In 1990, I traveled to South Africa as part of my work with Outward Bound.
That was life-changing for me.
Nelson Mandela had just been released from prison a few months before,
and apartheid was being dismantled.
I worked with mining groups and banks and other businesses
facilitating interracial team-building courses,
each lasting eight days.
The mining guys all worked on the same shifts together,
and yet,
on the same shifts across race,
they never ate meals together,
they never shared the same dorm rooms,
and they never drank beer together.
One white miner’s wife told him,
“If you sleep in the same room as a black man, I will divorce you.”
We started intensive team activities minutes after they arrived.
At first, I was inspired and connected
with the black miners from different tribal groups,
who would always spontaneously sing and dance around the campfire.
Over time, I found that I had a lot in common with the white men as well.
They were good guys one on one,
and yet, they were part of a system that was oppressive.
They were in power, and others conformed to their system.
I found over time
that I had more in common with the white men
than I was comfortable with.
I looked into their eyes and I saw myself.
I felt compelled to come back to the US and work with people like me,
other white men.
Back in the US, I spent seven years researching:
How do white men learn about diversity?
What triggers our awareness
and our movement towards being advocates for diversity?
In my dissertation research,
I found the white men I studied
learn almost everything from women and people of color.
They didn’t turn to other white men,
and in fact disconnected from other white men
and were angry at them.
I was presenting these results at a national conference
and a black woman stood up,
and she said,
“If that’s the pathway to diversity for white men, I’m exhausted.”
(Laughter)
“I don’t have the energy to educate all of you.”
(Laughter)
And she was right!
Another colleague of mine, also with an Outward Bound background,
Bill Proudman,
had an idea to break that pattern.
He said, “Let’s get in the room with a group of white guys
and spend four days examining ourselves.
What does it mean to be white and to be male,
and for many of us, heterosexual?"
We called it a white men’s caucus.
The first white men’s caucus we did was 20 years ago.
Since then, we’ve done hundreds of them, with thousands of white men.
Over time, we found that white men don’t know three things.
One, we don’t know that we’re part of a group,
and that we have a culture.
Two, we don’t know that others
are having a different experience in the world than us.
And three, we don’t know
that the process of learning this is actually life-changing for us,
and we gain so much in the process.
Just to be clear,
white men are not the only people in the world that don’t know things.
(Laughter)
All of us have learning and work to do
around how to partner more effectively with each other.
I’m just talking today about the white-male part of the equation,
which is often not articulated.
So let’s go back to the first thing that white men don’t know.
We don’t know that we’re part of a group, and that we have a culture.
When I look in the mirror, I see Michael.
I don’t see myself as a white male.
Others, women and people of color, may see a white male,
but I just see Michael.
This is partly a result of how diversity is framed.
When we look at race, for example, we often focus on people of color.
When we look at gender, who do we usually talk about?
Women.
When we look at sexual orientation,
we often focus on gay, lesbian and bisexual.
We don’t examine being white, or being male, or being heterosexual.
It’s like an invisible part of myself.
I once worked with a SWAT team commander
who came back and said he applied what he learned the first day on the job.
He was in a situation that usually ends in a fight or an arrest,
and he was able to avoid both.
Seeing himself and recognizing himself now as a white male, he realized,
“This stranger does not know me personally.”
And he didn’t have to take anything personally.
He shifted from defensiveness to inquiry,
and he was able to take an explosive moment
and turn it into a moment of partnership.
So white men, we don’t know we’re part of a group.
We also don’t know that we have a culture.
We’re like a fish in water.
We rarely have to leave our cultural waters,
and so we have the least awareness of them.
The culture, our culture, permeates our schools, our institutions,
Church, businesses, most places we go.
So we have the least awareness of it.
I love my culture,
and I’ve also come to see that when I overuse its strengths,
those strengths can become weaknesses.
So what are some of the traits of white male culture?
One is rugged individualism.
And I love that part of me.
I love that I pull myself up by my bootstraps,
put my head down and work hard.
