Mike Whan, LPGA commissioner
I think if you want to stay uneducated, you can in any topic. I just had this conversation with a neighbor on a driving range actually where somebody said something about black lives matter and he yelled back, all lives matter. I said no offense, as a 52-year-old white man, when you respond all lives matter, you’re not listening, you’re talking. We got into this conversation on the driving range. Nobody is questioning whether your life has worth by saying black lives matter. It’s just you can’t comprehend what it must feel like to grow up in a society where you’re worried about whether or not your life has worth, especially in front of the people that we look to to keep us safe.
I said to him, you have black friends. Every one of your black friends can relate with a story where they were nervous in a police situation. I have zero, zero experiences like that. I’ve never worried about getting pulled over by a police officer and hearing my parents talk about ‘the talk.’ Every black friend I have can tell me about the talk, when their parents talked about 10 o’clock and 2 o’clock (on the steering wheel). Don’t make eye contact. Always keep your hands in vision. When somebody tells you that story, you realize that’s a life you completely don’t grasp. You can decide to not pay attention, but that’s just deciding to stay uneducated.
When I was a 25- or 26-year-old brand manager at Procter & Gamble in the late 80s, you went to diversity training at least once a month. … I went to these diversity training classes and they were always taught by people with diverse backgrounds. They always talked about how they don’t understand this. I remember thinking by the third training, I’m they. Every time they use the term they don’t understand, they’re talking about midwestern-born white males of privilege. I’m not exactly sure why, but after that training I went to the diversity group at P&G and said how do I become a licensed diversity trainer, because you’re going to have to put some people that look like me up at the front of the room as well because you’re giving really good examples that I don’t relate to. I need to tell some of my white male brethren, this is where my blind spot is. Getting trained to be a diversity trainer was one of the more enlightening things of my life. It changed my life probably forever.
One of the things we had to go to in this training process was an all-black church in Cincinnati. Just one Sunday. I remember thinking, how hard is that? I go to church anyway. I’ll knock that off my checklist. It’s a pretty interesting experience to first walk into a building where you are the only white guy. I remember walking into that church (service), which by the way lasted about four hours. The beginning was like a bake sale, everybody brought food and sat around and talked. When church was over, nobody left so I didn’t feel comfortable leaving. I just remember there was this really large woman named Berta who took me under her wing and had me sit next to her in the pew and introduced me to people. But it was really community, and church for me was not community. I was raised Catholic so church for me was sin relief. It was guilt relief. You felt guilty if you didn’t go, so you went. I didn’t do it to get in touch with other people or learning about other people’s woes. When the priest said one thing you said something back, you never thought about what you said back. It just showed me a different side.