Mateo Askaripour Headshot

Race and the Startup Ecosystem: An Interview with Mateo Askaripour

Mateo Askaripour was a 2018 Rhode Island Writers Colony writer-in-residence, and his writing has appeared in Entrepreneur, Lit Hub, Catapult, The Rumpus, Medium, and elsewhere. He lives in Brooklyn, and his favorite pastimes include bingeing music videos and movie trailers, drinking yerba mate, and dancing in his apartment. Black Buck is his debut novel.


Elinam Agbo (EA): Black Buck opens with an author’s note from the novel’s narrator. Referencing influential Black people from history—from civil rights activists and artists to Oprah—Darren (who becomes Buck) invites us to read the book as a lesson in sales. He says, “My goal is to teach you how to sell,” and then he lists his credentials to show that he knows what he’s talking about. But while the book is about rising from humble beginnings, Black Buck is also a cautionary tale. Can you tell us more about the vision Buck is trying to sell? How does it contradict with his reality?

Mateo Askaripour (MA): Yeah, “cautionary tale” is certainly an apt description of Darren’s character arc. But it’s also important to note that one of the takeaways I had in mind while writing the book, and which I hope readers also internalize, is this: no one is ever too far gone to find their way back to the best parts of themselves.

As for the vision that Buck is trying to sell, it’s that freedom––for yourself, those you care about, and the people you want to serve––is the ultimate goal, but that it is not easy to attain, which is why you need to arm yourself with as many tools as you can, with sales being one of them.

Still, Buck is speaking from his own perspective, and what he defines as freedom may not be the same for the reader, so I hope that readers understand and reflect on Buck’s story but only take what they can from it that’s actually applicable to their own lives.

I also wouldn’t say that the vision he’s selling contradicts his reality, especially because his reality changes so much from the beginning of the book to the end. But if we’re speaking about the reality of where he starts––loving son, boyfriend, best friend, and Bed-Stuy resident––I still believe that what he’s trying to reveal to the reader is in line with that younger Darren. It was his desire for freedom, even if he didn’t know it at the time, that drove him to become the person he did.

EA: Throughout the novel, I kept returning to the idea of balance. The protagonist is at once Darren and Buck. The story dances between comedy and tragedy. Sometimes it’s clear who is a friend and who is a foe, and sometimes it’s not at all. There is a thin (often blurred) line between “winning” and “losing,” and there are moments when it feels like the two are happening simultaneously. Which of these “pairs” did you enjoy exploring the most? How did you balance so many themes while writing? 

MA: Wow, what an incredible question! Yes, I definitely wanted to blur line after line after line––not to carelessly spin the reader around and induce vomiting, but because that is often how it feels in these environments when you’re the “only one,” or one of a few.

This is tough to answer because I had a lot of fun exploring many of the pairs you mentioned, but if I have to pick one, I’ll go with the fine line between winning and losing. You really nailed what I was going for when you said, “it feels like the two are happening simultaneously.”

When it came to Darren’s ascent/descent, I wanted to throw into question what it means to win if you’re losing parts of yourself along the way. Or, stated differently, what the cost of success is, and how much people, especially Black and brown people, need to pay in order to achieve it.

There was also the element of illusion at play. Some readers see Darren pitching Rhett, getting the job, and making money as a rise that they can root for. Still, others, who have seen this play out time and time again in reality, read those parts with a certain reserve because they know that what looks like success to many isn’t success at all––it’s actually the portent of a fall.

The balancing of it all was slightly difficult, if only because there was so much more I wanted to include, and initially did, before realizing doing too much could be detrimental to the story and my aims for it. So I had to ask myself what were the points that I thought would be most relevant and interesting to other people who have been in these environments while also staying true to writing something that felt honest and exciting to me.

EA: I want to talk about “diversity.” Darren moves from an ethnically diverse community to a workplace where everyone is white. From a multicultural community to one that appropriates other cultures without acknowledging them. He goes from a family that supports and loves him to a “family” whose “love” is very conditional. Can you talk about the culture of “work as family” in the novel, especially in the context of diversity?

