Forget the Rat Race, It's All About the Hustle

By Celina R. De Leon, WireTap. Posted December 19, 2005.

Ever wonder what corporate America is really like? Well, besides how it looks in the boardroom of "The Apprentice," or when Martha Stewart is not writing you a letter to take home. Hadji J.S. Williams gives an insider's look into the walls of Chicago's marketing and advertising firms in, "Knock the Hustle: How to Save Your Job and Your Life From Corporate America," that reveals the harsh realities "reality TV" doesn't even come close to bringing to the screen.

Williams, a 13-year veteran, gives candid accounts with an urban, hip-hop edge, of his experiences as a Black man working in corporate America. You'll either nod with all too knowing agreement, or find yourself screeching "What?!" as you flip through page after page of real-life examples of insidious discrimination, and manipulation and corruption that are all too similar to the hustling he witnessed first-hand on the streets of the south side of Chicago. And the examples occur in every part of the office, from the water cooler to the boardroom; by fellow co-workers to high honcho executives.

But rather than leave you in debilitating despair or in a cynical funk, Williams actually provides concrete solutions to what he describes as being the wrong way to do business. Williams says there is hope, and encourages the reader, along with his students at the Columbia College of Chicago, to change corporate America from the inside out. AlterNet.org got a chance to speak with Williams on his book and "the hustle."

Can you break down what you mean by "the hustle"? Is it another phrase similar to "the rat race"?

The rat race is a part of it. But I guess the technical phrase for it would be just constructs -- putting people in boxes. Telling people you have to be a certain way, behave a certain way. It's kind of just mind games, really. Ethnic constructs, behavioral constructs -- if you don't behave in this type of way, don't look a certain way, don't carry yourself in a certain way, you don't count. It's really about manipulating people in the name of control and marginalization.

Do you think the motives behind taking part in "the hustle," or falling into the hustle of corporate America, are similar or different to the motives of hustles often associated with lower-income and/or urban settings?

I think part of it is the need to make money. But overall, the need we all have as human beings to want to fit in and be part of something bigger than ourselves. When someone tells you that you have to do this in order to fit in, it's your natural instinct or human nature, to want to fit in -- to want to belong to a group.

Your observation that the hustlers you met and witnessed on the streets of Chicago weren't very different from the hustlers you met in boardrooms in Chicago seems to be the backbone of the book. To quote you, "I saw pimps and hustlers in the streets just about every day. Once I began working with Fortune 500 clients and blue-chip brands, it was more of the same -- only at work the rules and the players were a little more sophisticated."

Yeah, that was something I found really amazing. My neighborhood, Chicago is really segregated. Most people tend to keep to themselves. I grew up on the south side. Young people never left. You know the phrase - 'They never left the block.' So everything I saw, I had to guess that something similar happened somewhere else. I had no other community or experience to compare it to.

It took me a while to figure it out when I entered the business world and saw people playing mind games. I was like, 'Wait a minute, that kind of looks familiar. The way this guy is trying to make this person work really late. You know what, you're kind of like a pimp.' They get a woman to think it's just you and her against everybody else.

And in the workplace, the only way you can get somebody to pledge allegiance to you is by getting that person to believe that everyone in that company is out to get you, but somehow your supervisor or boss is going to protect you. And that some day, when they climb the ladder, they're going to take you right along with them.

After a while, I would see that and think, the only difference between you and the guy on the street is, the guy on the street is a little darker. But I knew even from the street that the higher up you got on the food chain, the distributors -- they weren't black, Latino, Asian -- the higher up you went, the paler the skin color. Once I started seeing the parallels, I was like OK, now I can start figuring this out.

Celina R. De Leon is a social justice journalist based in Brooklyn, NY.

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