One of the first instincts many white people have when they begin to recognize racialized dynamics in society is a good one. We want perspective from people whose experiences differ from their own. We realize that if race and culture shape experience, then listening to people who are not white may help us understand what we have not had to see before. That instinct is not wrong. In many ways, it is necessary.

But there is a complication here that often goes unnoticed.

When white people rely primarily on friends, coworkers, neighbors, or acquaintances of color to explain race to us, process our confusion, answer our questions, and help us understand the world, the burden of white development gets placed onto the very people navigating those dynamics themselves. Many of us begin our learning journey assuming that other people will educate us, often without realizing that this expectation carries its own cost.

What we are asking for in those moments is not small. We are asking people to spend their time helping us process questions we could have begun exploring ourselves. We are asking them to revisit experiences that may be painful, frustrating, or deeply personal in order to make them legible to us.

We are asking them to translate cultural realities they navigate intuitively into language we can understand, often while managing our defensiveness, confusion, or need for reassurance along the way. Even when offered generously, that is emotional labor, intellectual labor, and relational labor. And when it happens repeatedly, the cumulative effect is that People of Color are asked not only to survive racialized dynamics, but to teach others about them too.

While many people of color generously do make space for those conversations, we should be honest about what that asks of them. Whatever the goodwill present in those conversations, that is not a sustainable or just model for formation.

If we want to grow in cultural competence, we have to do our own work. That means reading the books, listening to the podcasts, watching the documentaries, studying the history, learning the frameworks, and taking advantage of the many resources already available to us. It means committing ourselves to education rather than waiting for education to come to us through relationship.

But here is the part we often miss. Doing your own work does not only mean consuming content created by experts. It also means talking honestly with other white people. Whether we admit it or not, we know our own cultural dynamics. We know the assumptions, habits, anxieties, coded language, avoidance patterns, and inherited narratives that shape many white communities. We know how race is discussed, and just as importantly, how often it is not discussed, in the rooms we come from. Part of doing our own work is helping one another examine that honestly.

Step one – read, listen, study the stuff

Step two – find another white person to talk about the stuff with

This does not mean retreating into all-white conversations and calling that growth. We do not become culturally competent in isolation, nor do we mature without real relationships across difference. Friendships, partnerships, and communities that stretch beyond our own experience remain essential to growth.

However, when we do our own work first, we show up to those relationships differently and hopefully better. We show up less dependent on others to do our homework for us. We show up with more context, more humility, and more awareness of the complexity of the conversation we are entering. We become better friends, better coworkers, and better conversation partners because we have done the work.

There is, however, another danger worth naming. Some people begin doing the educational work and assume that knowledge itself is the goal. We read enough books, learn enough vocabulary, and understand enough theory that we begin to believe we are now competent.

We are not.

Reading about race is not the same as building meaningful relationships across cultural difference. Understanding anti-racism conceptually is not the same as learning how to navigate real human relationships with wisdom, humility, and grace. Knowledge without relationship is not maturity.

Knowledge is not the destination. It is preparation. It helps us show up better in the relationships where real growth happens, because cultural competence is not built merely by knowing the right ideas. It is built when understanding and relationship begin to shape one another.

In other words, part of becoming culturally competent is learning to do what some people call “white people work.” Not because the work belongs only to white people, but because white people cannot outsource the work of understanding whiteness.

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This past week, we kicked off the pilot cohort for the Project 2045 Skill Building Cohort. The project began last November but in some ways it felt like the real start. And aside from my awesome Bridgerton clip not working and a few opening nerves, it went really well.

That may sound like a small thing, but if I am honest, launching this cohort carried more weight for me than I expected. Project 2045 has lived for a long time as an idea, a conviction, a framework, and a hope. To finally gather people in a room and begin doing the work together felt significant.

What made the evening especially meaningful is that the room was filled with people I know to varying degrees. Friends. Colleagues. Trusted conversation partners. People willing to step into something new with me before there was much proof of concept beyond conviction and vision.

And they showed up with grace.

One of the first things we named together was something that resonated deeply across the room: many of us have not only never been taught how to talk about race and culture well, we have often been actively discouraged from doing so.

For so many people, silence was presented as politeness. Avoidance was framed as wisdom. Colorblindness was sold as virtue. But silence has not prepared us for the world we actually live in.

If anything, it has left many people anxious, underdeveloped, and unsure of how to engage across difference with honesty and courage.

That reality was present in the room. And if I am honest, I do not think I was the only one who came in a little nervous.

We also found ourselves navigating religious difference in the room almost immediately. That was not planned, but it was welcome. One of the things I hope this cohort becomes is a space where people can practice the kind of relational honesty that makes deeper conversations possible. Difference does not have to be a threat. Sometimes it is the very thing that creates the conditions for growth.

By the end of the night, we had begun moving into people’s personal experiences with race and culture, which is where the real work starts. We only scratched the surface there, and I will write more about that in a future post.