MA: Thank you for this question. The way I look at it, whether we see Darren in Bed-Stuy, with people, as you said, who love him unconditionally, or Buck in Manhattan, surrounded by a homogenous group of coworkers whom he ends up spending almost every waking hour of his day with, family is what you make it.

There’s a dinner scene at the beginning of the book, and Darren, Soraya, Ma, Mr. Rawlings, and Jason are all eating charred hamburgers. These people are his family, but he’s only biologically related to one, his mother. And then there’s another scene, where Darren is told he didn’t pass his final test at the startup and would have to leave, but dozens of people went to bat for him, inducting him as a brother.

Part of how Darren loses himself, despite blatant warnings from his best friend, Jason, is by buying into the post-racial hype that many workplaces espouse today. For a while, he believes that being a Sumwunner––the name for employees at the startup he works at––supersedes his identity as a Black man, so the lack of diversity at Sumwun becomes less important to him than when he first began working there, and then, once he begins to crawl out of “the sunken place,” we see the byproducts of that lack of diversity come back with a vengeance.

EA: Honestly, I felt like Darren entered an abusive relationship when he started working at Sumwun. He loses a part of himself (his name) and is cut off from his support system. When friends and family try to get him out, he cuts ties with them, often to devastating results. And there are several glaring contradictions between what Sumwun sells (and claims to represent) and how it treats its employees. Can you elaborate on the conditions that allow for Darren to be reprogrammed into Buck?

There’s a fine line between cult and culture. And if we look at Sumwun as a cult more than a company, everything you mentioned––being cut off from your support system, lashing out against friends and family––makes more sense.

It’s easy to become someone else within the startup ecosystem, so while Darren consciously becomes Buck, I think we should cut him at least a little slack. Let’s look at the facts: he was a 22-year-old man who an older, wealthier, and suave man said had the potential to change the world. He then goes from making $19,000 to $65,000 overnight. After being intentionally broken down through psychological warfare, and its various manifestations, and then built up as a new, supposedly evolved human, he is given the mandate that it is his duty, as well as the duty of everyone else who works at the company, to make the world a better place through selling their product.

Catered lunches, bottle service at the swankiest clubs, the opioid-like rush you get from calling up someone, an individual who is likely respected and influential in their own right, halfway across the country and getting them to do what you want them to do––in my opinion, with all of this going on, the question is, “How couldn’t Darren lose his way and become Buck?”

EA: I was very drawn to the comic book references in the novel. Buck describes the Black salesman as “Superman, Spiderman, Batman, and any other supernatural, paranormal, or otherwise godlike combination of blood, flesh, and brains.” Brian, one of Darren’s coworkers at Starbucks, is also a fan of comic books, and later, this plays a role when Buck tries to teach Brian how to sell. But Buck’s methods are questionable. So, in the spirit of comics, I wanted to ask, is Darren/Buck an anti-hero?

MA: Ah, I’m glad you liked them! I watched cartoons as a kid and still appreciate animated works, but I was never someone who read comic books. With that said, I was and am a fan of films and TV shows, like X-Men, Phenomenon, Black Panther (R.I.P. Chadwick Boseman), or Heroes, that feature people with special abilities.

It’s funny; someone recently told me that Buck almost seems like a superman of sorts, with his superpower being his sales prowess. With that said, I did envision Buck as an anti-hero, even if I didn’t exactly have that phrase in mind as I was writing the book.

The further I got into the writing process, the more I realized that it would be too easy for Buck to suddenly wake up one day and say, “By God, I’ve got it! I am going to teach young people of color how to sell and change the face of startup culture and corporate America!” So, after having him fall out of the reader’s favor, through hurting those who loved him most, it was important for me to have this responsibility (think Spiderman and Shakespeare) thrust onto him by a few people he was initially helping/using to get ahead. There goes another blurred line.

