Rather than focus on being the good black, blacks should focus on finding the right white.

When Black professionals enter the workplace, three patterns emerge.

First, some African-Americans recreate the Black Table in their careers. They seek out and only socialize with other Blacks in the office. Ultimately, this yearning for the Black Table is a foolhardy career strategy. African-Americans are only 12% of the population. And the percentage is even less in the professional classes. About 4.4% of lawyers are Black. The percentage of high ranking African-American executives in the Fortune 500 approaches 1%. So, yearning for the Black Table leaves much to be desired.

Second, other African-Americans take the opposite tack. They cut off all relations with other blacks. They refuse to return phone calls from job seekers. They provide no counsel about navigating office politics to newcomers. Some even deny they are black. I know of a black law professor who has the skin color of Oprah Winfrey. And yet this “black” law professor will deny that she is black and disassociates herself from African-American culture at every opportunity. We live in strange times. Passing as non-black, however, is spiritual death and guarantees one a life as a token.

And still others adopt the “Good Black” stance. They decide to be passive, to be seen and not heard. But creating relationships with others is essential to African-American career success. And so these “good blacks” come up short at evaluation time. No one knows them. No one can vouch for them.

If we put aside the lens of Critical Race Theory (race as destiny) and look at African-American careers with fresh eyes, we see that racism exists but relationships with the right whites matters far more.

What do I mean?

Back in the 1980s, George Davis and Glegg Watson wrote an insightful book, Black Life in Corporate America. In their book, Davis and Watson argued that black corporate men and women struggled to find a home in “foreign social space.” Reminiscent of Kenneth Frazier’s experience (a lawyer discussed in an earlier essay, "The Relationship Gap"), the book described rules, protocols, habits, manners, values and styles of thinking that placed black culture and consciousness at a disadvantage in the workplace.

In the most brilliant and underdeveloped part of their argument, Davis and Watson recount the story of a successful black corporate executive who entered management in the early 1960s. He grew up in a segregated, albeit middle-class, setting. As this pioneer remembered his first days at the company:

I saw the way they wanted things done, and I learned to do them that way. I encountered very little overt racism. I mean every once in a while I’d meet someone who I knew didn’t like me because I was black, and they didn’t think I should be there, but I could usually ignore that person.

The value of having friends in high places could be seen in his rise at the company. Someone high up in the company had hired him. As a result, he always received placement with a manager who didn’t mind having an African-American working for him. In fact, one of the managers told him that he had a godfather looking out for him. He didn’t know what that meant at first. Imagine the President of the company coming down personally to your section to see how you are doing as a young manager. It happened to this African-American. That he would receive fair treatment came from the top.

As his career progressed, this personal interest developed into a friendship. He received invitations to the president’s home. He played sports with the president’s son. The president’s son looked up to the rising manager as a role model, of sorts. The favored protégé always sat next to the head of the company and his spouse at formal events. The spouse would dance with the rising star. She chatted him up about the goings on at the company. While his official title remained non-descript, every conscious manager knew the young African-American was a golden boy.

When asked by Davis and Watson to explain why this friendship happened, the unidentified top manager said:

The president had been a millionaire ever since he was seventeen. His wife was a millionaire from the time her granddaddy was born — old Mayflower money, Boston Brahmin. These were people who weren’t threatened by the progress of a black man. That’s the difference. Back in the old days, the presidents and vice-presidents of most of these companies were people of wealth. They were from the American elite and so they were more secure.

There are lessons here for African-Americans. Rather than seek work with an Old Money firm where one would not be seen as a threat, blacks may choose to work under hard-driving executives new to money. These struggling supervisors and middle-managers fit the psychological profile of whites who would be “very threatened by blacks . . . [e]specially if the blacks [were] more qualified than [them].” Rather than focus on being the good black, blacks should focus on finding the right white.

This insight is supported by the career stories of Kenneth Frazier, Reginald Lewis, Colin Powell, and Condoleezza Rice. Frazier made partner at an Old Money Philadelphia firm, a firm populated by the grandsons and greatgrandsons of wealth. Frazier’s elevation to partner posed no threat to their sense of self. Lewis named a white guy from out of central casting as his company president. Lewis’ ascent did not disturb the social universe of Angstadt. President George W. Bush grew up in Old Money. As the son of a President and the grandson of a U.S. Senator, it is unremarkable that George W. would be the first President to nominate back-to-back African-Americans as Secretary of State.

African-American advancement is always greatest when aligned with the interests of Old Money and Old Families.