For this first session, the focus was mostly introduction, framing, and setting the table. And perhaps I set the table a little too thoroughly. I think I talked too much.

But that is part of piloting something new. You learn in public. You adjust. You refine. What matters most is this:

The room had energy.
The room had trust.
The room had curiosity.
The room had courage.

And now we get to begin the actual work of the Six Conversations.

That is where this gets exciting.

Because the goal of this cohort is not merely to help people understand ideas. It is to help people build the skills, confidence, and relational capacity to engage difficult conversations with honesty rather than performance or debate.

And apparently others are seeing the need too.

We already have two communities interested in running cohorts with us this fall and a publication of a major university ready to do an article on us.

That tells me what I have suspected for a while:

People know they need help with this.
They are hungry for frameworks.
They want spaces to practice.
They just need somewhere to begin.

This pilot cohort is that beginning. And I cannot wait to see where it goes.

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An Invitation

If these ideas resonate and you want structured support to understand them, Project 2045 is hosting Skill Building cohorts in 2026 that teach the conversation skills white people need for this moment. It is a space to build capacity, deepen self-awareness, and strengthen the muscles required for a shared multiracial future.

Check out cohort details and apply here.

Conversation and action is how change begins.

As Project 2045 begins to find a bit of momentum, I’ve noticed something unexpected. I spend a lot of time talking about the things in life that matter most. And almost none of us were ever trained to talk about them well.

That realization keeps showing up in different ways.

I think about how ineffective most of our early attempts at learning were. A sixth-grade sex ed class that barely prepared us for a deeply complex and highly sexualized world. Conversations about politics that quickly collapse into slogans or silence. The quiet shock of being handed a newborn and realizing how little anyone actually prepared you for parenting.

We are living inside some of the most formative, consequential parts of life with almost no shared language, no real practice, and very little guidance. And yet, these are the places that shape us the most.

Sex. Money. Family. Race. Culture. Politics.

These are not side topics. These are the terrain of our lives. And still, many of us were taught some version of the same rule: We don’t talk about that. Not here. Not at the table. Not in polite company.

There is something understandable about that instinct. Some experiences can only be learned by living them. No handbook can fully prepare you for everything you will face.

But I am no longer convinced that silence is the best we can do. Because there is a difference between mystery and neglect. There are parts of life that will always be complex. But there are also parts where we have simply failed to develop the skills, language, and confidence we need. And often, that failure is not accidental.

There are spoken and unspoken forces that keep us underdeveloped in these spaces.

Polite culture tells us not to make waves.
Family systems teach us to keep things looking “okay.”
Wider structures benefit when difficult conversations never happen.

Silence, in many cases, protects the status quo. And the status quo does not benefit everyone equally. So the question underneath Project 2045 is not just about race or culture, even though those are central. It is a broader question about our lives.

What would it look like for people to become competent, confident, and even fluent in the areas of life that matter most?

Not perfect. Not having all the answers.

But able to name our own story.
Able to listen to someone else’s experience without immediately reacting.
Able to stay in a conversation long enough for something real to emerge.

Because the goal is not simply to “talk about hard things.”

The goal is to build the kind of capacity that allows us to bridge across difference without collapsing into fear, performance, or avoidance. Race and culture in America are undeniably complex. No single framework is going to resolve that complexity. But that does not mean we are stuck.

We can get better.

We can learn how to locate ourselves in our own stories with honesty.
We can practice listening in ways that create space rather than shut it down.
We can develop language that helps us navigate tension instead of escaping it.

We can become people who are formed enough to engage what is actually in front of us. The alternative is what many of us have already experienced. A life where the most important conversations are the ones we never learned how to have. Project 2045 exists because that does not have to be the case.

And maybe the work in front of us is simpler than we think. Not easier. But simpler.

We start talking.
We learn how to listen.
We practice staying.

And over time, what once felt unspeakable becomes something we can carry together.

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I have been in enough rooms now to know when it is coming.

A public presentation. A conversation about race, culture, history. Often led by a Person of Color. The room leans in. Something lands. You can feel it. And then, almost on cue, a white person raises their hand and asks:

“So what do we do?”

It has become so predictable that I once leaned over to the person next to me and whispered, “Here it comes.” I counted it down in a whisper. Five. Four. Three. Two. One.

Right on time, the question came. “So what do we do?”

It is, in many ways, a good question.

At some point, I hope all of us, especially those of us who are white, arrive at that moment. The moment when we realize that the world we inhabit has been shaped by forces that have harmed others and benefited us. The moment when the question becomes personal. What is my part in this? What could I do?

That question signals awakening. It signals that something has shifted.

But it is also a problematic question. And not just a little.

Often, it is directed toward the very people who have been most impacted by the problem. A white person asking a Person of Color to provide the roadmap forward. In that moment, responsibility quietly shifts. The burden of solution lands on those who have already carried the weight of harm.

Yes, those voices matter. Deeply. But it is not their job to educate white people out of something white people created. It is a problem created within white culture that has consequences far beyond it. Which means the work of understanding, of unlearning, of reimagining, cannot be outsourced.

