Intending to overcompensate is an effective method to actually treat them the way you should treat everyone.
I find it incredibly patronizing to actively pursue "okay, black guy is talking, let me me play everything up a little bit!" Yikes. Reminds me of kneeling to talk to a child in a baby voice when they're crying that borders on a weird manipulation.
If you have such a hard time giving people of other races equal footing and need a roleplay minigame like this to do it, please speak for yourself and not everyone else.
A good leadership + empathy trait is to recognize people who aren't able to get their word in, in general, and use some of your leverage to help them. This may be the one male substitute teacher on a team of professional women teachers, or the whitest kid in a Mexican school (my experience), or a woman in a male-dominated workplace, or a black guy on a team of east asians.
I'd rather be teaching that. That's the actual moral bedrock that you're trying to get at here but in the wrong way.
And once you realize this, you'll realize there are plenty of other people in meetings that don't have equal footing for all sorts of reasons, like the soft-spoken guy with low self-confidence, probably the most common in our field.
No, it doesn't, but this is generally speaking a perfect encapsulation of the "all lives matter" perspective, which is morally incorrect, usually not because of raw KKK level hatred or racism but instead simple ignorance of what unconscious bias and racism is really like for POC in America.
> I find it incredibly patronizing to actively pursue "okay, black guy is talking, let me me play everything up a little bit!"
This is also a common trope I've encountered time and time again. Some call it "racism of low expectations." The important distinction to make is that being an ally isn't patronizing, it's an active recognition of the reality of racism and unconscious bias that POC face in the workplace. The fact that you jump all the way to comparing it to speaking to a child in a baby voice says more about your own lack of empathy than an effective rhetorical attack on the position that "seeing color" as an ally is good and helpful.
I don't know you but your position is identical to a lot of people who think they aren't racist but I have observed act in a biased way, unconsciously.
The playing field isn't level. Doing nothing aids the status quo, and the status quo is systemic racism against POC.
You may have learned to cope but not all coping is equal and not everyone can. Again, the argument isn't for baby talk. It's for adult strategies for adult issues. Be it ensuring that a woman can have her voice heard in a meeting or an autistic employee can have a desk in a non-busy part of the office. Non-patronizing, reasonable, and aware methods to improve inclusivity and be an ally.
An ally doesn't take over the fighting entirely, they simply aid.
What I do struggle with is being able to get a word in edgeways during group conversation, and that can be solved quite easily with a good team leader inviting quiet voices to speak. This is where I need the most help because real life isn't a neatly nested series of conversation threads where replies accurately link back to the quoted text, life is life and life is a mess.
Life is a mess hence why I don't think we should pretend otherwise. You don't want help, cool! Some do. I've been told this explicitly. If I act on a general rule of thumb of keeping the dialogue open, that would mean people like you can say "no thanks, I don't need help," and that's that.
When you have the empathy I described, you don't need a custom rule engine for black people or women or indians. You realize that people don't have equal footing even among people you would think are equal peers. Nor a group of ten white twenty-year-old guys from the same suburb. Some of the individuals in that group may be enduring the full brunt of the suffering you're talking about. And there are groups where black men have the social power and have the power to cut others off, they don't need your white-guilt superhero help.
Most of us reading this aren't even the well-spoken social apex of the groups we're in and could be assisted by others with the empathy that I describe.
In another comment, you admit that you found yourself unintentionally talking over women at the workplace. Which can't be an easy thing to introspectively discover nor admit on a public forum.
Yet your reply re-focuses on POC, racism, KKK when my viewpoint generalizes over women, people of all races, people in your peer group, and groups of any composition.
Everything I'm saying here I've learned through conversations with POC and women coworkers. I want to comment in a way that convinces others to have those conversations. If we "ignore color," we never have those conversations.
The ask is to become aware of and fight against your own unconscious biases, nothing more.
This isn't in opposition to what I'm saying.
> not infantilized or demonized because of their skin color.
Good, we don't disagree.
So, unless you're operating off some kind of strawman of what a good diversity and inclusion initiative does, I think we're on the same page.