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The Invisible Executive
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20328 |
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BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
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6 / 1992 |
2,846 Words |
| Author
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Gerald Early
Gerald Early is professor of English and director of African
and Afro-American studies at Washington University in St.
Louis. He is the author of Tuxedo Junction: Essays on
American Culture and editor of My Soul's High Song: The
Collected Writings of Countee Cullen, Voice of the Harlem
Renaissance and Lure and Loathing: Essays on Race, Identity,
and the Ambivalence of Assimilation. |
THE COMPANY MAN
Brent Wade
Chapel Hill, N.C.: Algonquin Books, 1992
220 pp., $17.95
"The corridors of corporate America are teeming with highly trained Black men and women wandering trance-like through the monuments of commerce asking themselves, 'Who am I?' The 'Who am I' affliction is caused by the pervasive inequities of racism exhibited in the white corporate structure."
This passage is from black Chicago businessman Dempsey Travis' book Racism American Style: A Corporate Gift (Urban Research Press, 1991), which is largely composed of interviews with blacks who are in middle- and upper-management positions in some of America's leading corporations. The picture that Travis paints is not pretty: From being denied country club membership to enduring slights and insults at official social gatherings, from sacrificing their ethnicity in a vain attempt to get ahead in the "old boys' network" to being denied promotion on various flimsy pretexts, blacks in the corporate world live a precarious, and often decidedly uncomfortable, life near the top of the glass ceiling of middle management, beyond which they rarely ascend. The passage emphasizes precisely what is at risk for blacks in corporate America: namely, their identity. For the white corporate world, as does the dominant culture generally, sees the black as an alien, an outsider, regardless of the scope of his training or the intensity of his ambition. And the black, in response, is forced to see himself as alien as well, not only to the whites for whom and with whom he works, but also to himself as he tries to blend into a world that does not think he truly belongs.
It is this controversial yet dramatically rich subject of blacks "crossing over" to the exclusively white male world of the big-time corporation, a synecdoche of the larger historical phenomenon of black integration into the white world, that Brent Wade takes on in his first novel, Company Man. A first-person narrative, it describes the rise and fall of a black executive at a fictitious and fairly Byzantine corporation called Varitech. As one of the characters tells the novel's hero, William Covington, near the end, "Tell me something. I've wondered about this for a long time. Why do black people call you Billy and white people call you Bill?" This identity split signifies not only how blacks and whites see Covington differently but how he manipulates his identity so that he can be seen differently by each
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