There is another layer to the question that is harder to name.

“So what do we do?” often carries an assumption. If I care enough, if I decide this matters, if I am willing to act, then I can help fix this. It is the quiet confidence that intention leads directly to impact. That awareness leads quickly to action. That action leads to resolution.

There is a kind of cultural arrogance in that. We have been formed to believe that showing up and wanting to help is enough. That complex problems yield to good intentions. That urgency is always virtuous. But what if the first step is not action? What if the first step is grief?

Grief for what has been lost. Grief for what has been taken. Grief for the ways systems have been built that advantage some at the expense of others. Grief for the ways we have participated, knowingly or not. Grief slows us down. It interrupts the impulse to fix. It creates space to actually understand. In most areas of life, we recognize this. We do not rush into solving something we barely comprehend. We listen. We learn. We sit with complexity. We allow ourselves to be changed by what we are beginning to see.

But when it comes to race, many of us have been formed differently. We have been taught, subtly but consistently, that we should have answers. That we should move quickly. That doing something is always better than doing nothing.

Sometimes doing something too quickly is just another way of avoiding what is real.

Project 2045 is, in some ways, my response to that question. Not the answer. One answer.

And I hope it is an answer shaped not by urgency alone, but by learning, by listening, and by grief. By the recognition that whatever emerges next must be held with humility. That none of us are solving this on our own. That we are participating in something much larger than ourselves.

The question still matters. “So what do we do?” But perhaps the better question, at least at first, is this: Who are we becoming as we learn to live in the world that is already arriving?

Because 2045 is not waiting for us to be ready. The future is coming. The question is whether we will meet it with the depth, honesty, and courage it requires.

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When we first conceived of Project 2045, I thought I knew what it was.

I gathered a group of people in Portland to help advise how I would launch it. Almost everyone in the room was a person of color, along with one white guy from Arkansas. These were not random voices. These were people who had walked with me, challenged me, shaped me. People who loved me enough to tell me the truth. Many of them are described in the autobiography posts on this Substack.

I came in with a plan for the project and a plan for the day.

Version 1.0 of Project 2045 was clear in my mind. A Substack. A podcast. Six conversations that I believed all white people needed to have with each other. I imagined gathering reflections, sharing insights, maybe even building something like an online community over time.

It felt thoughtful. It felt important. It also felt, in hindsight, very controlled. What I did not expect was how quickly that plan would be expanded. Within about fifteen minutes, my plan for the day was gone. When you put brilliant people in a room who care deeply about something, you do not get polite feedback. You get clarity. You get conviction. You get truth that cuts through whatever assumptions you brought in with you.

And what they told me was simple. My plan is not enough.

Before I say more about what they said, I need to name something that has been sitting with me for a long time. I have been in countless rooms where white people say, “We need to listen to voices of people of color.” I have heard it in organizations, in churches, in leadership spaces. There is often real energy around getting those voices to the table.

But a friend pointed something out to me recently that I cannot unsee. Listening is often where it stops. The implied next step is rarely followed through, which is actually doing what those voices say.

If even a fraction of the white individuals and organizations who claim they want to listen actually acted on what they heard, our world would look different.

So I made a decision going into that room. Project 2045 would become what this group said it should be. Not what I preferred. Not what felt easiest. Not what I had already built in my head. What they said.

That commitment mattered, because what they said pushed me in directions I did not want to go at first. The first thing they told me was that I needed to tell my own story. Not just ideas. Not just frameworks. My story. My racial autobiography.

To be honest, I did not want to do that. I especially did not want to do it in front of a camera, which is what they suggested. It felt vulnerable in a way that writing about concepts never does.

But they were right.

What has become the eleven Substack articles of my racial autobiography started in that moment. And even though I resisted it, it has opened something in me and in this project that I could not see at the time.

It turns out that people do not need another white person explaining race. They need to see what it looks like for a white person to do the work honestly, imperfectly, and in public. I am still not excited about the idea of putting that story on camera. But I am convinced that I need to follow through. That conviction comes directly from that room.

The second thing they told me was just as important. Information is not enough.

I could not just tell white people what conversations to have. I could not just offer insights or frameworks and hope something changed. If Project 2045 was going to matter, it needed to be about formation. It needed to help people actually grow.

That means working with others in learning how to be present in hard conversations. Learning how to sit with grief, anger, confusion, and defensiveness without shutting down. Learning how to hold space for others without centering ourselves. Learning how to stay when everything in us wants to leave.

In other words, it needed to be about becoming a different kind of person, not just thinking different kinds of thoughts. As someone with a background as a minister, this hit something deep in me. Formation. Holding space. Walking with people through change. These are not new ideas for me. They are at the core of how I understand my work in the world. And yet somehow, in my original version of Project 2045, I had left that part of myself on the sidelines.

I had made the project smaller than who I had potential to make it. I walked into that room thinking I had a solid plan. I walked out realizing I had been playing it safe.

