I want white people to read the book and do some serious self-examination and ask themselves what my role is in the narrative of this book. Examine that role with ruthlessness, with honesty and courage, and ask what I can do to help with the advancement of progress?

Touché. I was browsing the web for info about Mateo Askaripour's debut novel Black Buck when I stumbled into those words by the author on BKReader, and here I am: not only am I a white woman, but a European one—that is, probably the last person on Earth entitled to a commentary on the book. Also, I should add that I never had a corporate job, let alone in sales—which makes me the worst person to comment on the book, but the best to learn from it.

But it's not a marketing lesson that I got from Black Buck. What we know following the rollercoaster of Darren/Buck’s life—a valedictorian working at a Starbucks—is that you cannot escape your own fate; and that your own fate is reflected into your actions but is shaped from your thoughts into your mind, and nothing can outrun it, no matter how high or low you get in your life. Buck's predestination is to learn and to pass along his knowledge. He does so with the people that cross his path in the perfect narrative arc of the novel; proposing a sort of flipped cautionary tale to the reader; and with highlighted bits of theory of sales flashing along through the pages, breaking the readers' suspension of disbelief by making them feeling more and more engaged and dragging them deeper in the action.

Reader: Believing that you can somehow prevent change is the surest way to fail. Whether in life or sales, nothing ever stays the same.

Askaripour's love for absurd and satire lands hard on the post-Millennial supposedly post-racial start-up universe and their monopoly on fake diversity and inclusion. In a game of reversed Chinese boxes, we discover a metafictional memoir, which is a novel, which is written by someone the same age as the main character who worked as a Director of Sales in a tech startup before—the same way we see the change and evolution into the man's name, from Darren to Buck, to Black Buck, appropriating a racial slur by embodying its stereotype to create a massive sensation and a real cultural revolution.

It’s like my urban-corner-philosopher-cum-fairy-god-uncle Wally Cat used to say, “You can change the hands of a clock, but you can’t change time.” I can give you the tools to change, but only you can change yourself.

The result is a corporate golpe made by an army of misfits, underrepresented and people from minorities—set up in a worldwide network of trainers and trainees—disrupting with their talent the preeminent companies’ Marketing offices—to the point that a white sales supremacist force arises to confront them.

Was it all worth it?
Reader: You tell me.