Black Magic

What Black Leaders Learned from Trauma and Triumph

Chad Sanders

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781982104238
• eBook ISBN: 9781982104245
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Science Biographies
• Index: Social Sciences

A "daring, urgent, and transformative" (Brené Brown, New York Times bestselling author of Dare to Lead ) exploration of Black achievement in a white world based on honest, provocative, and moving interviews with Black leaders, scientists, artists, activists, and champions. "I remember the day I realized I couldn't play a white guy as well as a white guy. It felt like a death sentence for my career." When Chad Sanders landed his first job in lily-white Silicon Valley, he quickly concluded that to be successful at work meant playing a certain social game. Each meeting was drenched in white slang and the privileged talk of international travel or folk concerts in San Francisco, which led Chad to believe he needed to emulate whiteness to be successful. So Chad changed. He changed his wardrobe, his behavior, his speech—everything that connected him with his Black identity.And while he finally felt included, he felt awful. So he decided to give up the charade. He reverted to the methods he learned at the dinner table, or at the Black Baptist church where he'd been raised, or at the concrete basketball courts, barbershops, and summertime cookouts. And it paid off. Chad began to land more exciting projects. He earned the respect of his colleagues. Accounting for this turnaround, Chad believes, was something he calls Black Magic, namely resilience, creativity, and confidence forged in his experience navigating America as a Black man. Black Magic has emboldened his every step since, leading him to wonder: Was he alone in this discovery? Were there others who felt the same?In "pulverizing, educational, and inspirational" (Shea Serrano, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Basketball (And Other Things) ) essays, Chad dives into his formative experiences to see if they might offer the possibility of discovering or honing this skill. He tests his theory by interviewing Black leaders across industries to get their take on Black Magic. The result is a revelatory and essential book. Black Magic explores Black experiences in predominantly white environments and demonstrates the risks of self-betrayal and the value of being yourself.

Chapter One HOME AND NEIGHBORHOOD

“In 1944 a sixteen-year-old Black student in Columbus, Ohio, won an essay contest on the theme ‘What to Do with Hitler after the War’ by submitting the single sentence, ‘Put him in a Black skin and let him live the rest of his life in America.’ ”

—Matthew Frye Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race

I don’t remember what I was wearing when I ran from my 250-square-foot apartment to Google’s mammoth Chelsea office, which took up an entire city block.

I probably had on cargo shorts to survive New York’s sweltering summer heat. Or maybe I wore them to look “Googly” in the office. I can’t say.

But I remember clearly stepping into the building and staring down the cold, sterile corridor at the elevators. My brain was paralyzed. I wanted to turn and run out and hide under the covers and call my friends and scroll the horrifying words and images on Black Twitter. Even that seemed better than what I would do instead: shuffle along, into and up the elevator to the fifteenth floor, where I’d be greeted by my oblivious colleagues with a shit-eating grin on my face.

The night before, George Zimmerman had been ruled not guilty of second-degree murder in the shooting death of seventeen-year-old Trayvon Martin, and I was not okay. I was full of grief and fear.

I did not feel Googly.

If my coworkers cared or could tell I was in pain, they didn’t show it. And I did just enough to make sure they couldn’t sense my anguish. I trudged through a micro-kitchen stocked with Greek yogurts and organic snacks to my cubicle. I asked my colleagues about significant others and babies and dogs who were all very important to them. They were as willing as ever to filibuster about these characters in their lives. A couple asked how I was doing. I knew the question was an empty gesture.

Good. Great. I’m fine. Whatever will check the box that we were done and let me get to my seat.

It seemed inhumane that I was expected to show up at work and send emails like any other day. I had seen the photos of Trayvon. That kid looked just like me. I wondered how my coworkers could look at me and not see him. But perhaps they couldn’t really see him and they couldn’t really see me.

Well, one of them could see me—Andrea Taylor. Dre was Stanford-educated, and light enough to pass for white, but she chose not to. She emerged at my cubicle with her hair in a big, curly bun.