What I received that day was not just feedback. It was a kind of commissioning.

This group saw something in me that I had not fully embraced. They saw a connection between what the world needs and how I am uniquely wired to respond to it. And they refused to let me settle for something less.

I cried several times that day. And several times after. Not because I felt criticized, but because I felt known.

There is a kind of love that affirms you as you are. And there is a deeper kind of love that calls you into who you could become. That room held both. I was tangibly loved. Deeply believed in. And also held to a higher expectation than I had set for myself.

I will never forget that day

Every time this project feels uncertain, every time it stretches beyond my comfort, every time I wonder if this is too much, I come back to that room. Project 2045 is no longer just an idea I had. It is something shaped by community, sharpened by truth, and grounded in a commitment to actually listen and act.

And because of that, it is bigger than I imagined.

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Welcome to Project 2045. We just crossed over 100 followers on Substack, just got our 501c3, and are preparing our first cohort. Things are moving. There are a lot of new people looking in, so we just wanted to get anyone caught up who may be new… or want a refresher.

Project 2045 begins with a conviction that may feel both obvious and risky to say out loud. Many white Americans already want a future where we flourish together across difference, but we do not yet have the confidence or competence to engage that reality in public. Too often, the fear of getting it wrong pushes people into silence, especially in a climate where the loudest voices are not always working toward shared flourishing.

At the same time, racism has not only harmed communities of color, but it has also diminished all of our ability to learn, relate, and grow honestly across difference. Project 2045 exists to create spaces where the temperature is low enough for real learning, where people can build the courage and capacity to speak, listen, and practice the kind of shared future many of us already believe is possible.

Project 2045 is grounded in a simple but urgent reality. The United States is already becoming a more racially and culturally diverse society, moving toward a future where no single group holds the majority. This shift is not distant. It is visible now in younger generations, in schools, and in communities across the country. But this is more than a demographic trend. It is a defining moment that will shape how we live together.

The question is not whether this change is happening, but how we will meet it. Project 2045 exists to help people prepare for that future by building the relationships, language, and skills needed to pursue a kind of shared flourishing that is not zero-sum, but rooted in dignity, responsibility, and the understanding that our lives are bound together.

Project 2045 is not just about anticipating a demographic shift. It is about formation for a future that is already arriving. Many of us, especially white Americans, have not been prepared for the kind of presence, resilience, and responsibility that living across difference requires, even if we support it in principle. This work resists the idea that information or the right language is enough.

Instead, it focuses on the slower work of becoming through skill building, honest conversation, and repeated practice. It also insists that this responsibility cannot be outsourced. We must do our own work, in public and over time, learning how to stay present, repair harm, and grow in our capacity to live with integrity in a more diverse society.

An Invitation

So join us if you want to live in a world where difference does not automatically mean division, where our kids inherit more than our unresolved fears, and where people learn how to live together with honesty, dignity, and shared responsibility. Join us if you believe flourishing is something we practice slowly, imperfectly, and together.

Visit thisisproject2045.com to learn more. Subscribe to Project 2045 on Substack to follow the thinking as it unfolds.

Follow along on social media
https://www.instagram.com/thisisproject2045/

https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=61584749169449

https://www.tiktok.com/@thisisproject2045

And get ready for the podcast, learning cohorts, and other ways to practice showing up for the future that is already on its way.

You can support us as we start this important work.

This is Project 2045. The future is closer than we think. Let’s become who that future needs.

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One of the lessons that our culture quietly teaches white people from childhood is that we need to be separate from each other. Not every culture is raised with the model of individualism that often results in an us versus them mentality. The lie of separateness creates an underlying shame that so many of us are unaware of. It is a recipe for cultural, communal, and racial disaster. I find it fascinating that no one is born with shame, but each of us carry it within us on a profound level.

This quite cultural teaching shows up in our inner dialogue and storylines we have of ourselves, the world, and the people in it. It impacts how we perceive race and the way we approach discussions about it.

“Judgment is a tool of the inner critic,” writes Caverly Morgan in her brilliant book, The Heart of Who We Are: Realizing Freedom Together and states, “In other words, the collective inner critic acts like a glue for our collective conditioning.” Morgan writes, “For many white people, shame pervades most, if not all, aspects of learning about race and the history of oppression. I am clear there can be no learning, and therefore no transformation, in a group that has been seasoned with guilt and shame. And that these two ingredients are by-products of judgment.

Judgment poisons the heart.

The pain of shame prevents clear seeing.

Lack of clear seeing prevents change.”

Shame in many forms often leads to hiding and keeps one unconscious from its impacts.

Shame and guilt are different. Morgan differentiates, “When one feels guilty, there is judgment that something you’ve done is wrong. When you feel shame, you believe that your whole self is wrong… While the experience of shame may be followed by growth, the growth doesn’t happen inside the shame.” It is this inability to grow that will keep us from becoming who we need to be in a world of increasing diversity.

