White guys don’t have to be taught to empathize with the marginalized; they have to be taught not to. You’ll hear that a white guy who empathizes with the marginalized does so because he has some marginalized identity himself. He must be gay, or he married an Asian woman, or he was mistaken for black, or whatever. Alternatively, he must have gone through multicultural training, that growth experience of realizing what a privileged, racist, sexist, homophobe he is. (Not all multicultural training is like this, but people who think that white guys have to have their noses rubbed in their privilege are thinking of this sort of thing.)
Everyone starts off empathizing with the marginalized because everyone starts off powerless, disqualified, and functioning differently from other people’s expectations. Your parents rightly did not treat you as an equal, but sometimes they pulled rank on you purely for convenience, and you experienced the frustration of powerlessness. You experimented with different social roles (this is called “play”) and it was all they could do not to laugh out loud when you sang, at age 11, the McCartney lyric, “I’m not half the man I used to be.” Your parents developed a sense of who you were based on their experience of you, but within six months their expectations were outdated. This is similar to the way people develop expectations of others based on external traits and then box the others into behaving according to those expectations. Just growing up means you weren’t normal, to the extent that normal means “as expected.”
So white guys grow up marginalized, just like everyone else. Look at the horror and rage that accompanies many white guys’ loss of privilege—it turns out that white people dislike being put in their skin and stereotyped as much as people of color do. But that horror and rage, as Erving Goffman points out, occurs not because the loss of privilege and face makes white guys fearful of what will happen to them; it’s because they know exactly what is happening to them. They’re being made into boys again.
Many men are taught that it is humiliating to be like a child—short, emotional, and powerless (but not Wordsworth, that white guy extraordinaire, who wanted as a man to have his heart leap up at rainbows as it did when he was a boy). We are taught to disown all that is weak, vulnerable, emotional, and joyous. Then we dedicate ourselves to pretending to be, for want of a better term, cowboys. And while it’s true that a socially marginalized identity element or an experience of self-disgust can undo that ridiculous posture, an easier path to self-acceptance is, well, self-acceptance. I don’t have to know what it’s like to be black to identify with the diversity agenda; I just have to know what it’s like to be me.
Michael Karson, Ph.D. 
This is a great statement. If only more training took this tact. Sadly when multicultural training decides it needs to use marginalization to make a point it misses the mark. We merely need a reminder of our own marginalization experiences in a safe non-marginalizing, inclusive environment to come into contact with “what it’s like.” Coercion is met with resistance, having to do something without informed consent-especially when it means contacting our marginalized selves-is not cool. If multicultural training wants to get it right it needs it needs to do this-help people contact their marginalization with informed consent and do it with humor, compassion and intelligence.
“Like”!
Thanks, please see comedians of every race, color, creed, religion, etc, etc and how they’ve managed to do this without being throttled by some “other” group.
Your grandson, from day one, has been full of rage from powerlessness. And now, with a creative vocabulary of a 4-year old, when he’s feeling powerless because he slept in late and can’t have hot chocolate, he invents and acts on threats some teenagers would be proud of. Later, when asked, he will tell you that he indeed does not have control because he can’t “decide to stop throwing things.” As children (and as adults), when we get stuck in this mind-frame of powerlessness that prevents us from empathizing, how do we get out?
Uh, by throwing things. Duh.