Facing Up to Being White : Diversity: For members of America’s dominant culture, there are some hidden prices to pay, experts say.

A fragile-looking woman with blond hair and delicate, pale skin, flushed pink with emotion, is biting her lip.

The setting is a conference room on the UCLA campus and a seminar on diversity-- that buzzword generated by massive demographic changes affecting every aspect of American society.

“This is the only place you are going to be able to say this and not be called a racist because of the imbalance of power in our society,” says Lillian Roybal Rose, an expert in cross-cultural communication. “I want you to pull back your shoulders and say: I’m proud to be white.”

“I’m proud to be white,” Cindy Nulty says quietly.

“What goes through your mind?” Rose asks.

“That it’s OK to be proud to be white,” says Nulty.

“Uh, huh. Say it one more time. . . . “

She’s not talking about whites on a power trip, Rose explains. “I’m talking about the essence of your ethnicity. Not the things your parents or grandparents said that you are ashamed of, like: ‘Don’t play with that black child.’ I want you to separate the pattern (of racism) that they were taught from the person. Think of your white, European lineage . . . your grandparents and great-grandparents.” Place them in a circle that represents the essential goodness of all human beings, she urges, and say: “I want to come home.”

The woman, in tears, can barely mumble it. “I want to come home.”

“What is it you are thinking?” asks Rose.

“I want a place to belong,” says Nulty.

Says Rose: “Most white people don’t know what home is.”

They have, she says, lost what she calls the “handles” of their culture--a distinct language, music, food . . . unique traditions.

At the beginning of her workshops, she asks participants to identify themselves by ethnicity. Often, in a tone that suggests it’s irrelevant, they answer: some place in Europe. . . . I’m just an American. Or, conversely, in attempt to find some cultural validation, she says, “they dig up that 1/68th Indian blood.”

This is a price, Rose says, that whites pay for being the dominant group in a society that has demanded cultural homogeneity and denigrated differences: They lose fundamental aspects of their own identity. This loss, she asserts, has important psychological implications. It helps to understand why whites may feel threatened by the cultural and racial diversity that is happening fastest and first in California.

To varying degrees, all Americans have been “coerced into assimilating, whether we are of German heritage or black or Chicano,” says Roberto Chene, director of the Southwest Center for Cross Cultural Relationships in Albuquerque, N.M., and a frequent consultant to universities, including UCLA, on diversity.

“Whenever you have been coerced into giving up anything . . . you pay a high price. If you don’t grieve the loss, you get stuck in a rigid place of wanting everybody to be like you,” he says.

In his workshops, which are similar in approach to Rose’s, Chene finds that “white people will often spontaneously start to cry. They start to grieve. And once they begin to sense that they personally lost something--that their family lost their language, their heritage, whatever--I think there is a very deep-seated need to grieve that loss.

“It’s very difficult to let others be who they are if you paid an unacknowledged high price for your loss. And white people, often, are totally unaware that they lost anything.”

Echoing “An American Dilemma,” Gunnar Myrdal’s classic work on American racism, Rose points to the inconsistency between this nation’s values of justice and equality and its history of discrimination and exclusion based on race and ethnicity.

At varying levels, whites are aware of this contradiction, she believes, and because of racism, they pay the price of diminished self-worth.

Diane Kenney, a white minister for United Ministries at USC, believes that whites pay a psychological penalty for racism: “One of the major ones is that most of us are so busy trying to prove that we are persons of value. I think that’s a frantic attempt to overcome (feelings) that we aren’t.

“Even if it was our ancestors” who committed the wrong of racism, “we feel that somehow we are less as human beings than we should be,” says Kenney, co-founder of an ad hoc USC group called Pro-Act--Push Racism Out, Accept the Challenge Today.

Says Nulty, a 29-year-old computer expert raised in the South Bay: “For years, I’ve had the voices of my family and friends resounding in my ears, things . . . I am ashamed of. Like, my grandmother would say bad things about Asians and blacks. I had friends who were Asian and black, so it was like an attack on them.