One of the results of a creative, mindful, mature, examined, and aware whiteness is a person that is compassionate and practices lament. There is power in lament, and part of the problem we have with lament is that it is deeply felt. It is not only in our minds, but it must also be an emotion to be experienced and felt within the body. Much like shame, it cannot be avoided and must be faced. As Soong-Chan Rah writes in Prophetic Lament: A Call for Justice in Troubled Times, “there is power in bringing untold stories to light.” Real, raw, and authentic lament Rah states, “the story of suffering is often swept under the rug in order not to create discomfort or bad feelings. Lament is denied because the dead body in front of us is being denied.” Lament is expressing deep sorrow.

We would be wise to lament what is harming white people right now in the rising levels of overt racism becoming normal, calls for our nation to become more homogenous, young white men finding identity in grievances, rising racial violence being instigated by white people, the obvious racial makeup of the Epstein list, etc. Identifying this despite not being socialized with the language to deal with it we can still learn to develop our cultural literacy. We need to admit that we need better models of whiteness and seek mentors and elders.

This type of lament is an invitation that can coexist with tenderness and strength. Lament does not stop with only expressing emotion but leads to change and action risking in conversation and relationships with one another, like mentoring younger people, being intentional about building emotionally safe and nurturing friendships, supporting mental health initiatives, learning from differences, experiments in reparations, etc.

Francis Weller writes in The Wild Edge of Sorrow, “Grief is a powerful solvent, capable of softening the hardest of places in our hearts. When we can truly weep for ourselves and those places of shame, we have invited the first soothing waters of healing to wash through our souls. Grieving, by its very nature, confirms worth.” Could this be the work of white people to address our shame? All white people carry a collective guilt that I believe is appropriate and can be deeply helpful and meaningful; a source of change. If white people look deep enough, there may be wisdom in the sorrow and in our guilt deep in our soul.

White shame on the other hand, needs to be grieved and named, the rupture of the soul and closing of the heart must be lamented to confirm worth because our whole self is not wrong. White people have and continue to do wrong and with it we face and address the appropriate guilt with confession, humility, curiosity, and behavioral change. May we grieve our shame so that the hardest places in our hearts can be softened and opened so we dance with compassion for all people and with all of humanity instead of the conditioned patterns and socialization of separateness.

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One of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s most quoted lines comes from his 1963 Letter from Birmingham Jail. Many people can recite the opening phrase from memory: “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”

We hear that sentence often.

It appears in sermons, speeches, classrooms, and social media posts. It has become a kind of moral shorthand. When something unjust happens somewhere, someone inevitably reaches for those words. But for a long time, that line alone felt a little abstract to me. True, yes. Powerful, yes. But also a little unclear as to what that looks like and what to do about it.

Why exactly is injustice somewhere else a threat to justice where I live? The answer, I eventually realized, comes in the very next sentence of King’s letter.

“We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.”

King says that we are caught in what he calls a network of mutuality. Our lives are tied together in ways we do not always see. The metaphor is almost like a web. Tug one strand and the vibration travels across the entire structure.

That idea changed how I understood the first line. The point is not simply that injustice is morally wrong wherever it happens. The point is that our lives are structurally connected. We are not separate actors living independent stories. We live inside the same web.

The conditions that shape one community eventually shape others. The rules that advantage one group eventually shape the opportunities available to everyone else, which in turn impacts those with advantage. The stories a society tells about some people eventually influence how it treats others. The web holds all of it.

This is one of the hardest ideas for Americans to fully embrace. Our culture trains us to see ourselves as individuals first. We talk about personal responsibility, personal freedom, and personal success.

Those things matter. But King’s vision insists that our lives are also collective. I am starting to think this is less of a vision and what King was naming was a reality.

The neighborhood you grow up in matters. But the health of the neighborhood matters to a city. The schools available to you matter. But the quality of that education impacts the greater economic progress for all. None of these things exist in isolation. They are strands in the web.

This is why conversations about justice often feel uncomfortable. When we begin to talk honestly about inequality, it is tempting to retreat into individual explanations. People want to know whether they personally did something wrong. But the web of mutuality is not primarily about personal guilt.

It is about shared reality. We inherit systems. We participate in them. And whether we acknowledge it or not, we are shaped by them. Some people experience the web as support. Others experience it as a constraint. Most of us experience some mixture of both.

Consider something as simple as the clothes we wear. A shirt that sells for $20 at a store often reflects a chain of decisions made across several countries. The garment worker who sewed it may earn very little for that labor. The factory owner is under pressure to keep costs low to stay competitive. The brand profits by maintaining a price point consumers will accept.

For the shopper, the result is inexpensive clothing. For the worker, the result may be wages that barely support a family. For the company, the system keeps products moving and profits stable.

Each person in the chain experiences the outcome differently. Yet they are connected through the same system. The comfort of one part of the web often rests on the strain placed somewhere else along it.

Housing markets reveal the same web. Recently, the President of the United States declared that he does not want home prices to go down because that will have a negative impact on the wealthy. That is a vision of the world that is not taking into account the network of mutuality. When home prices rise faster than incomes, the effects are not the same for everyone.

