“White Men and Allies: Deepening the Partnership in Creating Inclusive Organizations”

Orlando, FL, 11/4/2001 through 11/7/2001

Purpose of the Conference:

The White Men and Allies^TM workshop was a three and a half day residential learning lab designed for organizational teams of two or more. Each team, consisting of a mixture of white men, women and people of color, were to be intentionally formed so that, upon return, they could work together as partners with their organization’s ongoing diversity efforts. The purpose of the workshop is to have participants:

	Understand more about how systemic racism, sexism, heterosexism, and classism operate as systemic advantage in their work, community and personal life.
	Become more conscious of how their own behavior may unintentionally reinforce these unproductive dynamics.
	Identify new options for interrupting systemic advantage, and for being a more effective partner across difference at work and in other interactions.

General Summary:

This workshop was excellent for several reasons including that it used experiential learning techniques rather than simple lecture/presentation style, it defined diversity partnership types that help us to understand the level of our commitment to diversity, provided tools that individual participants could use for developing diversity partnerships, engaged the participants in defining diversity issues and most importantly made it clear that “white heterosexual male” defines the dominant, but by no means only, culture in the U.S. I rate the workshop a 9 out of 10.

Executive Summary:

What is White Male culture? Seeing white male culture is a challenge because it is pervasive in the U.S. It can be defined and is clearly different than white female culture and the cultures of people of color. These are the key attributes of the culture:

	Rugged individualist. We see ourselves not as members of a group, but as individuals. By contrast, women and people of color see us as members of a group and expect that we’ll behave consistently with being in that group.
	Low tolerance for ambiguity
	Focus on status and rank over connection.
	Time is linear and future focused.
	Rational over emotional.
	Doing/task completion vs. being.

Notice that these cultural attributes correlate strongly with those of Microsoft’s culture.

What is “systemic advantage?” As defined by the workshop participants: An unconscious, invisible agreement among those in power (and those that collude with them) to get as much as possible or hold what they already have, that provides unblocked access to benefits not necessarily earned and unquestioned permission to do what members want, reinforced by policies, rules, laws, etc., created by those in power. In the U.S., white males have been the group in power since the beginning and thus have defined this agreement and accrue the benefits.

Diversity Partnership types: There is a natural evolution of partnerships around diversity issues. These are the stages of partnership based on the type of commitment provided and the duration of the work:

	Opportunity driven: Serves best interests of individuals involved, has a time-limited common goal and is the typical starting point for diversity partnerships.
	Transactional: Also time-limited, focused on a particular task and provides a routine service. Examples include participating in newsletters, brown-bags, publicity and diversity committees. Represents the second step for diversity partnerships.
	Alliances: Longer-term cooperation in service of common interests/cause and taking on more difficult challenges. Examples include employee networks and ally partners (like the planned participants of this workshop).
	Synergistic/Leadership: Longer-term, natural partnerships with mutual benefit that take bigger risks to tackle systemic advantage and privilege. Both partners have clarity around privileges and their impact.

In my work environment, we can see that most of the partnerships formed on the basis of our review goals are transactional.

Major sponsors:

· The workshop was created and facilitated by White Men as Full Diversity Partners® (WMFDP), an organizational-development consulting firm. The workshop was lead by WMFDP facilitators Bill Proudman and Jo Ann Morris.

Second tier sponsors:

· Florida Hospital (2 attendees, several others planned but did not attend). Florida Hospital has strong diversity leader, XXX, who appeared in some of the training videos during the course of the workshop.

· Ithaca University (2 attendees)