“White people have no culture.”
“American is not an ethnicity.”
“Students listen to you because you are a white male.”
“I consider you a white friend.”
(Things said to me by professors)
When white guys for whatever reason find themselves interacting with the concept of diversity, they typically fall into one of two camps. In one camp, they just don’t get it. They think the privileges afforded to them for being white or for being men came to them for being effective, competent, and industrious. As one wag said of a rich kid, they are born on third base and think they hit a triple. These guys react in a variety of ways, from irritation to avoidance, but their reactions reveal their essential indifference to difference. When they hear about a black couple hovered over by the waiter to make sure they don’t dine and dash, they assume the black couple was either oversensitive (it didn’t really happen) or had done something suspicious. If you’re that guy, you need help understanding what multiculturalism is all about—but without insulting you. The white guys in the other camp are clothes-rending, flesh-tearing, guilt-ridden apologizers. They are aware of privileges and think they have to forgo them, like rich kids who give away all their money. They hire the less qualified Latino applicant because it is more important to them to avoid accusations of discrimination than it is to run their business efficiently. They, also, react in many different ways, from excessive caution to self-negation, implicitly accepting the idea that their accomplishments follow from their skin color rather than from hard work. If you’re that guy, you need help integrating your private masculinity with your public role, to restore your pride in yourself even in conversations about race and sex.
If you are not personally a white guy, you may find in these pages some similarities with white guys that will make their situation instructive. Perhaps you have some positions of privilege in certain situations and have been told that these came to you because of your sex or race or other status? Welcome to my world. Perhaps you are in charge of some groups and would like to make everyone feel included but stumble on the fact that there’s no reliable way to tell when you are failing? Welcome to the human race.
It seems like a white guy in a multicultural discussion is supposed to sit quietly like the defendant in a rape trial and act as if he personally enslaved Africans, dominated women, and tripped blind people. But nobody wants to enter a dialogue if the terms of entry require him to be the bad guy—well, almost nobody—some men and quite a few white women seem to jump at the chance to call themselves racist. If you or your work group has ever been sentenced to a multicultural training, either for some infraction or as a developmental workshop, you’ve probably heard some white person confessing their own racism like an alcoholic at an AA meeting. For most white guys, though, spending a day or even an hour having to shut up and swallow our pride makes us tune out, especially when the shutting up is in the service of “dialogue.”
But white guys have nothing to apologize for in a conversation about multiculturalism. They have made huge contributions to the diversity agenda. White guy Charles Darwin proved that all people are related (plus dogs, cabbages, and worms, but still). White guys Gregory Bateson and B.F. Skinner taught us to understand behavior in its context. White guy Immanuel Kant demonstrated that no way of looking at a situation (including white guys’ ways) is fundamentally correct. White Guy Jesus Christ taught us to value those whom society casts out.
Or perhaps you don’t consider Jesus a white guy. In a stunning act of circular logic, the statement that white men have no culture is, with alarming frequency, promulgated by multiculturalists who define any man with even a shred of ethnicity (whatever that could possibly mean without something to contrast it to) as nonwhite. By that reckoning, Jesus was a Jew (or, if not wholly a Jew, Jew-ish), Darwin was English, and Kant German. This way of thinking can only end with the conclusion that the only white guys on earth are George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, and possibly Bush Sr., although he would seem to qualify as an ethnic Yalie.
And speaking of the contributions of white guys, I think it’s high time we reminded the world that we are after all a minority. Maybe, what, 10% of all humans are white guys? You always hear about how small the Scottish population is and yet how great their contribution was to science, or how small the black population is in the United States compared to their contributions to popular culture. Well, white guys are only 10% of the earth’s population, and just look at the enormity of our contributions to philosophy, literature, science, classical music, and, well, warfare.
Michael Karson, Ph.D. 
I am looking forward to reading your blog entries since I finished your Deadly Therapy book. I have to say that Jesus was Middle Eastern, so not exactly white by most American’s definition. He does look white in most of his pictures.