For someone who already owns a home, rising prices can mean growing wealth. Their property becomes more valuable. Equity builds. Financial security increases. For someone trying to buy their first home, those same rising prices can push ownership further out of reach. Down payments grow larger. Mortgage payments become harder to qualify for. Many remain renters longer than they expected.

For renters, higher home values often translate into higher rents as well. More of their income goes toward housing, leaving less to save or invest. The same housing market creates stability and wealth for some while creating pressure and uncertainty for others. As a homeowner I would rather see prices go down, more people be able to get into ownership, generational wealth built for the sake of healthier familes and neighborhoods.

One strand moves, and different lives move with it.

We could cite examples in so many other areas. At some point, every conversation about justice runs into a quiet question.

Why should I care?

Not in a cynical way. In an honest way. People want to know what this has to do with their lives. Dr. King’s idea of the web of mutuality answers that question in a surprising way. It says that caring about justice is not only about helping someone else. It is also about the kind of world you yourself get to live in.

When the web is healthier, life improves for everyone. Communities with stable housing are safer communities. Schools with more opportunity produce stronger local economies. Healthcare systems that serve everyone reduce costs and strain for all of us. Workplaces that treat people fairly create more sustainable businesses.

The web of mutuality means that flourishing is rarely isolated. When opportunity expands, innovation grows. When communities trust each other, cooperation increases. When people feel seen and valued, they contribute more fully to the common life.

The opposite is also true. When the web is strained—when inequality grows, when opportunity narrows, when distrust spreads—those pressures eventually touch everyone.

No one gets to live completely outside the web. Even if there are forces at work to hide the web from us or teach us that it doesn’t actually exist. So the question is not only whether we care about justice for someone else. The deeper question is what kind of world wide web we want to live inside.

A fraying one built on separation and scarcity. Or a stronger one where more people can flourish.

Dr. King believed our lives were tied together, whether we acknowledged it or not. The work of justice is simply learning how to live responsibly inside that reality. Because in the end, caring about the web of mutuality is not just about changing the world. It is about recognizing that the world we help shape is also the world we ourselves must inhabit.

The work of justice is not pretending the web doesn’t exist. The work is learning how to repair it. For those of us doing the work of Project 2045, this idea sits at the center of the conversation. We are trying to tell the truth about the web we inherited. We are trying to understand how its strands were woven. And we are asking what responsibility we have for the parts of the web we now hold.

Because once you see the web, you cannot unsee it. And once you recognize that your life is tied to the lives of others, the question changes. It is no longer simply: What is happening to them? The question becomes:

What kind of web are we weaving together now?

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I hear some version of the question all the time. “Is it hard to be a white person today?”

Sometimes it is said out loud by people whose politics lean more conservative than mine. It comes with frustration about how quickly the culture seems to be shifting. The stories they grew up with about the country feel less certain now. They feel like the ground is moving under their feet.

Other times the question arrives quietly. Almost whispered. It often comes from people who consider themselves progressive. They lower their voice a bit when they say it. Sometimes they tell me they feel like they cannot ask the question publicly. Sometimes they say they would never bring it up around their friends of color.

But the question still lingers.

For some people, especially in progressive circles, the concern is economic. Organizations and companies are making stronger commitments to hiring diverse teams. New leadership pipelines are being built. Some white workers quietly worry that the opportunities that once seemed guaranteed may no longer be.

For others, particularly in more conservative spaces, the concern feels cultural. The country is changing in ways that shine a brighter light on the advantages white people have historically received. Things that once felt invisible are being named more openly.

That shift can feel disorienting.

There is a line from film producer Franklin Leonard that captures the dynamic well:

“When you’re accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression.”

I suspect this line contains some truth. But it does not dismiss the feeling people are expressing. Many white Americans genuinely feel unsettled right now. Even if the broader evidence about opportunity, wealth, and mobility in this country still shows that white Americans remain advantaged in most measurable ways, feelings are powerful. Perception often becomes its own reality.

And in that sense, I actually appreciate when people say it out loud. Even if it comes in a whisper. Naming a feeling is often the first step toward understanding it.

But let me be clear about something. I do not believe it is hard to be white in the United States today—at least not when compared with the experiences of our neighbors and siblings of color. That has been true across most of American history.

Yes, there has always been a white poverty class. Economic hardship has never been distributed along only one racial line. But the basic structures of society have long been built in ways that make it easier for white people to move through the world with fewer barriers. And that reality largely remains.

So if the phrase “it is hard to be white today” is not quite accurate, what are people actually experiencing? I think what many white Americans are feeling is something else.

A reckoning.

It can be hard to realize that the systems we live inside of have not been neutral. It can be hard to discover that advantages we once thought were simply the result of hard work were also shaped by invisible tailwinds. It can be uncomfortable to hear that the social arrangements we participate in—often unknowingly—can produce harm for others. It can be hard to recognize that we benefit from things we did not intentionally create but still quietly sustain.

