Muna on The Apprentice

I haven't watched The Apprentice in ages, but I was flipping around the channels one night with my wife and realized that one of the contestants was Jamaican.

Not even a kinda-sorta-Jamaican, who has become so American that the Jamaican picee of her is lost.

No sah... Muna is the real article, with an accent and attitude that is ALL Yardie.

I am now watching the ninth episode online, in which she was fired and I recommend it to anyone who has ever come from the Caribbean to work in corporate America (less so Canada.) (Luckily for us, the entire episode in available online at this link -- thank you NBC!)

I'll admit, it is a bit difficult to watch, and that is just from my personal experience as a Jamaican who kept most of his accent even after spending 20 years working in the U.S.

Why so?

Basically, Muna was fired by Trump... because of her accent.

Was it her fault that she spoke so differently that she could not be understood clearly? She happened to be the only person on the show who spoke with even a mild accent, which says a lot about what it is like to work in the U.S. as a foreigner, where studies have shown that people with regional and foreign accents are thought to be less intelligent.

In an earlier post, I mentioned the very difficult choices that Jamaicans living in the U.S. have to make... to become, essentially, white American or Black American or ultra-ethnic Jamaican/Fringe?

When I arrived at Cornell as a freshman, I saw all three groups and limed with Jamaicans who had chosen to be in all three groups... although rarely at the same time. Their choices had a lot to do with when they came to the US, and whether or not they came to the U.S. in high school.

From what I could tell, those of us who came straight from Jamaica as freshmen were very different than those who came from Jamaica just a year earlier. Many of those who came earlier were under a threat- they either adapted or got beaten up, called "coconuts" or "bananas" or were mercilessly teased, harassed or assaulted by other students. They deliberately lost their accents to avoid being hurt -- and this was something that very few of them could explain to their parents, who themselves undergoing a major own culture shock.

Muna clearly chose the option of being "ultra-ethnic," and it showed on the show. She just did not fit in, much in the way that those friends of mine in U.S. high schools didn't fit in.

In the episode, she had a major acting role in a short video-taped advertisement put together by her team. It was a mistake, judging by the fact that her own team-mates could not follow her accent.

They let it slide, and they lost the challenge, only to be sent to the boardroom where she was fired.

Unfortunately, Muna was at a disadvantage -- she could not listen with U.S. ears. When she thought that something was amiss she asked her team point-blank if they could understand, and they (probably trying to be politically correct and not piss her off) did not answer...

The answer finally did come from the judges, who said that they could not understand her accent. They also told Trump that the responsibility to decide what to include in the video lay with the director, and not the actor.

In the end, however, Muna was fired when Trump put it to her team-mates and asked who they would like to keep in their team going forward. He pushed, and pushed, until they relented and chose the Project Manager, Christine, instead of her.

Did it matter that Muna was a sharp, Black, young, pretty, heavily-accented Jamaican?

And that her teammates were all (what seemed to me) to be older white women?

I suspect that most Jamaicans who have been there, and played of Muna in their U.S. companies would say "Yes" while others might disagree.

I read a book once that described how Black managers, directors and above learned to adopt the most agreeable personalities, to smile and accept all sorts of nonsense in order to further their careers. They tended to have superior social skills, much better than those of their white counterparts. They knew how to fit in, and be inoffensive to the point that they were often accused of being Oreos or roast breadfruits -- black on the outside, but white on the inside.

I thought this was theoretically interesting until I, as a young Black employee, did a quick mental inventory and realized that ALL the Black executives I knew at AT&T fit the description precisely and exactly.

Muna, to her credit, wasn't playing that game, and that was what got her fired.

At first, it seemed as if Trump was taking the judges recommendation to look at who should have been directing the video, and who had the final say about who would play which part in the taping. That decision was clearly Christine's -- the Project Manager.

That is, until a word slipped into the conversation in the boardroom that many Black professionals have heard before -- a word that often signifies trouble in white corporate America: "difficult."

It was interesting to watch -- all of a sudden, Muna was being "difficult."

The story changed -- she was "difficult" when she supposedly insisted that she play a lead role in front of the camera. She was "difficult" in other projects prior to the one at hand. She was also "less experienced," and the combination of the two meant the end of Muna as her two friends professed a newfound preference for firing her.

In a way, she was less experienced -- she obviously did not know what it takes to be a successful sharp, Black, young, pretty, heavily-accented Jamaican in white corporate America. They knew it, and she didn't.

My experience has been that when Blacks in the U.S. don't play the soothing, non-confrontational role they are expected to play in the corporate world, words like "difficult" and "inexperienced" are among the specific phrases that start to be used to describe them.

(Another phrase used is "not a team player" which is code language for "not like us." I can't recall hearing the phrase in this episode, but someone else can go back and listen to the other episodes ;-) )

While this may not be a case of racism (in the sense of racial bias,) it definitely is a case of cultural difference, and the dramatic firing might have been a shock to Muna, but it seemed to follow a well-worn sequence of events in which Blacks as smart as she is, end up on the outside looking in, wonder what the hell just happened.

My advice to Muna (meant to be heard with Jamaican ears:) "Mih luv... mek haste com bak home. We need people like you bad bad."