ThiemeWorks - The Missing Link

The people who hired me asked that question, too, and some of my appeal as a speaker was that I was “safe,” that is, I was not an angry radical and was therefore more likely to present the issues in a non-threatening way.

As I spoke, however, it became clear that while I looked like a “middle aged white male,” my insides had traveled a path more similar to the experience of women and African-Americans in the audience.

That’s because I have lived in five different ways as a “minority. I have been a religious minority twice, a racial minority once, and a foreigner twice. Each experience provided anecdotes about the ways a dominant culture socializes its members differently than it does the members of what it calls a “minority.”

One punch line in my talk is that the bigger shock came when I moved twenty years ago to Milwaukee. Arriving with a German name and a job (I was an Episcopal minister, then) that facilitated my identification with the dominant culture, I was treated for the first time in my life as if I belonged. The shock came with the discovery of how radically different members of a dominant culture treat someone who is perceived to be “one of us.”

Dominant cultures open doors in a million ways for those who belong. Through mentoring, the communication of intrinsic value, promotions, and other ways, members of dominant cultures are assisted, supported, and sustained in their personal and professional lives. Over time, they cease to see these privileges that come with membership and believe, as was said of George Bush, that they are born on third base and think they hit a triple.

Because the privileges of power are invisible, dominants also fail to see how “minorities” do not have them. Because they believe that their attainments are based on intrinsic merit, they genuinely can not understand why everyone can not simply do as they do and achieve the same level of success.

African Americans in Milwaukee frequently say they can not get traction in careers. They are startled when they go somewhere else – Chicago, Atlanta, Minneapolis – and get traction, find mentors, and advance. They are treated differently.

That refrain has been heard so often that a reasonable person might conclude that conditions here do not change for a simple reason – the leaders of the dominant culture do not want it to change.

We hear repeated calls for change in our economy, too, and they will probably happen, but not because our leaders have worked actively to bring them about.

Initiatives like regional branding by the Greater Milwaukee Committee or the Wisconsin Technology Council’s efforts to attract entrepreneurial technology companies are good approaches. They don’t try to change the heart first, a daunting task. Their good approaches because realists know: where money flows, the heart will follow.

We would like to believe that we will do the right thing and money will follow, but it doesn’t work that way. Anyone who is paying attention learns in the ministry that economics is the right hand of God. When real money is on the table, our prejudices will be checked at the door.

That brings us back to Michelle Obama.

I point out in my speech that blacks must understand whites, Jews must understand Christians, gays must understand straights, and women must understand men, because there is a price to be paid if they don’t. The reverse, however, is not true. It costs whites, for example, nothing not to understand blacks, which is why Obama’s statement was incomprehensible to many – they do not understand that the whole of her life was a different experience and led to that statement which popped out with such unselfconscious clarity. They do not know that what she has achieved was not achieved in the same way or with the same ease as the equivalent education or career by a white, Christian male.

Naming is powerful. Dominant cultures have pejorative terms for members of the minority, but you have to work to think of a similar term to denote members of the dominant culture. Think of a term for “an angry woman,” for example; one comes to mind at once, doesn’t it? Try to think of a similar term for “an angry man” and you’ll draw a blank.

If that’s news to you, and if you were upset when you heard what Michelle Obama said, my bet is that you’re a member of the “dominant culture” and have never been asked to look at the real difference it really does make to be different.