“My attitudes are very different. I didn’t ever feel like I had any place to go,” where other people shared her values, she says. “I’ve always been ashamed of that part of my upbringing and being white.”

Many whites who attend Rose’s workshops--which usually include a range of ethnic and racial groups--wonder why she spends any time analyzing Anglo-Saxon culture or Euro-Americans in general. Understanding diversity, they assume, means learning about people who are different, people who are exotic.

“Plants are exotic, fish are exotic. People are not exotic,” Rose tells them.

The presumption that another human being is exotic is an expression of ethnocentrism and part of the problem, she explains. The dominant group in every society uses itself as the standard by which others are judged.

Diversity and the conflicts that arise from it, social scientists point out, are only superficially about race or ethnicity. Race and ethnic relations are types of group power contests. Since whites hold the power in America, their behavior is the key to understanding most inter-ethnic tensions, Rose asserts.

But the idea of cultural pluralism, the notion of diversity “effaces the real issues . . . all the power imbalances in America,” says Nulty, who holds a master’s degree in history. “I hear people talk about pluralism and it’s like everybody, with their different ethnic origins, is going to stand holding hands in a circle, as if everything is going to be happy. That’s bull.”

Pluralism, she says, “is far better than the melting pot idea”--everybody assimilating to one cultural standard. But, “when I hear people say: ‘Yeah, I have friends from Cuba. I love Cuban food.’ Is that pluralism? That means that you’re not treating a Cuban as an individual, but as some cultural oddity.”

Sitting in her El Segundo apartment days after a Rose seminar, Nulty adds, “Why should I think that just because I’m a good white person, sensitive to ethnic issues, I can go into a Latino community and expect them to accept me? That’s what I think a lot of people want to believe. But that’s condescension. And as a white person, I’m still coming from a place of privilege.”

But Nulty asks the same question many social scientists do: How does racism hurt whites with no sensitivity to the issue?

“If you ask most white Americans, and in fact, in surveys, we have asked this very question, the majority would say, ‘No, I don’t feel any effects of racism. I feel sorry for blacks. Too bad they don’t work harder,’ ” says Thomas Pettigrew, a social psychology professor at UC Santa Cruz and author of numerous studies on race relations, including a 1981 assessment of racism’s effects on whites’ mental health.

Further, whites like Nulty and Kenney who do feel the pain of racism and care about social justice “are already sensitive. They are the ones involved in making change. But the rest of white society isolates them as radical, bleeding-heart do-gooders. That’s a mighty sociological barrier to cross,” says Alex Norman, a professor in the School of Social Welfare at UCLA and a race relations consultant to Hughes Aerospace, TRW and Lockheed.

Rose nods her head. “It’s true, most white people are numb to racism. But you can see on the faces of whites in the seminar, that when they find the safety to heal and to feel, they will respond. I don’t believe white people don’t care.”

Rose, a 47-year-old Latina born into a family of political activists in East Los Angeles and trained at Stanford University’s Institute for Intercultural Communication, believes her approach breaks through the numbness.

If she can get whites to “connect with the forms of oppression they are most familiar with”--child abuse, class discrimination, sexism--she is better able to penetrate the psychological wall that blinds them to the most intractable of American social problems: Racism.

A policewoman, fed up with the sexist behavior of a male officer in a Northern California police department, reported his latest offense to her commander. The male officer retaliated, Rose tells her UCLA audience. He jammed her radio. He failed to send backup to a crime scene--almost getting her killed. He put dirty panties in her locker, then soiled sanitary napkins. His dirty tricks escalated daily, until the female officer finally had to take a leave of absence because of mental stress.

The day that Rose conducted a seminar for the officers in that Northern California police force, a policewoman stood up: “If just one of you, just one male officer had been able to say ‘This is wrong,’ it would have made all the difference in the world,” recounts Rose.