It has served me really well.
And I know I can overuse that, as others can too.
Any of you ever know of white guys
who get lost and refuse to ask for directions?
Audience member: My dad!
And that happened recently?
(Laughter)
Just so, I’m modeling white guys.
You can actually read directions here.
So, also, I love the action orientation.
That’s another aspect of our culture.
And that action orientation is about doing and getting things done.
I like to fix things, I like to solve problems.
I can also overuse that problem-solving mindset.
Any of you ever have to tell your white male spouse,
“I don’t want you to fix this, I just want you to listen”?
(Laughter)
Anybody hear that? As white guys, have you ever heard that before?
Also, our culture teaches us
that we can’t be rational and emotional at the same time.
So we leave our emotionality behind.
Other cultures don’t do that.
When I live in this - invisible to me - cultural box,
I don’t even think of it as a culture.
I just think of it as being a good human,
or a good American.
And I judge others by this invisible cultural box,
and that puts them in a place where they feel judged.
Unconscious bias, that’s what it is for me,
which is that it’s like a background operating system on autopilot,
that I didn’t even know was running in myself.
I might say I’m culture-blind or I might say I’m gender-blind,
and that I just treat everybody the same.
I don’t realize that others hear that as having to fit into my cultural box.
And I don’t even know that I’m causing that assimilation in others.
Others can be frustrated
because they know they have to leave part of themselves at the door.
And what’s even more interesting is we do that to ourselves as white men.
We also fit into the cultural box,
and when we do that, we leave some of our humanness behind.
The second thing that most white men don’t know
is we don’t know that others are having a different experience in the world.
Most of us just naturally connect on sameness and commonality.
In fact, intercultural research shows that when you engage difference,
most people either deny or minimize those differences,
and that pattern shows up for younger generations as well.
And yet, women, people of color and others have different experiences,
and if I’m only connecting on sameness,
I’m not seeing another part of their reality.
It’s not that my view of the world is wrong;
more likely, it’s incomplete.
So, for instance, I don’t have to think about my own safety.
If I go jogging at night, most of the time I’m pretty comfortable,
even going alone.
I travel on business a lot.
I arrive late into airports, and I drive to the hotel.
Sometimes I get lost.
And I’m not too worried about that.
It’s just not easy,
but it’s not unsafe for me, for most of the time.
Many women would want to arrive in the hotel before dark,
and would want your hotel room to be off the ground floor
and not near an exit.
I was traveling with my business colleague, Bill,
to Kalamazoo, Michigan,
to work with an executive team.
Well, right after I flew into O'Hare Airport,
thunderstorms closed the airport.
Soon, I found out there were no more flights to Kalamazoo,
and there were no more rental cars.
Bill’s rugged individualism kicked in,
and he propositioned a taxi to take us all the way to Kalamazoo.
We got there 2:30 in the morning, and by 8 a.m. that morning,
we are standing in front of the executive team, proud,
and talking about how our adventure was and we were going to get there.
Failure wasn’t an option in that rugged individualism.
Well, there was one woman on that team.
She raised her hand, and she said,
“I would have never gotten into that taxi and driven across rural America at night
with a stranger as a taxi driver.
And I would have made up an excuse
so you wouldn’t think I wasn’t a team player.”
I looked at her, and I looked at Bill, and I looked at the group,
and I said, “I teach this stuff, and I’m blind to it at the same time.”
The word “privilege” is a hard word for us as white men
because we don’t feel privileged.
We actually feel like we’ve worked incredibly hard
for everything we have.
And I would say a deeper perspective is, yes,
we have worked incredibly hard,
and there are things that we haven’t had to navigate or negotiate or think about
that other groups are.
For instance, more examples of how my life might be different
being heterosexual.
At work, I can have a picture of a loved one on my desk
and not worry about what other people think about,
or not worry that it might hinder my next promotion or get me fired.
As a cisgendered person,
I can go out on the spur of the moment with friends
and know that I can find a bathroom that I can use
without being harassed or beat up.
