Barackface: Tracey Denton Of DFNYC
Barackface: DL21C Events: High Class Acts
Barackface: An Open Letter To Elizabeth Caputo
I think I am taking a cue from my Facebook friend Matt Damon and going Hispanic. The racial skin ceiling is proving a little too much for me. The chances of Hillary breaking the glass ceiling are greater than me breaking the skin ceiling, I think. Skin wall, skin ceiling, skin floor. There's skin all over the place.
Carrie was the editor of the college newspaper when I was SGA President. She first published a demonizing, racist article by someone that essentially called me a rapist. That someone succeeded me as SGA President: attacks work. The woman in question was Jewish, summer flame. My introduction to racism in America was a package deal: anti-Semitism was part and parcel of it. A few months later Carrie published an article by a guy who urged all girls who get boinked by me to go public with the information. 10 years later Carrie emailed me out of the blue, her first email to me ever. She was at a Buddhist monastery in Colorado. I was more than welcome to join her, she said. A Russian friend Olesya once called me a "sex bombino." Once in a while she shows up on Yahoo Messenger from Moscow. Political office can do strange and wonderful things to your image. You become vocabulary.
Among many white Kentucky conspiracies, sending me off to New York City might have been one. I am having to start from scratch.
I blogged a paragraph about Good White People Living In The Asian Century. Not long after the Chinese went public with PetroChina, world's first trillion dollar company.
Women are relational. Men are instrumental. That is the hardwiring. That is why women enjoy shopping so much. They are weaving into the social fabric when shopping. Women also thus have a third eye for the social reality, the us and them, the silos. They are aware white guys will love them for sending them out to protect the boundaries, something like that. That is one way to create social space, especially white guys who are not WASP. Romney calling Obama Osama was him trying to figure out how to get into this white thing.
There is a concrete difference between someone who makes 100K and someone who makes 50K. The difference is 50K. That is money. Power works the same way. Having internet access, and not having internet access. If you can smell the contours, power is as concrete as money.
The software loop/bug of an organization that performs a few basic functions: will you join, will you not join, will you come, will you not come, can you come, can you not come.
There's the spider organization and there's the starfish organization. Spider is hierarchy. That's all the big companies in NYC. Starfish is the Al Qaeda, the Wikipedia. The Apache Indians who fought the Spanish for centuries, they were a starfish organization.
Gabriel Garcia Marquez locked himself up for 19 months or so and wrote One Hundred Years Of Solitude. I came to NYC to launch a company but instead found myself giving two years of a zombie existence to Nepal: best work I ever did. There is a social price to be paid for that. I paid. You are socially absent at the time, and you have weak social muscles in the aftermath. You build.
What do you do? Where do you live? Standard questions.
It gets exotic. Like watching a coral reef. Watching the social reality in motion. There's the observation part. There's the analysis part. There's the action and participation part.
There are three obvious Harvard people on the Manhattan political scene. Dave Pollak, Elizabeth Caputo, and Justin Krebs. They all liked me at first sight, before I found out where they went to school. It felt very similar each time. And I am thinking I must be some kind of a good looking guy.
I sometimes wonder about smarts. Are some people biologically smarter, or have they just read more books? How does that work? I mean, I know it is both. But even if everyone had books, are some people still biologically smarter? Am I one? Can you see that on my face? My eyes?
I am long past the age of worrying about who went to college where.
I was the top student at the top school in Nepal, a top country, but that was before the Bahuns and the British got me. Nuru was number two. He went to Harvard.
It is possible Pollak, Caputo, and Krebs mistook me for Harvard people. Caputo's first question was, "Where did you go to school?" But I would like to stick to the good looks theory. Makes me feel better during this oncoming recession.
I will compare my Nepal and Obama work to anything Pollak, Caputo, and Krebs might have done. I am okay in the self esteem department.
Some day I would like to make corporate use of Pollak. McAuliffe did that a lot while working for the party for "free."
There is a reason all the top names in tech are college dropouts. Ellison could not have worked his way up IBM. He was in his 30s when he launched Oracle. One wife of his dumped him for a Harvard MBA. He claims his first wife left him because he did not work at all. His second wife left him because he worked too hard. After his third divorce, he called up his first wife and asked, "How does this work?"
Middle and upper middle income mindsets can not fathom the early stages of big money mindset. Ellison is proof. He went ahead and bought a boat and that sent his first wife into therapy. She decided it was between insanity and divorce.
At some level you could say I am both a high school and a college dropout, mentally, emotionally. After high school I launched a national political party. At Berea, I was still there after year one for the room, the food, the internet access - T1 - and the library. Going to class was a price I was willing to pay.
Faith, Family, Work, Health
Zone 3/The Blue Zone: Positive, Creative Group Dynamics.
If you are in the blue zone, the green zone people look exotic, the brown zone people look exotic. But to the brown zone and the green zone people, you look like you are part of some hierarchy, usually one where they are above and you are below.
Spider organization people are kind of like green zone people. They think hierarchy. The culture clash is very real.
My young company is both, spider and starfish. Ultimately when everyone everywhere is online, everyone is potentially an Apache Indian. But the institutions of society, of power and money, will not go away. They will change for the better. They will become more transparent, more agile. But many of their outlines will remain.
If you love New York City like I do, and if your target audience is the Global South, your career goes online.
5.0 With Manhattan Organizations
In The News
Giuliani banks on Florida to spring back into race
Clinton goes national, Obama looks to lock in South Carolina AFP
Daschle: Bill Clinton's comments about Obama are not 'presidential'
