How I Write “Black” for Brands. Hire Me to Find Out.

Around seven years ago, companies started paying for AAVE points. That’s weird.

The only one in the room who talks like you *and* you.

I’m reading a book called Black Buck by Mateo Askaripour that’s rightly brilliant. It’s about a young Black man named Darren Vender who lives in Brooklyn with his mother after graduating at the top of his class from a specialized high school. Rather than going off to college and meeting the expectations that come with high achievement, Darren decides he’ll keep it simple and work at Starbucks. He is an A-1 employee who runs a team of misfits, a few of them older, to peak coffee-slinging performance. But it’s obviously not his calling. Darren’s failure to launch might be a result of his close relationship with his mother, a widow whose gleam is gone but for the presence of her son, or it might be his need to stay humble and not outpace the people in the area where he grew up. No matter the reason, he’s not satisfying his potential and that truth hangs over his head and the story until he meets Rhett.

Rhett’s the charming white co-founder of a nebulous startup company called Sumwun that alleges it can help companies boost productivity by assigning “assistants” to employees. The assistants are untrained therapists. Rhett woos Darren away from barista life with the promise of money, status, and, of…