Being a Black Man in Social Media Marketing Is —

Being a Black man in marketing (specifically a Nigerian-American within social media marketing) is complicated.

Plane and simple.

With that said, it’s incredibly challenging, and I don’t know that, to this day, I’ve written about what makes it so hard.

It’s been a notion — well reality that has been floating in my head for a long time and I’ve purposefully not given it the air it deserves to breathe outside of my own mind.

It’s not always fun to acknowledge it because those facts coupled with the demands of the job can be overwhelming in a lot of ways.

The fact of the matter is over my 7–8 year career, 98–100% of the time I am the only one of my “demographic” to be on my team at a company, which means I’m very much the minority when it comes to creative thinking, strategy, general conversation, relating to coworkers on the team, interests outside of work, all the way down to perceptions of quality aesthetic and what’s culturally important.

Within the advertising, marketing, or social media spaces I have never worked with any other African American or just Black American male at any company (I’ve only worked directly with 1 Black female and that…