What is it like for a white man to be a minority?

I can say with confidence that I have never experienced discrimination because of my race.

The only thing that springs to mind is that I have heard a few comments about 'white boys', usually made light-heartedly in connection with ability to dance.

If I was black such things would probably be termed 'micro-aggressions', but since I'm white, they weren't--and I didn't take them that way and usually appreciated the humor in whatever was said.

And once, there was a very attractive Mexican girl who told me once that she liked 'brown skin' like hers.

I guess that's a mild form of racism, but I didn't feel that broken up about it. (I don't relate, though: to me, an attractive woman is an attractive woman, no matter what her color. Personal connection is what matters most. And that's hard enough to find without putting racial restrictions on top of that!)

Otherwise,

• I've been harrassed by the police(numerous times) and denied jobs, but I never thought for a second it was due to the color of my skin. 
• I've had to overcome the mindset of coming from a really poor white family(poor people just think differently about themselves and their possibilities than middle class or rich people) in order to achieve some modest modicum of success. But, thankfully, I didn't have to overcome prejudice on top of that.
• I've had managers follow me around supermarkets to watch out in case I was shoplifting--but that wasn't because of my racial make up, it was because I actually was shoplifting.

But there is one thing that happened to me once that gave me food for thought. Food for alot of thought.

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In my twenties, I registered at a temporary job agency and got a temporary job working at what I believe was some kind of insurance company. It was quite a low-paying job, though better than minimum wage...and it was also the most tedious, monotonous, mind-shatteringly dull job I'd ever done(or have done since.) Believe you me, I would rather work slinging burgers than work in this place again, which was essentially going through TENS OF THOUSANDS of credit card receipts, check stubs and invoices, searching for one or two names that I would then copy and file in a different file.

The fact that it was dull was one thing. But I was the only white guy there. I met my boss, who was black and I hardly noticed. When I got to the small cramped office I shared with my colleagues, I realized they were all black. OK, I thought, no biggie. And it wasn't. Nobody treated me badly or anything like that. We all did our boring, repetitive job.

The only thing was, I was completely ignored. No, "Hi's", no "hey mans", no 'what's ups' or "howyadoins" or  none of the normal meaningless niceties that grease the gears of everyday routine American existence.

And that was weird. 

All my colleagues would talk and talk--usually about quite ordinary and frankly not very interesting things--it nearly always seemd to revolve around other people's sex lives. Gossip.

So it's not that I really wanted to join in in the conversation: or that I even could, not knowing who they were talking about.

If they said something funny and I chuckled, I was still invisible.

But being shut out of everything had a weird effect on me psychologically. I started feeling that everyone was ignoring me because I was white.

And, to be honest, they probably were: everyone knows that America is sort of 'self-segregating', it was something I really started noticing in college. What is a truth that is often neglected is that it's not only whites segregating themselves--minorities also segregrate themselves. It's part of the weird racist curse America is under. Maybe it's not only America, actually. Maybe people do this anywhere.

But anyway.

So they were just doing what everybody always does: segregate themselves. Not mistreating me or anything.

Just, you know, putting up the invisible barrier.

This had a weird effect on me.

I started to yearn for acceptance, aware of how silly that was. I started feeling like I should, I don't know, show them a picture of my ex-girlfriend from the summer before (who was black) or point out that I did have some black friends, my best friend was not black but was Pakistani, things like that.

. I started feeling like I should slip into black slang, but then realized that I had no idea how to really speak black slang..

And then I started thinking that the whole situation in my head was utterly comical.

At the same time it was sad. Here I was, there they were: nobody was malicious towards anyone: we sat in the same room and did the exact same boring job--we had at least that in common...but we weren't able to connect.

There was one woman who was a little friendlier I recall but we didn't always work together. Her smile would definitely brighten up my day.

At the same time, I thought, well why? Because the ironic thing was, I think if all of them had been white, or if I had been black with them, I would have been TOTALLY bored by them. 

And I was aware of this, too.

If they had been white or me black, I don't know if I would have had much to say to them. And I might have despised them. After all, I had been in working situations in which I didn't really relate to my colleagues before.

But because they were black and I was white, I wanted to be accepted by them. 

And that was just weird. I wish I could say that it didn't bother me, but I have to admit that it did. It bothered me that I was clearly an outsider; and it bothered me that it mattered to me.

Now if I had a bigger, more gregarious personality, I probably could have broken through that barrier. Like I've known others to do. But it's always the big, gregarious personalities.
Im actually quite shy(although I do have a persona as a teacher and public speaker that is loud and funny, it's not really me) so I couldn't really do it.

After a couple of weeks I found a better-paying job and left the company. But I have thought of the expereience many times since.

I was never discriminated against there, and I want to make that clear.  Never a victim of racism.

For that one brief period I was a minority at work, though. And I think I can say I was treated like a minority, insofar as I was treated slightly differently only because of my race.

It was uncomfortable and definitely a really profound lesson on human behavior.

Written on April 5th, 2016