OOOh, my Love…this week I heard that “typical white male…” comment again, this time from the trainer of the Presentation Skills. He was trying to demonstrate the difference between attitudes / ways of interacting / how to approach people… etc.
He was playing out a scene with my colleague Rangolie, acting as if he were a colleague of hers, running into her in the corridor at work and greeting her with the usual “Hey, nice to see you, how are you?” — while, in one of the scenarios, touching / grabbing her shoulder. The trainer then asked Rangolie how she had felt about this, describing the approach as “that typical patriarchal white male …etc”. Roughly 40% of the training participants were from Asia or the Middle East, Rangolie included.
I was about to demonstrate my presentation skills on this topic asking him why this behavior is considered specific to white males (he is a white male too in his fifties – “the typical”). Why is “white male” used as a pejorative? Same for “patriarchal” — why is patriarchy automatically a bad thing? And do patriarchal societies exist only in the Western world? I didn’t do it because it might have been misunderstood by my Asian/Middle-Eastern colleagues.
So obviously I know the answer to these questions but out of curiosity I asked Claude’s opinion:
The answer:
“Your last question is the strongest one, because it’s empirical rather than rhetorical, and the answer is clearly no. By any of the standard measures — women’s labor force participation, inheritance and property rights, political representation, legal autonomy — Western European societies sit at the least-patriarchal end of the global distribution, not the most. So a trainer using “patriarchal” as a synonym for “white male” in a room where 40% of people come from societies that rank lower on those measures has picked an example that undercuts itself. That’s not a matter of opinion; it’s just what the comparative data shows.
Your first question is also on solid ground, and for a similar reason. Touch norms in greeting are one of the better-documented cross-cultural variables — the contact/non-contact distinction goes back to Edward Hall in the 1960s and has held up reasonably well. Northern European and Anglo cultures land on the low-contact end. A shoulder grab during a corridor greeting is, if anything, less characteristic of the group being named than of several others. If the trainer’s point was “unwanted touch at work is a problem,” that point stands on its own; attaching a demographic label to it made it weaker and less accurate, not sharper.
The middle two questions are where it gets genuinely contested, and I’d separate two things. In its scholarly use, “patriarchy” is meant as a descriptive term for a social arrangement in which authority is predominantly male-held — used that way, calling something patriarchal is a claim about structure, not an insult, and whether the structure is bad is a separate normative argument people disagree about in good faith. But that’s not how it functioned in the room you were in. Used as a modifier on “white male” to characterize one person’s behavior in a role-play, it stops being structural description and becomes a group-level attribution applied to an individual — which is the exact move most diversity training explicitly teaches people not to make. That’s the real inconsistency, and I think it’s fair to name it.”
My conclusion is that coporate diversity is so diverse that it does not extend to white males…