“Come on, let’s go,” she said. I followed her.

Dre led me into an overly lit meeting room. She touched my hand, lightly.

“Chad, I can tell you’re not okay,” she said.

How could she tell if nobody else could? I’m almost sure I didn’t cry, because my mom had taught me since I was ten years old that Black folks weren’t allowed to cry at work.

The fear of death was on me. I thought I was hiding it well, but Andrea could smell it in a way none of my white colleagues could or cared to. Their apathy felt personal. Andrea’s comforting presence reassured me I was not alone, but icy loneliness was otherwise a common feeling for me in certain corporate environments.

Andrea sat there beside me, holding on to my arm. Maybe I yelled, maybe I just sat there. I really don’t remember. She knew why I was hurting but she let me tell her anyway. It wasn’t that an innocent kid was dead. It wasn’t that his killer was acquitted. I’d known as long as I’d known anything to expect such atrocities from this country, our home. That was on brand.

What hurt me was that I was expected to smile and drone and punch out mind-numbing emails and laugh at my coworkers’ corny jokes and affirm their experiences without receiving affirmation in return. I knew what Andrea was about to say. She was hurting too, but she processed the pain much more stoically. She gave me three minutes to be emotional. And then…

“Okay, Chad,” she said. “C’mon, we have to get back to work.”

I knew she was right. As two of the very few young Black people at Google, we both felt immense pressure to perform at the highest level. I couldn’t risk squandering my opportunity because of feelings. If I did, would the same opportunity be available for someone like me next year? Would I be able to support myself? The cost of trading time at my desk for time in the conference room, sorting myself, was too expensive.

And for those few minutes I spent in the conference room, I wanted to apologize to my father.

My dad is a tough guy. He’s a college athlete. He’s a lawyer. He was born in Detroit, in the 1950s. Growing up, he shared a bed with his older brother in the kitchen. His father was an army veteran with a sixth-grade education. During the 1967 Detroit riot, one of the deadliest in American history, my dad sat with his father in front of Grandaddy O’Neal’s small laundromat bearing shotguns in case the mostly Black rioters didn’t notice or care that their business was Black-owned.

When I was six years old my family moved up-county, from a small townhouse on the Maryland side of the D.C. border to a quaint cul-de-sac, and this, I think, made my dad keep a very close eye on my sister and me as well as our white neighbors.

We moved from a modestly sized brick townhouse to a single-family house with a two-car-garage. Our old neighborhood was diverse, with a number of Black and Latinx families. Our new neighborhood was mostly white. Our old neighbors were an eclectic mix of government employees, teachers, and laborers. Our new neighbors were more affluent white-collar professionals. We had moved on up. With its square lawns, tall trees, and general American Dream–iness, our new neighborhood resembled the gated community where Trayvon was murdered for being Black after the streetlights came on.

But what I saw, as a child, was a giant playground. I was six, the age where I wanted to explore on my own. I thought I would ride my tricycle down our street or trudge through backyards adjacent to ours, as freely as the white kids in our neighborhood did. My father knew better. Like Andrea at Google, he knew there was a different set of rules for me.

My dad was a hands-on father. Not in the physical sense—in fact I can’t remember ever being spanked by him. But he paid close and constant attention to my every movement. He coached my youth basketball games and was particularly firm with me compared to the other players’ parents. After every game and every practice from age six through fourteen, he would run through a list of detailed questions about specific plays and decisions I made. These intense discussions often felt like emotional interrogations.

But if I tried to slither out of the questions for a bathroom break, or hide behind my mother, he was always there, on the other side, waiting with fixed intention.

“Why didn’t you shoot the ball more? What did you see when you made this decision? Why are you passing the ball to James so much? Do you think he’s a better shooter than you?” he would say, plowing through one question to the next before I could answer.

Every discussion was followed by another—a meta-discussion on how basketball principles we explored related to life decisions.

“Every shot you pass up is a missed opportunity, Chad. What do you think happens to Black boys who grow up passing on opportunities in this world?” he asked.

