Shrinking tall white guys

["Ian Murray" <seamus2001@xxxxxxxx>]

Published on Friday, June 15, 2001 in the Minneapolis Star Tribune
An Open Letter to the Tall White Guys:
Too Consumed by Your Own Privilege to Notice Who I Am
by Syl Jones

You work with me nearly every day. But to say that you know me would
be incorrect. I'm the woman who ultimately stands between you and your
dreams of how the world should really be. And I want you to know that
I'm on to you.
I'm the professional woman in the next office, the secretary down the
hall, the girl who cleans your home, the peer who sits next to you at
the board meetings. I'm the one who stands beside you in the campus
cafeteria, who counsels students, or patients, or home buyers, or
social work clients. We work together but separately because you are
too consumed by your own privilege to notice who I am, in my heart.

Yes, I can sense your delight when I'm being charming, as I've been
taught to be in front of men. But your amusement is tinged with
suspicion and trepidation. Your smile is tight-lipped, your body
tense, even as you chuckle at my unpredictable sense of humor. In
private, you seem to appreciate the keen observations I make about our
business, but you often stare wide-eyed at me when I'm speaking, as if
you'd never heard a woman think out loud before in a linear fashion.

We are friends, in a way, but we can never expand that peer-to-peer
connection beyond a razor-thin collegial facade. Because when you get
together with the other TWGs -- tall white guys who used to rule the
world -- your suspicions of me come flooding forth in a torrent of
misplaced boyhood fears. You'll be quick to protest that the TWG
concept is just another stereotype, but you are wrong. Unfortunately,
I have the scars to prove it.

The TWGs talk down to me or over me or through me, or around me, and
you follow suit. They roll their eyes or rudely sigh aloud if I deign
to contradict them, no matter how gently, and you sit silently staring
at the floor. They even claim my ideas as their own, interrupt my
comments, tune out when I'm not on their precise wavelength, snicker
at the observations I make. And that's not all.

Together, you and the other TWGs shut me out of key decisions,
attempting to nullify my authority. You send conspiratorial e-mails to
each other about issues that directly impact my job, planning your
next moves in a game that I am too busy working to take notice of. You
gather for secret lunches, buttonhole each other on the sidewalk, in
the men's room, the gym, the athletic club dining room. You whisper
and stare, or you talk loudly and back-slap, congratulating each other
on the dubious achievement of avoiding open and honest communication.

I've been to business or medical or law school just like you, and I've
got credentials that are as good as the ones you frequently tout. What
I don't have is a raging ego, a killer instinct, or a penis. I mention
the latter because you don't have to study Freud to recognize the
importance of size in your world. It shows in the way you crowd
shorter men to emphasize your height. It comes out in that
gee-I-pity-her look you throw toward women who are overweight or don't
otherwise fit your imperial standards of beauty. And in the curious
way you deal with men of color, who may dress like you but somehow
aren't cut from the same cloth. They seem to threaten you in ways that
surpass understanding, ways that I find amusing.

Not that you have to be tall or white or even a guy to be a TWG. They
actually come in all sizes and colors and both genders. The short
ones, the ones of color and the women who emulate you are three times
as obnoxious. They know they've got to prove beyond a shadow of a
doubt that they belong in the world of TWGs despite their obvious
deficiencies, and they work hard at being the kind of double-talking
backstabbers of whom you can be proud.

You're probably feeling a sudden craving for the sports page right
about now. But before you turn away, I just want to ask if you treat
your mother, your wife or, God forbid, your daughter this way? Do you
dismiss them with a wave of your TWG hand? Do you teach them to be
charming, to smile pleasantly, while protecting your professional or
social interests? Do you talk endlessly and incessantly about your
plans, your problems and your dreams while ignoring theirs? In short,
are you a royal pain in the butt at home as well as at work? And how
does it feel to know that this is what your wife and your daughter
face every day from someone who looks a lot like you?

We all know you are blissfully unaware of what you're doing. That's
part of your prerogative: to not notice the disastrous impact you can
have on others, to see only what you want to see, to marginal ize the
rest of the world. Perhaps you learned this from your father, the TWG
who taught you all that you know and who treated your sister with
studied indifference. Whatever. We grow weary of your arrogance.

We want you to know that the world you survey from on high is changing
faster than your failing eyesight can detect. Do you spy that small
but growing band of unappreciated and mistreated women on the horizon?
We are the people who really run the world, who do the work that makes
life worth living. Soon, very soon, we will be marching your way,
bringing our intuition and our anger along with our compassion to a
boardroom, a clinic, a classroom, a hospital or an all-staff retreat
near you. And, when we finally arrive, it's safe to say that based on
the way we've been treated, we'll be taking very few TWGs as
prisoners.

Syl Jones, of Minnetonka, is a playwright, journalist and corporate
executive.