As a white person, at work people don’t look at me
and think I got my job because of affirmative action,
and therefore have me feeling like I’ve got to work twice as hard
to prove I’m qualified.
Or I can easily find mentors of my race at all levels
in most organizations.
Or I can buy pictures, postcards, greeting cards
featuring people of my race, easily.
Or I don’t have to have the talk with my white kids
about how to literally stay alive if stopped by the police.
So for me, the layers of privilege go on and on.
Being able-bodied or, I might say, temporarily able-bodied,
I didn’t have to figure out
how to negotiate my way through this facility to give this talk.
Being Christian, people know my holidays, and they align with time off.
So privilege is stuff that I don’t have to deal with.
It’s not having to navigate or deal with some of those things.
It’s not something I chose.
And what happens is others assume
we, as white men, know about our privilege,
and that we see it.
And they assume we just don’t care or want to hoard our privilege.
So they attribute negative intent on to that privilege.
When we start to see our privilege and own our privilege,
it removes the burden from others
to have to educate and prove to us their different realities are real.
I can use my privilege honorably.
For instance, if I’m in a meeting,
and a woman shares an idea and it’s ignored,
and a few minutes later a man repeats that,
I can use my privilege to point out to my male colleagues
that, hey, that was originally her idea.
If she was to do that, she might be seen as having a chip on her shoulder
around men.
When we acknowledge other people's experiences as valid
and let our hearts be impacted by their experience,
we create more trust and more openness.
I saw this happen in South Africa, and I've seen it happen around the world.
It's a shift from a partnership that's based partly on fear
to a partnership based more on love.
Which brings me to the third thing that most white men don't know.
We think diversity is about helping other people with their issues.
We don't realize the process of learning about our culture
and that others are having a different experience
actually is life-changing for us and gives us many insights.
For instance, when I discover my cultural box,
I can continue to use the strengths of that culture
and I have the choice to step out of that culture
when it would serve me and others more.
For instance, maybe I want to be in my head and my heart at the same time.
Maybe I want to be able to ask for directions,
or ask for help or say, "I don't know."
Maybe I want to be able to slow down
and not try to fix something I don't understand.
When I show that I'm willing to validate other people's experiences,
it opens up space for new partnership.
One white man went back to a black man at work
and shared his learning.
Initially, the black man wasn't open,
but a week later, the black man came at to the white man,
closed the door, talked for two hours,
and he said,
"In 20 years, no white man has ever asked me
what it's like to be black in this corporation."
Another white man went back to his son and apologized.
The week before the caucus,
his son had come from school bullied,
and he'd told his son, "Don't cry and suck it up."
Well, during the caucus,
the white man learned he was just training his son
to be in that white male box.
So he came home and he said,
"I'm sorry I told you to suck it up and [not] cry.
It's okay to feel what you feel, and you don't have to do it alone.
You can come to me and I'll be there for you."
We can have other kinds of partnerships at work too.
If I offend somebody, which is going to happen eventually,
I don't to spend time defending that I'm a good guy.
I can shift, using humility and inquiry, and say,
"How did I just impact you?"
That shifts me from a stance of "it's not my fault"
to a stance of "I'm responsible."
So white men, what can you do when you leave here today?
One, you can remember and realize that you have a culture,
and you can start to see it.
You can step outside of it when that serves you,
and you can notice more when you impose it on others.
Second, remember that others are having a different experience than you.
So use inquiry and curiosity
to get their world and broaden your perspective.
Three years before Nelson Mandela died, I wrote him a letter.
In it, I said,
"I was astonished to see you emerge from 27 years in prison
and embrace, from a place of love, the white men who imprisoned you.
You showed that love is the greatest force for change,
and I want you to know
that it's the same thread of love that I carry
that you passed on to the white men in South Africa."
I ask all of us today to carry that same thread to others
as you create extraordinary partnerships with people around the planet.
Thank you.
(Applause) (Cheering)