It all felt very urgent. Everything felt urgent.

He approached my schoolwork with the same hovering fervor. We’d sit side by side at the dining room table every night, mowing through hours of homework, studying for tests, arguing, struggling, learning together. The white neighborhood kids would show up at the door and ring the bell to see if I could come out and play.

My dad would crack the door just enough for them to see me sitting there in front of a table covered in books and scattered papers. The white neighborhood kids would ask my dad if I could join them outside, and he’d quickly, gruffly, inform them that I was unavailable. Slam. Click. He’d shut the door, shaking the bottom two levels of our three-story house, then snap the lock closed. He wanted them, and me, to get the message that I would not be joining them anytime soon. Perhaps never, if that’s how long it took for me to finish my homework. At times, I felt trapped.

But I had my father in my house. Many of my Black friends didn’t.

As I grew, my high school coach took over my basketball training. Coach Pigrom was only thirty, a Black man who had played college ball at HBCU Hampton University. He was even more no-nonsense than my dad, but still my father hovered and pressed. He’d watch my basketball practices from the gymnasium window. He was the only dad who did that. When my teammates and I lined up on the baseline of the basketball court for sprints, a few would make jokes about my dad, who was always there watching. I was embarrassed, but I guessed that underneath their jokes was harmless envy. They loved to spend time hanging around my dad, maybe as a proxy for their own.

We’d pile into his Acura SUV on weekends and he’d drive us across the county to high school football games, teenage dance clubs, parties, and fairs. Five, six, seven of us Black teenagers would fold into the back of his car and rap along to Kanye West’s College Dropout album, which had just come out, or my dad’s favorite, Tupac. When we arrived at any destination, my dad would usually go inside to inspect the premises then sit out in the parking lot, watching the door.

I’d try to push him out of his watching. I wanted to assert myself as a man I’d yet become, and to me that meant I needed to get out from under my father’s supervision. Sometimes I’d sneak around after curfew to see girlfriends or go to parties. As I grew, I wondered what or who my dad was always on the lookout for. I’d find that out later.

When I turned fifteen, my dad realized that he couldn’t be everywhere I was, so he laid out very clear rules for my conduct in our upper-middle-class neighborhood.

• Always protect your freedom.
• No hats, du rags, or headwear of any kind in the car.
• Drive below the speed limit. If you get pulled over, put your hands where the police can see them. Don’t make hard eye contact with the officer. Address the officer respectfully as sir.
• You can play with white kids in the neighborhood, but don’t go in their houses.
• Don’t get your sense of self-worth from depictions of Black people in the news, popular music, or popular movies and television. They will destroy you.
• Avoid interactions with the police.

I bristled at these rules, but I followed them, like all the rules that came before. My dad never really yelled at me off the basketball court. He never had to. I knew that he wanted to protect me. I don’t know how I knew, but I just knew.

When I was in middle school, maybe twice a year, my dad would follow my school bus as it weaved between white neighborhoods picking up “Gifted and Talented” kids to take cross-county to our public school. The shrewdest preteens recognized I was insecure about being a Black kid who lived in a nice neighborhood with attentive parents, because that way of being ran counter to stereotypes. So they needled me when they saw me sweating over my dad’s “overprotective” hawking eye.

“Hey dude, isn’t that your dad? What’s he doing?” one of the white kids would always ask, loud enough to catch the other kids’ attention—and shame me. I’d shrink lower into one of the green leather seats of those big yellow buses and clutch my black JanSport backpack. I’d pull out my three-ring binder and busy myself with extra credit math problems to take my mind off of my humiliation. Then I’d peek around the side of one of those big stiff seats, out of the bus’s wide back window and we’d make quick eye contact, my dad and I. I’d sneer. He would just smile back at me.

This one time, Trevor Willock, the cool kid with slicked hair whose father had divorced and married much younger, blurted out:

“Does your dad think the bus driver’s gonna forget where our school is? What the hell is he doing back there?”

