Remember when Google dropped this Black History Month commercial in 2020?
That’s what honoring Black history looks like, telling the truth loudly, not sanitizing it when it makes people uncomfortable.
Happy Black History Month.
Last quarter I rolled out Microsoft Copilot to 4,000 employees.
$30 per seat per month.
$1.4 million annually.
I called it "digital transformation."
The board loved that phrase.
They approved it in eleven minutes.
No one asked what it would actually do.
Including me.
I told everyone it would "10x productivity."
That's not a real number.
But it sounds like one.
HR asked how we'd measure the 10x.
I said we'd "leverage analytics dashboards."
They stopped asking.
Three months later I checked the usage reports.
47 people had opened it.
12 had used it more than once.
One of them was me.
I used it to summarize an email I could have read in 30 seconds.
It took 45 seconds.
Plus the time it took to fix the hallucinations.
But I called it a "pilot success."
Success means the pilot didn't visibly fail.
The CFO asked about ROI.
I showed him a graph.
The graph went up and to the right.
It measured "AI enablement."
I made that metric up.
He nodded approvingly.
We're "AI-enabled" now.
I don't know what that means.
But it's in our investor deck.
A senior developer asked why we didn't use Claude or ChatGPT.
I said we needed "enterprise-grade security."
He asked what that meant.
I said "compliance."
He asked which compliance.
I said "all of them."
He looked skeptical.
I scheduled him for a "career development conversation."
He stopped asking questions.
Microsoft sent a case study team.
They wanted to feature us as a success story.
I told them we "saved 40,000 hours."
I calculated that number by multiplying employees by a number I made up.
They didn't verify it.
They never do.
Now we're on Microsoft's website.
"Global enterprise achieves 40,000 hours of productivity gains with Copilot."
The CEO shared it on LinkedIn.
He got 3,000 likes.
He's never used Copilot.
None of the executives have.
We have an exemption.
"Strategic focus requires minimal digital distraction."
I wrote that policy.
The licenses renew next month.
I'm requesting an expansion.
5,000 more seats.
We haven't used the first 4,000.
But this time we'll "drive adoption."
Adoption means mandatory training.
Training means a 45-minute webinar no one watches.
But completion will be tracked.
Completion is a metric.
Metrics go in dashboards.
Dashboards go in board presentations.
Board presentations get me promoted.
I'll be SVP by Q3.
I still don't know what Copilot does.
But I know what it's for.
It's for showing we're "investing in AI."
Investment means spending.
Spending means commitment.
Commitment means we're serious about the future.
The future is whatever I say it is.
As long as the graph goes up and to the right.
And in her very last race, Shelly-Ann Fraser-Pryce literally passes the baton to the next generation of Jamaican sprints.
Thank you, Shelly 🫶🏾 for making us all believe that the impossible is possible.
Uncle Nearest CEO Fawn Weaver is asking customers to “keep clearing the shelves” as she aims to clear up “fake news” that she no longer owns the whisky brand:
“Let me be clear. I built this company, I own this company, I run this company.”
This thing of politically segregating Afro-Americans and Afro-Caribbeans away from the African continental body politic is NEVER going to end well. This is not a statement born out of Pan-Africanist sentiment, but a simple cold, hard political fact.
If you argue that African Americans are somehow "less" African than say, Ghanaians because someone forcefully renamed their ancestor and took them away from Cape Coast in the 1800s, while the typical Ghanaian may be able to trace his ancestry back to the 1600s in Bolgatanga, then how far can you stretch this artificial division?
Let's say Kweku Asare Mensah, a 3rd generation American immigrant of Ghanaian descent who is culturally African-American, and no longer has any living ties to Ghana decides to leave the U.S. to discover his roots in Ghana. What is he then? Is he an African-American coloniser who is there to oppress the natives with his US dollars? Or is he a long-lost son of Ghana who has finally come home? And if he is the latter, then why does that apply to him and not to Antoine Green Jnr. from Jacksonville, Florida who wants to do the same thing?
Where is the arbitrary historical cutoff point between the 1800s and the 1900s where an African in the diaspora stopped having a right to return to Africa? Why should Joshua Oludare have a right to be in Africa, but Teyshawn Jenkins - who looks just like Joshua and has DNA test results showing that he and Joshua may be distant cousins - is somehow "not" African? Are we saying that the transactions that took place among slave dealers at Ebute Meta, Ouidah, Cape Coast and Okrika 300 years ago still determine who is or is not African in the 21st century? Because a white man decided to call Teyshaun's ancestor "Toby" in 1785, that means we are still doing so in 2025? Do you see the giant, gaping, obvious problem here?
This is precisely why anyone with solid research grounding in African Development has made it clear that political separation of Africans is, has always been, and can only be a very bad idea. If African Americans wish to build communities in Ghana, it is the same as any other group of Africans doing the same thing. If it makes your hackles rise reflexively, you REALLY have to question yourself - why are you more concerned about the descendants of enslaved Africans returning to Africa than you are about the descendants of those who enslaved them actively trying to create white ethnostates and racially exclusive communities across Africa? Which one bothers you more? Which one should bother you more?
Colonial programming affects all of us, including those of us who think we are intelligent and have broken through the matrix, so there's no harm in questioning yourself and making a shameful discovery. Think of it as auditing your mental source code and deleting redundant bits of code that could lead to a bug.