Work Force Diversity : Trading Places : Advice for Those in Reverse Integration Situations: Just Relax and Go With It

It’s your first day at the new job, and you’ve noticed something different. It’s you. Your co-workers and your boss are not of your gender or background. You’re a white male.

Kevin O’Gorman, one of the few white employees--and the only white reporter--at the Voice & Viewpoint, a San Diego newspaper that covers the African American community, has some advice for someone caught in the process of reverse integration: Just relax--it worked for me, it can work for you.

“I don’t think they have to worry,” O’Gorman said. “Maybe I’m just lucky, but I’ve never been made to feel I’m especially white.”

O’Gorman joined the Voice & Viewpoint to broaden his view of the world beyond what he picked up in Catholic schools and the New York borough of Queens. And O’Gorman figures he’s getting a jump on learning about the multiracial workplace, where everyone has to work together to stay afloat in an increasingly tough business world.

“You learn to deal with it for the simple reason (that) it’s the future,” O’Gorman said.

For Pat Lawlor, the future is now. Lawlor is the lone white lawyer at the black-owned firm of Harrison, Taylor & Bazile, which has a dozen attorneys in general civil law practice at offices in Oakland and San Diego. He was introduced to the firm when he and a black classmate in law school conducted a study to show that women and minority-owned businesses were not getting a fair share of government work.

The law is the law, black or white, Lawlor said, but the real differences are in style and language. Black attorneys, he found, dress more stylishly than white attorneys. And when talking to each other, black attorneys engage in what basketball players call “trash talking” or “puffing,” good-natured joking with a slight put-down edge.

To fit in, Lawlor has learned to adapt. “If I have to, I can speak black,” Lawlor said. “I can do street talk.”

Sondra Thiederman, a San Diego consultant in cross-cultural communications, said the issues and potential conflicts are the same whether it’s a white-owned business learning to accommodate people of color or a minority-owned firm coping with white employees.

If there are language differences, the chances for things going afoul multiply, Thiederman said, but often people speak different languages even when they ostensibly use the same one.

Thiederman said workers who make cultural blunders are “innocently inept.” She advises co-workers to look for common ground, be aware of different perceptions about the relationship between the individual and the group and, yes, don’t sweat the small stuff.

“That Korean business owner and that white male worker from Ohio,” she said, “all want the same things: human dignity, social support and physical comfort.”

Still, differences in background can cause more than a few unsettling moments in otherwise stable relationships. For example, Lawlor was once asked what kind of cake he preferred, and he answered--with no intention of double meaning--”Chocolate.” After a moment of uneasiness, people started laughing. Another time, one of Lawlor’s colleagues made a sarcastic crack about an attorney of Irish descent before he realized that Lawlor is also Irish.

Lawlor’s view of such slips: No harm, no foul.

Lawlor said he is considering writing something about his experiences as a white man in a black business. The trick, he said, is to neither pretend race differences do not exist nor dwell on them. “Color is superficial,” he said. “If everybody is working together, race doesn’t have to be a problem.”

Some organizations, both private and public, are taking steps to help white workers not feel left out in a world of diversity, the scorned losers of a cultural revolution.

As part of a diversity effort begun in 1991 for its work force of 10,000, the San Diego municipal government is trying to teach a new brand of teamwork and consensus management, rather than the old “one up, one down” style, diversity project manager Danelle Scarborough said.

“We’re not just changing the power structure,” Scarborough said, “we’re changing the power paradigm.”

White men, she said, are being told they will still be able to get promotions under diversity. And women and people of color are being assured that what is oppressive in the American workplace is not skin color or gender, but the heavy-handed “me boss, you worker” attitude, regardless of who is in charge.

“We tell them that if we took all the white males out of the organization, there would still be oppression,” Scarborough said.