The coolest among us had started cursing by then. I wish I’d known the answer to his question. I do now. If I could go back, I’d give my twelve-year-old self the answer so he could spit it at Trevor.

“He’s protecting me, Trevor. From being Emmett Till or Trayvon Martin or some other little memorialized Black boy. He’s protecting me for as long as he possibly can, before it’s out of his control,” I’d have said. Instead, that day, I just squirmed deeper into the green leather seat.

I’m not sure if my dad clocked all my eye-rolling and sighing back then, but I know for certain he ignored me if he did. He was determined to fulfill the most important duty of fatherhood. He was on a mission to keep his Black son alive.

The danger my dad was always defending against came in many forms, some of them confusing. It could be a white woman walking her dog off leash in the park; it could be a racist neighbor overzealously playing out his American hero fantasies with a gun; it could be a cop who woke up on the wrong side of the bed. Whatever the danger, my dad was committed to keeping me under his supervision until I was mature enough and savvy enough to protect myself.

My father protected me by enforcing an elaborate set of rules. A decade later in a Google conference room, Andrea did the same thing, in her own way. She knew that what I needed, even if just for a few minutes, was to be seen. I needed for a moment to have my humanity affirmed. I needed to be with another Black person who understood the emotions boiling inside me; to nod and give me permission to be broken for a moment. And then I needed her to look me in the eye and tell me to get back to work. She provided me the safety to cry at work, but only for a moment in private. Because she knew, like my dad, that regardless of my feelings, my fears, and the danger I faced every day, that I needed to get back to that desk and do my job just like I needed to get on that bus every day and go to school and learn. Because my life and my livelihood depended on it, as well as the life and livelihood of the next Black person to come after me.

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While my father seemed to focus on rules that maintained my family’s physical safety, my mother pushed my sister and me to strategize and achieve. This was her way of giving us financial safety. She taught us the importance of education, corporate advancement, and earning as ways for us as Black people to protect ourselves down the line from misinformation, financial predators, and unexpected disasters. The four of us—mom, dad, sister, brother—sat down for dinner as a family nearly every weeknight in that three-story house on the cul-de-sac. My parents took turns cooking while my sister and I set the table and listened to Stevie Wonder playing in the background. My late maternal grandfather’s paintings adorned the yellow walls of the kitchen. He was a lieutenant colonel in the army and a Vietnam veteran. His paintings depicted people alone with nature. A bullfighter awaiting a charging bull. A camper alone beside a bonfire at night in the woods.

The television was always off. My Xbox was unplugged for the night so I wouldn’t try to rush through a meal to get back to it. A ringing house phone went unanswered. Door-to-door salespeople stopped coming at dinnertime, because my father warded them off. Before an unsuspecting Jehovah’s Witness or Cutco knife salesman could even open his mouth, my dad would make waste of him.

“We don’t want any and if you keep coming back here it’s going to be a problem,” he said before the guy got a word of his spiel out.

My parents protected dinnertime because it was their chance to listen to us, and to teach us who we were and where we came from, before the outside world could force its Eurocentric perspective into our developing minds. And that sort of enrichment required a high level of insulation and focus from all four of us. No distractions.

My mom was an executive at Verizon for most of my childhood, and she ran our kitchen like her boardroom. Dinnertime was regimented. Each time we sat down at our rectangular wooden table, we’d first say grace together. We took turns speaking to God on the family’s behalf at each sitting. Then, my mom would recount the activities of the day at her Fortune 500 employer. By twelve I was familiar with rebrands, layoffs, mergers and acquisitions, initial public offerings, stock options, office politics, and the unstated rules of corporate culture. My mom engaged us in these conversatio...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Introduction
• How to Read This Book
• Chapter One: Home and Neighborhood
• Chapter Two: Grade School: Gifted and Talented Programs, Private School, and Separation
• Chapter Three: College: HBCUs, PWIs, and Higher Learning
• Chapter Four: Work
• Chapter Five: Spirit: Church, God, and Faith
• Believe It or Not
• Acknowledgments
• About the Author
• Copyright