Having Fruitful Conversations When You are in Majority Culture

We need to break through the majority culture worldview for the sake of the Kingdom.

I’m a white male who teaches at a prestigious college.

There’s much to unpack in that sentence, but it’s certainly a position of cultural power.

As a white male, I’m certainly representative of the majority culture in the contexts where I live. So, I think part of the question is: How is the conversation different when you, and those with whom you closely identify, are in members of the majority and thus in possession of cultural power?

In other words, and in my case, how does a white male have conversations about diversity and more?

First, We Have to Define the Conversation—and Decide Who Defines It

As a majority-culture person, the first point of discussion is allowing people to define the conversation differently than you. That may be difficult for man like me—some people have been members of the cultural majority their entire lives and know nothing else. They might be completely blind to their privilege or the many advantages that their status has brought them.

On the other hand, others might have always been a part of the cultural minority and so they’re coming into the conversation with their own set of observations and experiences.

It might require a bit of humility for those of us coming from majority contexts, but one of the most important things we can do in this stage is actually quite simple: listen. Don’t assume you have all the facts when you might only have them in part. Listen to people’s stories, ask good questions, and don’t hesitate to admit it when you’ve been proven wrong.

I’ve not always succeeded at that, though I want my impulse to be to try.

When they were in a racially divided moment, I asked African American evangelical leaders to come ...