Angry Old White Guy

The company I work for has embarked on a company wide mandatory diversity training initiative. The company line is that they are being proactive, not reactive in this quest for all of us in the company employ to open our eyes to the ways that we may overcome the built in assumptions that we operate under. To provide us with the means to overcome those filters to better communicate and facilitate working with people of different cultures and backgrounds. A lofty goal for an entire workforce. In this initiative they are trying to get us to understand that the core values that you operate your everyday life under may not play out with the person you are interacting with in the work place. And we played games to show how the different groups that we have at work view and look at things. Very enlightening. Mind opening. And one of the games we played was to be split into three groups. White women were first. People of color were second. And White men were third. These are the groups that they broke us down into. I think to show how even in the groupings that we normally assign to people to make them easier to understand and deal with there is major diversity. I of course was in the third group. And I knew better. I opened my mouth about something that has been eating at me for years. I took the course of brutal honesty and told a story of how I had come to the company as a temp. How in the first 10 months of working there I had work 2080 hours. For those of you who don't know, that's one year of 40 hour work weeks in 10 months. And at the end of that time, the company hired me full time. And at that point, two of my peers made the statement (overheard by me, not to my face) that of course they would hire me, I was a white guy, part of the good ol' boy network. So one full year of hard, personal life neglecting work was pissed out the window. I didn't do anything to deserve the job. I was just a white guy that the bosses liked. I knew when I opened my mouth to tell that story that I should just stay quiet. I knew it. But I wanted to see how much this intensive day of training had actually worked it's magic on my fellow employees. And I was tragically correct in my assumption that nothing had changed. I had made an error. I was now the angry white guy. The one who hated affirmative action. The one who had expressed an experience contrary to what "everybody" knew was a lie. I was white. I had all the advantages that that infers on one. It was still a heartbreak to me that the people I was with were embarrassed for me. And then someone spoke up and told me that no matter what I thought, I was privileged. Whether I knew it or not, that that's how I got the job. That at our level everyone had the same skill set, it was something else that I brought to the table that got me hired. And that it was because of my race and my gender. So, I think, diversity of opinion and experience are only for the "others." Because no one wants to think that angry old white guys have had to experience the exact same thing as they have. Because everyone knows that if you're white and male, it's handed to you. All you have to do is show up.
Sometimes I wonder why I bother to care.