“One very brave white male officer raised his hand,” she says. “He had to be brave; this was a room full of officers. He told her: ‘I wanted to say something. I wanted to stop my friend from doing this. But I was afraid if I did I would be called” female body parts.

He was “quite graphic about what female parts,” says Rose, “and then he went on to list all the other things that had happened to male officers who had stuck up for females on the force.”

When he had finished, Rose asked him: “ ‘What did you give up?’ He choked up. ‘I could not be soft,’ he said. ‘I could not be kind. I could not be human.’ ”

For white women in the seminar, this is a model of oppression they can easily identify with. And for white men with any sensitivity, it sheds light on the way sexism scars victims as well as perpetrators. It illuminates, Rose says, the way all forms of oppression scar “targets” as well as “non-targets.”

Near the end of the draining day, Rose asks seminar participants to stand on one side of the room if they have been “targets” of a particular oppression and on another side of the room if they are “non-targets” of it:

* “If even one parent attended college . . . “ she says, “stand here.” The room divides; she asks everyone to think of the missed opportunities . . . the frustration that ensued if their parents didn’t go to college. If their parents were working class, she tells these non-teaching university employees, they had only a 7% chance of attending college and becoming a university professor. This is an expression of class oppression in our society, she says. You may have the talent, but if you don’t have the money, you don’t have the same opportunities.

* “Raised in a single-parent, female-headed household, stand here.” Again, the room divides. She asks them to think of the consequences: latch-key children waiting for a mother who has to work late, eating alone, losing a childhood to care for younger brothers and sisters. Remember being a child and “your mother coming home at night exhausted,” having to support the family that an absentee father won’t, Rose says. This, she says, is an expression of sexism, women left with the responsibility of raising children but today making 64 cents for every dollar a man earns.

* “Jewish, this side of the room, not-Jewish this side of the room.” The group is reminded of the Gentile woman in another workshop who told Rose: “I don’t see what all the hullabaloo is about. I love Jewish culture, the food, the music, the dancing at the weddings. I’d love to be a Jewish mother.” Rose’s reply: So be a Jewish mother. “And by the way, it’s 1943.”

* “Suffered abuse as a child . . . did not suffer abuse as a child.” She reminds the divided room that abuse is part of “adultism,” the universal oppression of children. And without fail in the workshops she conducts--for colleges or police departments--tough white cops, white university administrators, white college jocks line up on the side of the targets, along with Asians, blacks and Latinos.

At some point, virtually all participants indicate they have been the target of some form of oppression. And as they stand, Rose asks them to “look into each others eyes . . . and make a human connection.”

There are seldom any dry eyes, rarely any steady lips.

Those attending her sessions are not self-selected. They usually are ordered to attend by employers concerned about tensions in a work force increasingly characterized by ethnic, racial and sexual diversity.

“Whites know what oppression is,” Rose says. “Look how many white people cross over to the target side on the issue of child abuse.”

Citing psychologist John Bradshaw, who says “most people forget the abuse as a strategy for survival,” Rose says of her sessions’ participants: “If, somehow, you can get people to drop the postures, to feel the pain of their own oppression under adultism or whatever, pulling them across to see racism is much easier.”

She draws on various sources for concepts for her workshops: “I steal from everybody,” Bradshaw’s work on the family, especially; and the ideas of the late Ricky Sherover Marcuse (the widow of Marxist theorist Herbert Marcuse), a San Francisco area consultant, famed for her workshops on unlearning racism.

“Racism, sexism--all forms of institutionalized oppression--are passed on from non-target group to non-target group,” Rose says.

By definition, she says, it becomes institutionalized when attitudes toward a chosen group are in the “national consciousness, when it is reinforced in the social institutions and when there is an imbalance in social and economic power” between targets of oppression and perpetrators.

