A Party, a Conversation, and a Long Silence

Not long ago, I found myself at a celebration for a friend.

Photo by Gama. Films on Unsplash

Beautiful home. Warm energy. People I was happy to be around. The kind of night where you're genuinely glad to be where you are.

At some point I ended up in conversation with three white men—guys I'd met before, easy enough to talk to. I'm white too, for context.

It had been a while since we'd seen each other. One of them remembered that I used to work as a therapist. He asked if that's still what I do.

It's not. So I told them a little about what I do now. I started an organization—Hello Whiteness. Drawing on Narrative Therapy, we work with groups, organizations, and families to examine how whiteness shapes us. What it means. How it shows up in the ways we come together, the patterns we enact, what we treat as "normal." Mostly, we help white folks get in touch with their relationship to race—starting from the premise that in the U.S., none of us—not even white people—get to opt out of race.

One of the men leaned in.

"White people and grace?" he asked.

"No," I said. "Race."

"Grace?" he asked again.

"Race. W-h-i-t-e-n-e-s-s." I slowed down, enunciated more carefully.

That seemed to land. So I kept going—maybe a little too eagerly, in hindsight.

I don't remember every word, but it went something like this: I've spent much of my life trying to understand my own relationship to race and racial injustice. And I've found a useful place to start is at the beginning—whiteness itself. White people bought into this made up identity, and that's a lot of how we got here. Whiteness still impacts everyone in this country—in wildly different ways, depending on who you are. It was built to create racial inequity. And that's still what it does.

We look honestly, I told them, at how what we learned from whiteness can get in the way of who we actually want to be—the values we want to live out, the impact we want to have. Our work invites people to name that influence out loud, and support as they figure out what to do about it.

I looked between the three white faces in front of me. They stared back. Visibly uncomfortable.

Most people might've taken that as a cue to stop. I didn't—not yet. I tried to make it more relatable. More human.

I told them a personal story. About a moment when my own relationship with whiteness got in the way of showing up for a Black friend. I'd watched another white person treat her in a way I could only attribute to race. My friend agreed—it was racist. And when she looked to me for support, I wanted so badly to show up. To call it out. To be the white person who wouldn't let it slide.

But my own discomfort and fear got in the way. I couldn't sit with whiteness without drowning in it, without going quiet. That's what I'd been taught, without ever calling it that—stand with whiteness, even when it costs the people you love.

I wasn't the friend I wanted to be—it cost me too. I had to figure out how to repair that, and show up differently. I told these three men that.

They kept staring. Silently.

I was reaching now, looking for a thread to pull them back in. I got a little curious. I offered a question, something like: did you grow up like me—like most white people I know—not talking about race? Or thinking about whiteness?

They mumbled quick responses, looking unsure. No, they didn't talk much about race. They didn't grow up thinking about whiteness much at all.

That's pretty much where their responses ended. We were back to the silence. And the discomfort.

I kept going, explaining one of the lessons I picked up as a therapist. How when we're not aware of what's shaping us—like whiteness—it can be hard to show up meaningfully when it surfaces. For others. For ourselves. For what we say we value.

That's what happened with me and my friend, I told them.  And I've seen it in myself again and again. There's a gap in how I actually show up and how I want to show up for the people I care about. And it has to do with whiteness.

There’s a gap in my own understanding of how whiteness influences me, even when I swear it doesn't. Even when I wish it didn't. It's something I'm still working on. For myself. Alongside other people.

I paused. Looked at their faces again, trying to read where this had taken them. Nothing. Just more silence. More discomfort.

And something hit me in that moment—something I've noticed before. We were four white people, standing in the home of their long-time Black friend, gathered to celebrate another mutual Black friend. Race wasn't somewhere outside that room.

It was in the room. In the moment we were marking. It was in the friendships that had brought us there, in the history behind them. In the very air between us.

And yet the idea that another white person might actually name that out loud? It seemed unthinkable. Uncomfortable in a way that shut the whole thing down.

That's when the conversation ended.

Not rudely. Not with an argument. No dramatic exit. These three initially warm, talkative white men just... went quiet.

That night, I witnessed a pattern I've encountered more times than I can count.

When my work comes up with people of color, I usually get recognition. Curiosity. A kind of yes, and energy. Like something they've long known is finally being named out loud. By someone who looks like me.

When it comes up with well-meaning, friendly white people? A quiet, gracious exit. Nearly every time.

I'm not surprised by this anymore. But I haven't stopped paying attention to it. Because I think that silence is doing something.

I've come to see silence as a choice—not an absence, but an action. And when white people go quiet the moment whiteness gets named, that silence looks like something. To me, it looks like standing with whiteness—even when we don't intend to. It looks like protecting a story we tell about ourselves. It looks like keeping the whole arrangement intact, just by not saying a word.

I'm not saying this to condemn anyone. Not anyone at that party, or anyone reading this.

I've been that white person. I know that silence from the inside—the pull of it, the way it can feel safer, easier, more polite. How it can feel like the right thing, sometimes the only thing you know how to do, even when you're standing face to face with something you know is deeply wrong. Like racism.

So I write this to help interrupt that pattern. That silence. In myself, first. At the party with those three white guys. And in the hope that something here lands for someone else too.

Because I've come to know that we white folks don't get to be neutral when it comes to race—and especially when it comes to whiteness. Every moment offers us a choice point: who am I going to be right now? How am I going to show up?

This is me—a white person in the U.S.—trying to choose something different.

Moment by moment. Post by post. Conversation by conversation.

Even the uncomfortable ones.