It can be hard to look honestly at ourselves. It can be hard to examine the stories we were raised with about fairness and merit and realize those stories were incomplete. And it can be especially hard to hold all of that without collapsing into defensiveness. So when someone says, “It feels hard to be white these days,” I try to listen for the deeper truth beneath the words.

Often what they are actually saying is this:

It is hard to rethink the world I thought I understood. It is hard to listen differently. It is hard to see differently. It is hard to understand our neighbors’ experiences differently.

And ultimately, it is hard to live differently.

Those are real challenges. But they are also the work of growth. And growth, almost by definition, is uncomfortable. The question for us is not whether this moment feels unsettling.

The question is whether we are willing to stay present long enough to learn from it.

That is the invitation in front of us.

And if we accept it, something better may yet emerge.

An Invitation

If you would like to get better at answering a question like this, Project 2045 is hosting Skill Building cohorts in 2026 that teach the conversation skills white people need for this moment. It is a space be together, not be judged as we grow, build capacity, deepen self-awareness, and strengthen the muscles required for a shared multiracial future.

Check out cohort details and apply here.

Conversation and action is how change begins.

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I work as an organizational consultant. I am often called in when an organization has gotten sideways with its employees, and many of those moments involve breakdowns around race, culture, and leadership trust. The irony of the work is that leaders will often practice with me the very habits that helped create the crisis in the first place without realizing it. They interrupt the feedback they asked for, explain away employee concerns, or quickly redirect the conversation toward their intentions rather than the impact their decisions had on others.

Most of the time they genuinely believe they are trying to understand what went wrong. They want to repair relationships, calm the organization, and move forward. Yet the patterns that damaged trust often surface again in the very conversations meant to address the problem. For those of us who do this work regularly, it becomes clear that the crisis rarely begins with one decision or one meeting. It grows out of everyday leadership habits that leaders have learned over time and rarely had to examine closely until the consequences become impossible to ignore.

The moment a Black consultant walks into an organization to advise on leadership, culture, or staff development, we can usually see more than would be wise to say out loud. We often stay silent for our own protection or because the room isn’t ready for the full truth.

Here is the silent list that some Black consultants you hire carry in their minds as they help organizations solve their most complex problems.

You assume all I can talk about is DEI.

Many of us bring deep experience in leadership development, strategy, governance, and organizational culture. Yet the moment we walk in the room, the assumption is that our expertise begins and ends with DEI. Race is always a critical part of any conversation. But most of the problems we see in organizations are leadership issues. We have more than “soft skills” and can do much more than the implicit bias training you keep using to “start the conversation”.

You contract for one thing and then add more creep than a TLC album.

We are hired to do a listening session, a survey, or a strategic planning process. Within a week, the scope grows. Suddenly, there are crisis emails, and the scope starts to creep. When I reply that we can revisit the contract and add that additional request to the scope, the energy in the room changes. Chips and salsa are supposed to be unlimited, not my attention to the urgent matter you created.

You implement the recommendations you like and ignore the rest.

Six months later, the organization is still struggling, and the consultant gets blamed for the outcome. Half of an implemented plan produces half a result. If we don’t solve racism by this Tuesday, get a flawless strategic plan implemented by a disengaged team that cannot spell KPI (key performance indicator), and somehow cure the accountant’s gout, we just “weren’t what you were looking for.”

You negotiate our fees and pay our invoices late.

There is always a conversation about investment. There is always a reminder that budgets are tight. I have watched organizations accept other vendors’ pricing without discussion. Then suddenly remember a trip to Puerto Vallarta and how fun it was to barter, and I get the side eye for sending a rate sheet that is not negotiable. With consultants of color, bargaining suddenly becomes part of the process. Then the invoice arrives, and payment moves slowly. Grace is expected, even though our policy states we should be charging you. My mortgage company does not extend grace because a client decided to pay late.

You give us the real story after the contract is signed.

The first conversations always sound manageable. Then the details begin to appear. The board chair is also the largest donor, and the wife of the CEO. Half the leadership team resigned last month, and staff morale is at an all-time low. Consultants rarely find these things surprising. There seems to be no insight to give context or to map the organization relationally or logistically. We all know to tell someone who comes over that our cousin ain’t quite right, but it seem okay to sit me by him and let me figure that out by myself. For shame.

You praise the work but keep us a secret.

Organizations often say the consulting process was transformative. The culture turned around, people felt heard,and everyone was hopeful for the first time in a long time. But what happens afterward is strange. We suddenly become the secret weapon. Emphasis on “secret.” Apparently, good consulting becomes a competitive advantage that they do not want anyone else to have. They take the credit and make sure we stay hidden instead of sharing the love.

Despite all of this, most of us really do care about the organizations we work with. We want leaders to succeed and teams to thrive. We know that some of this has to do with the dynamics of race, gender, and countless other intersectional realities, but it also stems from how folks have been raised in organizational contexts to act. No home training.

