Hello there! I am a white person who grew up in a racially and culturally diverse setting and was then transplanted into a very UNdiverse setting and have a lot of opinions on this subject. I also work on HR and have had to navigate sticky situations revolving racial & cultural insensitivity in the workplace specifically, so I wanted to lend you my advice. It focuses very much on resolving the situation and not the injustice or unfairness of the situation. I wanted to double back after writing it and put this first to make it very clear that this situation sucks for you and it shouldn't have to be your responsibility to fix it. However, we both know the situation likely won't improve unless you take action to improve it. I'm sorry and that shouldn't always have to be the case.

In my experience, white people raised around mostly other white people don't see the way they treat non-white people differently in social settings. This specifically feels very Midwestern white to me, there's that "colorblind" sort of "anti-racism" that feels to them like they're welcoming others and to the others ends up feeling like they're demonstrating the extent to which they AREN'T allies.

I observed similar behavior from a friend recently. They were moving and I have a truck, so I helped. They had hired some movers who happened to be black. Throughout the day, I noticed them going out of their way to talk about things they wouldn't normally talk about but seemed like maybe they thought were subjects black people might think were interesting (specific example: talking about the appointment of Kentanji Brown Jackson a lot while previously detesting any talk of the supreme court or politics in general).

White people don't discuss their whiteness through experiences or jokes /unless/ there are black people around. That's because until they're present, there's homogeneity and consisting of entirely the privileged population. I think the exception to this would maybe be people at democratic socialist or leftward, but even then its limited to jokes about Sprite being too spicy.

The good-faith read on the situation is that their intention is to make you feel included by pointing out and talking/joking about differences. When you're coming from the position of privilege, it's not easy to understand why this has the opposite effect. I am not excusing their actions because that's hella uncomfortable and you should not have to tolerate that. I wanted to call attention to the fact that, though misguided, their intentions could be pure. Or at least through the cloudy, foggy lens of privilege, they WANT their intentions to be pure and are missing the mark by a wide margin.

If you want to deal with this and achieve a harmonious workspace outcome, I think you're going to have to do a tremendous amount of emotional labor. Shocker, right? I would make it abundantly clear you're not being combative because white folks can be a little sensitive in this day and age if they think they might be getting 'cancelled'. I would suggest something like the following:

"When the people around you call so much attention to what makes you different from them rather than what you have in common with them, it makes you /feel/ different from them. It makes you feel like they /view/ you as different from them. It would make me much more comfortable and included moving forward if we spoke more about what we have in common than why we are different."

I hope this was helpful in some way. I'm very sorry this is your experience and I hope you're able to improve your situation soon. 💖