EA: Of course, the distinction between “hero” and “villain” is not so clear-cut when we’re talking about racism in the workplace. At Sumwun, Darren (Buck) finds that there are those who are obviously villainous (i.e., white supremacists) and those who could be genuine friends (despite their blind spots). In Rhett, we see a mentor-figure who wants to invest in Buck’s career, but only if Buck does exactly as he’s told. Can you talk about the process of creating this charismatic character and the false security he provides?

MA: I don’t know if every reader will agree with me, but I feel like Rhett is one of the most complex characters in the book. We see him quoting Bible verses and dropping F-bombs in the same sentence. He gives Darren the opportunity of the lifetime and then pushes more opportunities on him that he presents as being good for Buck but are also, or even more so, good for Sumwun. He also genuinely cares about Buck, so long as he remains an asset to the company.

With Rhett, I knew I wanted him to conform to the “charismatic and eccentric” CEO type that we’ve seen before––e.g., Steve Jobs––but I also wanted him to break it. His being unabashedly religious in the workplace was one way to do that because religion is a taboo in startup culture. It’s almost like you can say you’re into bestiality, and your coworkers would give you a pass, but if you say you believe in God and go to church every Sunday, they will look at you like you just said you got accepted into Hogwarts. And this is coming from someone who isn’t even religious.

Going back to the use of illusion, Rhett is introduced as this larger-than-life man who could move mountains with his mind, but we quickly see that facade break down and then become rebuilt many times throughout the novel. Like the book itself, he is never one thing for too long, and if you try to put him in a box, you’re giving him the advantage because limiting him will make you less likely to anticipate what he’s going to do next.

Being around these types of people, the ones who suck you into their worlds by making you believe that you can and should be more than what you already are, is both tempting and dangerous because when they pull the bottom out from under you, you either plummet or grab onto the edge and pull yourself to safety.

EA: I read that you wrote two novels before Black Buck. What themes would you say you carried into this novel, if any? Why are you drawn to these themes?

MA: In many interviews, I say that I was able to write Black Buck when I stopped shying away from a few of the themes that are closest to me: race, sales, and startups. This is partially true.

With my first two novels, I was exploring race, what it means to be an other, and the duality of being surrounded by people who may love you but don’t entirely understand or accept you for who you are. But one reason those two novels didn’t work out, aside from the fact that I was still figuring out what it meant to write and be a writer––two things I will always continue learning––was that I was still searching for the clarity I needed on those topics, of race, otherness, and family, to write about them in a way that felt true.

I’m drawn to these themes because I think about them daily and know that many others do too, but there are also other parts of those first two novels that didn’t make it into Black Buck, like travel, colonialism, the fine line (there’s another!) between helping and harming. 

As I grow, revise my outlook, and continue to examine who I am and the person I want to be, the themes I focus on will also change, but some won’t, which is something I’m excited about.

EA: What books have inspired your writing, and what books were you reading while writing the novel? What are you reading now?

MA: The Sellout, by Paul Beatty, definitely affected Black Buck. It showed me what it meant to push a reader to their boundaries, while still keeping them rooted in the story. But to do that, as a writer friend once told me, “You have to be careful because you have to be good enough to pull it off.” It was a risk, but the writers I respect most are the ones who take them.

Other powerful books I was reading while writing Black Buck were: Behold the Dreamers, The Ways of White Folks, Tar Baby, Black Docker, Heads of the Colored People, Papillon, Pimp, Corregidora, The Intuitionist, If Beale Street Could Talk, The Angry Ones, The Street, Friday Black, The Residue Years, If He Hollers Let Him Go, The Mothers, and I’ll stop there because I could go on and on.

Right now, reading is tough. I’ve been so focused on promo that by the time I find a moment to read, all I want to do is watch something semi-mindless. I have been working my way through The Awkward Black Man by Walter Mosely, though. I’m diggin’ it.