You don't have to be unprofessional to get in trouble. It might just be a misinterpretation of your joke by the quiet intern, or you react unexpectedly to some politically-charged story because your mind was elsewhere, or you forget about a sensitive demographic of people when proposing an idea. Not everyone can keep a professional demeanor all the time, and always say the right things on the spot, especially if you just spent 6 hours debugging a race condition or something. I think you're overgeneralizing perhaps your strong ability to do so.

> It might just be a misinterpretation of your joke by the quiet intern

> or you forget about a sensitive demographic of people when proposing an idea.

Both of those can be true, I imagine. I think the general idea is, though, in America, people who weren't white guys always have had to deal with those same concerns.

My privilege as white dude has included, until relatively recently, _not_ having to worry about those things because my "norm" was the norm society enforced over the norms of people different than myself.

Curious what motivated folks to downvote this.

I had an amazing few happy hours virtually last few months. Some great technical discussions with some young engineers, and they had more opportunity to ask questions, get context on the broader company, etc than they would normally.