I’ve been reflecting recently on the fine line I’ve tried to walk throughout my decade-long growth journey as a white male leader immersed in racially and gender diverse settings. 

On the one hand, I want to grow my awareness of how I am showing up, how I may unintentionally be negatively (or positively) impacting others around me, and how to do better. 

And yet on the other hand, I am not interested in performing a role that others define for me, whereby I am expected to say, do or agree to certain things that signal that I’m somehow "woke" or "the good white ally". I want to show up as my full authentic self, not some robotic version of myself. And I think that’s what my colleagues and friends of all races also want from me.

While I by no means have this figured out, I feel like I am well down the path in this journey. What has helped me the most? I’ve been able to come up with two general categories.

About seven or eight years ago, my friend and former colleague Rev. Michael-Ray Mathews shared a clip from a Dave Chappelle standup routine that completely shifted my thinking about race and whiteness. 

In the clip, Chappelle talks about how, in the past, he used to tell a lot of jokes about white people. The camera flashes to a number of white people in the room laughing. Then Chappelle says this:

“When I say jokes about white people, don’t think for a second that I’m talking about you (more laughter). Don’t forget I almost had $50 million once. When you make enough money in America, they’ll pull back the curtain and introduce you to the real white people. You guys just think you’re white.”

You guys just think you’re white. Huh?

Historian Nell Irvin Painter describes a phenomenon that she’s observed when white people think about race. She describes it as a “toggle between nothingness and awfulness”. Either we think the conversation about race is only about people of color and not about us (nothingness). Or, when the conversation is about us, it’s only about how racist we are (awfulness).

Does this resonate?

For example, about a decade ago, when the organization I worked for decided it was going to “put race at the center” of our work, I felt like the organization was saying that I, as a white person, was no longer relevant. It was as if I somehow didn’t have a race (ha!), and therefore putting race at the center meant I was now on the margins.

Five years ago, I started feeling the rumblings of a calling. 

Seemingly everywhere I looked - from families, to workplaces, to politics - I was seeing a dynamic play out that I understood intimately as a white man: rising anxiety about what it means to live in an increasingly diverse society where whiteness and maleness are no longer the norm, and are in fact decreasing in cultural power. 

This anxiety was creating a lot of suffering for everyone. It was underlying so many issues, from workplace challenges, to marital discord, to addiction, to increasing political polarization.

Despite how pervasive this seemed, I wasn’t seeing many efforts aimed squarely at helping white people grow through and out of this anxiety, and perhaps even transform it into a positive force for growth and change. Instead, it seemed like white people were either lecturing other white people about how they should be, or just letting them flounder on their own. ​