We see this theme time and time again in black history, whether it be the support of the Rockefeller family for Spelman College, Old Money President Theodore Roosevelt dining with Booker T. Washington in the White House to the consternation of the white press, or the support of Boston Brahmins for Edward Brooke as U.S. Senator in 1966 and 1972. That more African-Americans are not Republican says more about an inability to change thoughts than social reality.

When one is born into wealth, one has the psychological security to do the right thing. This is not to say that poor and working-class whites cannot be free of prejudice. But one will find few poor whites behind the most successful African-Americans. That is a corporate reality.

Earl Graves, publisher of Black Enterprise magazine, has written about the fortuitous start to his career as a Robert Kennedy staffer. Kennedy came into the world as a child of extreme wealth. Graves has remarked on Kennedy’s casual attitude towards power and money. Kennedy never carried a wallet or money clip. In the way of Old Money, money was just there. In turn, Graves benefited from watching Kennedy up close. How did he handle challenges? How did he deal with people? Because of his social standing, Kennedy felt no threat from the young Graves, a son of West Indian immigrants. There is every indication that Kennedy took Graves under his wing and nurtured his abilities and talents, a nurturing that the unidentified manager in Black Life in Corporate America and a young professor Rice would recognize. When Kennedy died, he left a rich network of acquaintances and contacts to sustain the young, ambitious Graves.

Like many other African-American success stories, Graves got his start working with Old Money.

I have witnessed this occurrence in my own career. The most unpleasant experiences have been work details under hard-driving new money types. However, as a law professor for three years, I served under a multimillionaire dean. The dean did not have to work for a living. He worked in order to give back to the community, a noble and honorable legacy. I felt well-treated under his regime and advanced in my career.

This intuition about the role of Old Money and wealth in black career advancement does not fit well into the Marxist idea that the poor — black and white — have more in common with each other than the rich. Some leftist scholars argue that racism is nothing more than a social fiction created by the privileged to divide those at the bottom who have a common economic interest.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

Why were the first three black U.S. Senators all Republicans? Why did the Bush family nurture African-Americans into real power positions at the highest reaches of government? Why did a special connection develop between the Rockefeller family and Spelman College? Why was the largest contributor to Doug Wilder’s gubernatorial campaign a white billionaire? Why did an Old Money heir leave his fortune to the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund, a bequest that paid Thurgood Marshall’s salary and made the Brown decision possible?

Eleanor Roosevelt articulated the best reason why Black Americans should seek out wealthy and Old Money mentors to spark their careers. In explaining why Americans should vote for Franklin Roosevelt rather than John Nance Garner, she said:

[Gardner] was a self-made man and in achieving success had become insensitive to the sufferings of others. He considered people in need of help failures and regarded all reform as a conspiracy to divest him of hard-won personally-achieved gains. The president, on the other hand, never having gone through bitter personal struggle to achieve wealth and prominence, had no such feelings about his possession and privileges. He was sensitive to privation and suffering and, once he understood, would go to the limit to change things; the problem was to get him to understand and see a situation.
– Old Money: The Mythology of America’s Upper Class by Nelson W. Aldrich, Jr., page 254.

When Frazier signed up for work at his Old Money firm, he had stumbled into the best possible environment for his career to catch fire. He didn’t know it at the time and nearly squandered the opportunity until another lawyer in the firm set him straight. I began my career at a high-charging firm filled with self-made men who had clawed their way to the top. Finley Kumble proved the worst possible place for my career to flourish as an African-American lawyer. That the firm would declare bankruptcy within 18 months drove the point home for me.

The influence of this Old Money principle can be found in every American city. Most black lawyers work for the government. They gave up on their firms and became victims of the relationship gap. However, even more telling is that the black lawyers who become partners are not evenly distributed in the ranks of law firms. One always finds a disproportionate percentage of black partners at the biggest firms in town compared to small and middle-sized firms. While some argue that prejudice explains the relative absence of African-American partners at small to medium size firms, there is a better answer. Larger firms are more likely to be populated by Old Money partners. Smaller firms are more likely start-ups and entrepreneurial “Hail-Marys.” Partners at these smaller firms are insecure and still remember the chill of their blue-collar upbringings. Quite frankly, they are most likely to feel threatened by a black Ivy League attorney. But place the same black attorney in an old-line firm like Covington & Burling or Hogan & Hartson and you have an environment where the powers that be are secure in themselves and want you to succeed if you can play the relationship game with the best of them.

And so the invisible hand of Old Money has, and continues, to ignite black careers. Seeking out Old Money mentors and patrons is just one strategy, one tool in the toolbox, for ambitious African-Americans.