In a recent diversity training seminar, Coca-Cola told its employees to try to be “less white” as part of their “Better Together Initiative” in order to combat rising discrimination in the United States.

A Pew Research study reports that nearly 80 percent of Republican and nearly 70 percent of Democrat congressmen and women are very concerned about an increasing number of Americans who say they feel offended by derogatory language and certain behaviors.

An article in The New York Times stated that Homeland Security has determined the words “illegal alien” in reference to people who are not from this country are offensive and should be replaced with “noncitizen,” and the Department of the Interior wants the words “Native Americans” changed to “tribal people.”

So what’s behind this new pandemic sweeping the country about why “we the people” are feeling so offended? I have an opinion that is worth no more than anyone else’s, but the attempts to make minorities and cultural groups respected by the white majority appear to be failing miserably.

If compassion is what we want to achieve through a larger awareness of sensitivity, that’s a good thing, but it appears that fear of retribution is pressuring public officials to change what they have deemed to be offensive to some; yet many others think is just downright stupid.

An anonymous person of color recently blogged, “I bet that Colgate is already having internal discussion: How to rename whitening toothpaste because it is racist. Should we sell black charcoal toothpaste? … I think if we don’t stop this insanity, we will make things worse and have more hate and violence. This is my personal, subjective and out of context opinion. These days many white people are scared and say very strange things.”

If we huddle ourselves into separate racial and cultural groups, we fill the tank of discrimination with more fuel for the fire.

Having grown up in a white neighborhood wrought with fathers tossing racial epithets across picnic tables like they were burgers on the grill, I was kept ignorant from having compassion for the disadvantaged because their skin color was different from mine.

Then I became one of two white boys on an otherwise all black junior high school basketball team, and though we played to win together, there was an unspoken separation in the locker room that just seemed to be common in the mid-60s.

While teaching high school and coaching football and baseball, I learned that despite differences in colors and cultures, these kids were still kids in their struggles to assert themselves through their adolescence. I was a teacher to many and a father to some and the most beautiful moments in class and on the fields were celebrations of an all-inclusive color and cultural awakening of the human spirit. I’m saddened to think that these kindred experiences don’t often continue into adult society. The maturity of adulthood is a paradox in words. Kids of all ages behave maturely in multicultural and racially mixed situations unless they are taught to separate and even to hate by immature and irresponsible adults.

This all brings us to sensitivity workshops and diversity conferences, many of which address the issue of white privilege. Growing up in poverty and earning everything on my own, I didn’t understand that I had white privileges and I didn’t know how I was supposed to feel about it. Should I be ashamed? Should I apologize because I was born with my skin color? I had no sense of either feeling, but while I was delivering food at Thanksgiving years ago to inner-city families, an African American woman named Mrs. Clay cried in my arms as she thanked me for my generosity. I realized something at that moment while we stood in her small apartment with barely any heat. To have hope you will need to have help from the racial majority in your life, and the color of my skin had given me that advantage Mrs. Clay had never enjoyed.

Sociologists say that sensitivity training will help unite all Americans. Government officials are taking action to support this claim. I don’t believe politicians really care about bringing the people of this country together. They will say and do what’s necessary to gain the support of lobbyists and to attract the minority vote. I don’t think mega-businesses like Coca-Cola care about building a collective humanity more than they do selling their soft drinks. The hypocrisy in legislating respect for Native Americans or tribal people, if you will, is brutally obvious after their lands were stolen from them and they were forced to move onto government operated reservations.

What would this world be like if we were all color and culture blind? Do we really need governments and corporations to teach us how we should have respect for each other?

Feeling compassion toward minority groups cannot be taught in workshops or with seminars. It can happen if everyone steps over the lines that are drawn in the sand and we get to know each other as one human race. If you wonder what Coca-Cola meant by asking their employees to be “less white,” they specifically explained. “Be less oppressive. Be less arrogant. Be less certain. Be less ignorant. Be more humble. Listen and believe.”

Rather than direct these admirable virtues toward one race, why don’t we ask this of everyone? At the end of the day, we can agree that no matter the color of skin or the cultural heritage, we all have one basic thing in common.

We are all people of America and “we the people” are the only vaccine that can stop this potentially dangerous pandemic.

Rich Strack can be reached at richiesadie11@gmail.com.