then, we’d have to have special training so they could keep up,” he replied to us senior minorities on the diversity committee, oblivious that he was disparaging us to our faces.

My second job, learning to act like them and field their aggressions, though invisible to whites, was a burden I carried at the same time I did my paid job. In early days, I fought to keep my “acceptable” mask on in front of colleagues, some of whom talked over or ignored me. Later, I grew another persona, with corporate-speak rolling off my tongue, a thicker skin, and a practice of blocking and tackling people privately before my presentations so there was no ignoring me in meetings.

I thought my black executive in a white corporation card was working until a trusted black coworker called from payroll. “Hey,” she said. “Is your door closed?”

“Yep.” Settling in, I pulled out the bottom desk drawer and put my feet across its top, like a footstool. “What’s going on?”

She had some data I might be interested in, only if I agreed she didn’t tell me. The annual employee rankings for performance for my job title were in, alongside the new salaries and raises. My performance was ranked pretty high compared to my peers.

It was so great they recognized my contributions. “I’ll probably get a good raise,” I said.

“Well. Sort of,” she said. My pay and upcoming raise were way below those white men I ranked above.

I picked at the cuticle on my left index finger. “By how much?”

“Big money.” She couldn’t tell me everything, but that man who took two-hour lunches with the blonde secretary was ahead of me by maybe 20 percent. The one who didn’t do half the work I did. And wasn’t as good.

“What I want to know,” she said, “is what are you going to do about it?” There was a long pause. “I’m out, girlfriend. It’s your move.” She hung up.

I immediately thought about Daddy. How he put on his uniform before dawn every day and caught several buses to work, even in Buffalo blizzards. As soon as he got home, before he took his Lava soap bath, he’d drink a straight Four Roses whiskey. If his bosses had just pulled the same dirty deeds on him that mine were trying to pull now, he drank a second or third Four Roses. That, we knew, meant to watch out.

“I hate that damned job,” he’d say before he sat down to eat. After grace, if he pounded the table and hollered, we knew the damned DPs, as he called the European immigrants who owned the ornamental steel company where he welded, had somehow denied the recognition, title, or pay for the work he did, because he was black or because he married a white woman. Or they had used the word nigger, which Daddy said was the first thing they learned when they got off the boat.

That job had turned my father into a man who balled his rage up inside in order to keep working there, then brought it home to drink and go off on us. All he knew was it took his Four Roses to deal. All I knew was to stay out of his way when he drank it, if I didn’t want to somehow end up on the receiving end of his strap.

What was I going to do about my pay? Try not to turn into Daddy. It was thirty years later, and I wanted my due. Like everybody else at the office, I worked hard to move up and get paid, and I wanted to be paid fairly. If having my dream meant a continual game of whack-a-mole with white people popping up to stop my every move, I’d get my mallet out.

The day came when my boss came into my office and handed me a paper showing my raise and new salary. Had my friend not tipped me off, the amount might have looked good. But it was nowhere near that other guy’s old pay, even though the boss said I was highly rated and had done great work.

I thanked him pleasantly and said it was good he appreciated my work. “But, sorry,” I said, “I have to say—I’m not sure this level of pay represents what I contributed here.”

It was a big risk, but one Luther and I had agreed on. If the boss got mad, it could mean trouble for me, like intentionally impossible assignments, or being transferred to a dead-end group, or out the door on some false excuse. But where was my dignity if I didn’t ask for what should be mine?

My boss looked at me, his eyes dark. “It’s a good salary,” he said.

“But nowhere near what others in this group make; others rated lower than me, right?”

He asked me how I knew how much others made or where they were ranked.

“Because I know. Look, some people might think this discrepancy is not fair, if you know what I mean.” He knew I meant discriminatory. He sat down in my visitor’s chair, leaning toward me with his hands on his knees.

He asked me what I was saying.

“I want to be paid fairly, at the same level as the white men here.” I leaned in too, using a poker face and speaking slowly. “And paid more than those who don’t put out what I do. Can you please address this?” I had recited these exact headlines with Luther three different times in preparation for this moment.

But all the money had been distributed to employees and the payroll adjustments closed, the boss countered. The next raise would be a year from then.

I said the company could still make changes if they wanted to be equitable. “Can you see what can be done, please?” I tried not to look like that angry black woman white people are afraid of, using that layer of cultural camouflage I had learned to put on.

He nodded and went out. I tried to stop my foot patting wildly under the desk.

The next week he came in and handed me a paper stating that I was being given a significantly higher increase. Not as much as I wanted, but nothing to quibble about. I shook his hand and smiled. “Thank you very much. I appreciate what you did.” After that he found a number of ways to let me know how valuable I was to the team.

That was the moment I understood there was always room to negotiate, no matter how firmly an offer is stated. Throughout my career and personal transactions, negotiation has been a useful skill, something people from humble backgrounds like mine unfortunately don’t know or are afraid to try. But the price I’d paid to earn my place as a successful executive in a white corporation had worn me out. I was sick and tired of all that extra work to level the playing field. Filter. Hesitate. Pretend. Switch vocabularies. Point out inequities. Hide my pain and anger. Mask culturally natural responses. Decide which racial slight to let pass. Speak easily in well-modulated pleasantries with heedlessly entitled people.

In becoming a respected member of the team, I hadn’t seen how far I’d split myself. My white-coded executive persona switched off and on like a bad romance; on with the white business world, off with black friends and family. It was exhausting. Infuriating. I was losing my center.

I had even begun to meld whiteness with my personal life before I realized it. Following an opera broadcast on TV, Luther and I wanted to hear more of the dramatic melodies of the arias. Just as we went to see Broadway musicals and pop concerts in Manhattan, Luther bought a few Thursday-night performances of live opera at the Met in Lincoln Center.

We sat up in the dress circle, the only two blacks in sight, wearing our dark suits from work. A dozen starburst crystal chandeliers rose above the red seats and into the ceiling, hushing the murmuring audience. What a spectacle the elaborate costumes and sets created on a stage that split and sunk in sections.

When two hefty lovers sang duets in notes too high and too strong to imagine, Luther leaned over. “It’s my first time seeing such a big woman in a love story,” he whispered. Later I learned big divas often have amazing voices.

Opera was just one way Luther and I took in white culture, stepping outside our personal all-black box. We had plenty of activities with Luther’s family and members of our black church, but the older white couple next door became like family and a few colleagues became friends, sharing meals, advice, fix-its, and going to the Macy’s parade before a Thanksgiving dinner.

We had a good life. While very few blacks we knew associated with whites in their private life, we became sort of integrated, moving more naturally among whites. Sort of, because integration was a teeter-totter, bouncing up with the hope that we were accepted like everybody else, then dumped down in the dirt when whites jumped off their end and challenged our right to sit on our own neighborhood beach, or ignored Luther at the paint store counter to go in the back rather than wait on him in the midst of our half-finished dining room project.

The thing was, leaning into white culture had gotten to a point where I wondered if maybe I was selling out. Like fitting in and enjoying the other side diluted the blackness that always defined me. I had to get out of this halfway house and get back to me. But how?

A few months later, Luther and I plopped down on our den sofa to watch Roots, a groundbreaking show about a black American who traced his family to the slave ancestor captured from West Africa. Soon after, magazine articles and TV interviews galore featured all kinds of Americans who searched their roots. Each one swore filling in their family tree had made them sure of who they were.

That was it. My best anchor was to learn about my family too, the southern ones Daddy and Grandma talked about but I had never met. Knowing who I came from and the history that ran through me would plant my feet back on center. Maybe if I went down and spent time with them, I wouldn’t feel so lost.