Pettigrew and other social scientists agree that whites are harmed by racism but they are unaware of it. And if a tree falls in the forest and nobody hears it. . . .

Precisely because of that denial, Pettigrew and others believe racism must be attacked systemically.

Rose’s approach is “too clinical,” says Norman, the UCLA professor and corporate race relations consultant. “I’m a behaviorist. It makes more sense to change behavior than to get to people’s psychic pain. There has to be a system of penalties and rewards in the workplace. . . .”

The social theory underlying Norman’s approach is this: People are fundamentally conformists. If the environment they operate in--the corporate world or society at large--tolerates racist behavior, people behave accordingly; if penalized for it, the majority won’t.

If seminars like Rose’s “help white people work through problems, feel better about themselves, be a little less hostile, that’s all to the good,” Pettigrew says. “But it’s an aspirins and Band-Aids approach. . . . I learned long ago that attitudes are much more likely to follow, rather than precede, significant change.”

Rose agrees. Her seminars are not meant to supplant the systemic change Norman and Pettigrew seek; it is adjunct therapy. If an institution is trying to implement an affirmative-action policy to remedy discrimination, the entire work force needs to understand the need for it and their stake in it, or they are potential saboteurs, she says.

Whites may think the civil rights movement and affirmative-action policies are just for “victims” of racist oppression, Rose says. But that view is full of “patronization and condescension.” They need to “fight oppression because of what it does to them . . . because it is consistent with their sense of justice,” she says.

That was the conclusion of the President’s 1968 report on civil disorders: The problem of race in America is a problem created, maintained and condoned by white America. The Kerner Commission, which issued that report, urged the nation to “turn with all the purpose at our command to the major unfinished business of this nation. . . . It is time to make good the promises of American democracy to all citizens--urban and rural, white and black, Spanish-surname, American Indian, and every minority group.”

Twenty-one years later, a white male named Sean Hogan, a USC junior, sits at a campus restaurant and says: “I look around this campus and wonder if it’s really 1889 or 1989. Racism here is bad.”

Hogan, an English major, is president-elect of USC’s chapter of Phi Gamma Delta fraternity, which was sanctioned earlier this year for distributing a leaflet deemed racist by school officials. It advertised a slave auction, bearing a picture of what once was the frat mascot: The Fiji-man--a caricature of a dark-skinned island native.

The flyer--crafted by a white freshman from the Midwest who had attended only private schools, was under deadline pressure and did not know that the Fiji-man mascot had been banned as racist years earlier by the fraternity’s international office--went out without approval, he explains. The auction’s point, he insists, was simply to have “girls bid and pledge money for a guy to come over and help them wash cars or clean.”

To make amends for its flyer, Phi Gamma Delta arranged to have Rose conduct a diversity seminar for two members from each fraternity on campus.

It was not one of her more successful efforts, Rose says.

Hogan says that 15 of the 25 people who came stayed; the feedback he got from them “was positive.”

But the atmosphere at USC, overall, is “unbelievable . . . it’s not just black-white, but religious bigotry--anti-Semitism is pervasive . . . sexism. It seems like things are getting worse, not better,” Hogan says.

He says he hears “people say very rude, very obnoxious, insulting statements, all the time,” about Asians, blacks, Jews and other racial, religious and ethnic minorities. “How do I feel about it? I feel bad, because I hear the same type of words about my brother and it upsets me.” (His brother has Down’s syndrome.) Praising Rose’s seminar, he says it “makes you look at people, no matter who they are, as people.”

Bart Holladay is Phi Gamma Delta’s current president. He believes fraternities provide a substitute identity for white males who have lost their sense of ethnicity. “The fraternity ritual is kind of a white, American thing. I’m white, but what does that mean,” when white culture in America is so transparent? “Well, I’m a white Fiji. My father was a Fiji before me. I can relate to that.”

