Kwame's Take on Corporate America
Though he just missed a chance at a $250,000 job with Trump, hear why he thinks he's successful at navigating through the ranks of corporate America
By Kenneth Meeks
 Kwame Jackson had one reason for leaving Goldman Sachs to pursue an apprenticeship under Donald Trump: “I have my whole life to be ordinary and only a few moments in my life to be extraordinary.” During weeks of living in a fishbowl for the world to critique, Jackson, an investment manager and the only black male on The Apprentice, hurdled over obstacles that he hopes shows just how extraordinary a man he can be.
“This isn't my first time at this,” Jackson, 30, says. “I've always been that one black kid … I've gotten used to it. I've learned to wear the mask; I've learned to interact. I've learned to be myself, but, at the same time, I've learned how to move among the crowd. So for me, going on the show wasn't any different. It isn't like there were a billion African Americans running around at Goldman Sachs and on Wall Street. For me, being around an all-Caucasian cast was nothing new.
“I'm very much from the Huxtable background,” says Jackson of his middle-class upbringing in Charlotte, North Carolina by his stepfather, a doctor, and his mother, a CPA. He says the bigger adjustment was for his white counterparts who had never met anyone like him. Jackson was someone they couldn't pigeonhole as either the black guy raised in isolation from the rest of the black community-and, therefore, comfortable to be around-or the militant, threatening black man who no one can get along with. His fellow would-be apprentices couldn't quite put him in a box because-yes-he is athletic, but he's also intelligent, funny, and has been around white people before.
“The cast had to spend time getting comfortable with me,” Jackson explains. “I didn't have a lot of direct African American-versus-majority issues, and if I did, they were things that I've dealt with so many times in my life that they were easy. Someone would say something like, 'Hey, we have to go Kwame, why are you brushing your hair? You don't have to brush your hair.' ”
Anytime this happened on the set, Kwame just moved on, never feeling compelled to be the lone black “ambassador” who teaches white America about why we put grease in our hair. Everything he needed to move ahead on the show, Jackson says, he learned in kindergarten.
“That's important for African American professionals because we all have chips on our shoulders from the baggage of being an African American dealing with the corporate world,” he asserts. “These are people who don't look like me, don't interact like me, they don't know anything about me or my history, and they don't value it.”
Yet, despite it all, Jackson says it pays to get along with them, asserting that it doesn't mean he has to lose himself or compromise his values. “But if you hammer people over the head enough [with your blackness], you're going to turn people off and people aren't going to want to work with you, and then they will be quick to label you. That's one of the biggest lessons; it pays to get along-to be a team player and build relationships without compromising yourself.”
And while Kwame didn't win the chance to become Trump's apprentice, most would agree that his future is bright.
For more lessons learned from The Apprentice, pick up the May issue of BLACK ENTERPRISE, on newsstands April 20.
04/16/04 |