Holladay is a 21-year-old history major, who identifies himself as Slavic. He attended private boarding schools most of his life and grew up in a well-to-do family from Boston’s Beacon Hill. It’s hard, he says, to buck peer pressure and challenge racist behavior.

“I’m working with this (black) guy who started this group on campus called Diversity Encouragement Advisers,” he says. “He called me up and said he wanted to make his presentation to the interfraternity council and that he wanted me to introduce him to the other presidents at the next meeting. I said great. I like to get up and say things anyway. This will show I’m involved.”

Then it hit him: “What about all those guys. I’ve heard them say things, make comments, slurs,” says Holladay, who speaks Japanese and plans to work in Asia after graduating. “God, I thought, are they going to think I’m just some bleeding heart, some blank-lover. That sort of hit me. But it’s a matter of character. . . . I’m not ashamed to think what I think. So I had to jump that hurdle.”

He introduced his fellow student.

Holladay, who attended Rose’s USC workshop, says, “To really raise awareness, make a difference, the type of thing Lillian does needs to be taught from kindergarten on.”

Nothing could be worse, counters Pierre L. Van Den Berghe, an anthropology and sociology professor at the University of Washington and author of several texts on comparative race and ethnic relations.

He thinks seminars on diversity exacerbate America’s preoccupation with race: “I think what is needed in American society is less and less race categorization of people. I would apply that across the board. I’m opposed, for example, to race-based affirmative action. It constantly rubs people’s nose into it and makes them act in a race-conscious manner, which perpetuates and aggravates the problem. I believe in affirmative action . . . but it should be based on class.”

Domination, he says, “is by no means based on race only. I think class domination aspects are much more important than race aspects.”

Many social problems that resulted from “blatant racial discrimination can now be perceived in terms of class,” says Hubert G. Locke, director of the William O. Douglas Institute in Seattle and a University of Washington professor. But the “roots” of most of these problems, “now discussed in terms of class are in fact racial,” Locke says, countering Van den Berghe’s argument.

Most white Americans prefer to think of racists as a “kind of fringe element in the society,” Locke says. He points to “the Klan, the Order,” and other white supremacist groups suspected in the recent rash of Southern mail bombings that killed a white federal judge and a black civil rights attorney but adds, “If one confuses the problem of racism with outfits like that alone, one fails to perceive that racism cuts across a much wider swath of our society. It is in many ways a drain on a major segment of our society,” affecting public policy decisions.

If white Americans, as many social scientists contend, are unaware of the damages done to them by racism on a psychological level, its social and economic costs are evident, others say.

Challenging Van den Berghe’s position, Pettigrew says racism is “wrapped up” in most of the nation’s social problems.

He, for example, accuses the administrations of Presidents Ronald Reagan and George Bush of creating millions of homeless people, in part, by “playing on racism to support their wholesale withdrawal of support for the poor.” This was done by unfairly portraying welfare recipients as “predominantly lazy, black women who were unmarried with 12 children,” he says. In fact, blacks represent only a “tiny percent of those on welfare,” most of whose recipients are white. And over “half of the homeless are white,” he says.

It will be interesting to see, he adds, “what happens to any money that is freed up from reduction in defense spending,” because of the thawing of the Cold War. “A lot of it has got to go to debt reduction. . . . Then there may be a possibility of money for social programs again.”

But will that money, for example, go toward ending the capital gains tax for the rich, as President Bush wants, or social programs? That, he says, will be “an interesting early 1990s conflict,” shaped considerably by perceptions of race.

Finally, Chene believes two fundamental things have to happen before the individual and institutional effects of racism can be reduced.

Minorities, he says, must give up their posture of “victimization.” After years of powerlessness, they internalize this attitude and “continually blame others” for their problems. Whites, meanwhile, must move past their denial about racism. They must stop saying racism is a “historical problem,” for which they are not personally responsible.

“In a sense, I think one way to undo history is for everyone to assume responsibility,” he contends. “We have to learn to apologize to each other.”