So the next time you hire a consultant of color to help clean up a mess your organization created, try something simple. Acknowledge the problem. Tell them the full story at the beginning. Pay them well and pay them on time. Listen when they speak.

And if the work actually helps, tell someone else.
—————————————————————————————
We are grateful to our guest writer for illuminating this dynamic in What I Can’t Say With White People in the Room. Project 2045 will periodically publish reflections—many anonymous—on this topic from Writers of Color

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Over the last few months on this platform, I have tried to write honestly about my relationship to culture, race, and responsibility. Much of that writing has taken the form of autobiography. Stories about where I came from, what I learned, what I missed, and what it has taken to see a little more clearly.

If there is one thing autobiography does well, it exposes patterns. The same obstacles show up again and again. Different moments. Different situations. But often the same interior barriers. Some of those barriers are cultural. Some are emotional. Some are moral. Many of them live inside me.

One of the first barriers was shame. Not the kind of shame that produces humility or repair. The kind that paralyzes. The kind that appears the moment privilege becomes visible. The recognition that the system worked for me in ways I did not earn. That realization can open the door to responsibility. But it can also trap a person in self-consciousness. Instead of asking what I might do next, I spent time trying to manage how I felt about it.

Another barrier was denial. For a long time I could keep the realities of race at a comfortable distance. News stories, statistics, protests, historical accounts. All of it was easy to acknowledge in theory and easy to avoid in practice. Denial does not always look like rejection. Sometimes it looks like selective attention. Then there is the privilege of distance. If a story becomes too painful, I can turn it off. Change the channel. Close the article. Step away from the conversation. Many people in this country do not have that option. Their lives are the story. Distance is a form of insulation, and insulation makes transformation slower.

Closely related is willful ignorance. At some point the question is no longer whether the information exists. It does. The question becomes whether I will continue to seek it out. Ignorance can be passive, but it can also be chosen.

Another obstacle that surprised me was how easily growth can turn into self-congratulation. When a person begins to change, it is tempting to narrate that change as proof of moral advancement. I began to see the ways I had evolved and, quietly, I began to feel good about that evolution. In subtle ways, the story became about me again. Not about justice, not about repair, but about my own enlightenment.

Centering myself did not disappear. It simply changed forms.

At one point I also believed that the most ethical posture was to minimize myself. Step back. Stay quiet. Defer to others. There is wisdom in learning to listen, but silence can become another form of retreat. I eventually realized that opting out was not the goal. The real task was to opt in differently. To use voice, access, and influence on behalf of others rather than pretending those things did not exist.

Intentions were another place where I had to grow up. Good intentions matter, but they are not the same as meaningful action. I could care deeply about justice and still do very little that changed anything. Intention without practice is a kind of moral comfort.

These barriers are not unique to me. I see them appear again and again in conversations with other white people who are trying to make sense of culture work.

Shame.
Denial.
Distance.
Ignorance.
Self-congratulation.
Withdrawal.
Confusing care with contribution.

Naming them does not eliminate them. But it does remove some of their power. What I have learned, slowly, is that culture work is less about arriving at the right conclusions and more about staying in the right posture. Curiosity instead of certainty. Responsibility instead of performance. Participation instead of retreat.

And perhaps most importantly, remembering that the work was never about my personal evolution in the first place.

It is about the kind of world we are willing to help build together.

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Most of us grow up with a simple definition of fairness. Fairness means everyone gets the same thing. The same rules. The same opportunities. The same treatment.

At first glance that feels obviously right. It fits the instincts many of us learned as children. If three kids are sharing cookies, each person gets one. If there are rules for the class, the rules apply to everyone.

Sameness becomes our shorthand for justice. But life rarely begins from the same starting point.

Some children grow up in neighborhoods with well-funded schools, stable housing, and strong social networks. Others grow up navigating underfunded schools, housing instability, or communities that have experienced generations of economic disinvestment. Some people inherit wealth, connections, and safety nets. Others inherit debt, vulnerability, or systems that have historically worked against them.

When the starting lines are different, identical treatment does not always produce fair results.

Consider a simple example.

Imagine this popular image of three people standing behind a tall fence trying to watch a baseball game. One person is tall enough to see over the fence easily. One person can almost see but not quite. The third cannot see the field at all. If fairness means everyone gets the same wooden box to stand on, then the tallest person now sees even better. The middle person might finally catch a glimpse. The shortest person may still see nothing.

Everyone received the same thing. Yet the experience is still unequal.

Sometimes fairness requires something different than sameness. Sometimes it requires attention to the conditions people are starting from and the barriers they face along the way.

This is where many public conversations become tense.

Some people emphasize the importance of consistent rules. They worry that once we begin adjusting support based on circumstance, fairness itself becomes unstable. Others point out that consistent rules applied to unequal conditions often reproduce the same disparities year after year.

Both instincts come from a desire for justice. One focuses on equal treatment. The other focuses on equal possibility. In practice, societies wrestle with both questions at the same time.

When a school district directs additional resources toward schools serving low-income neighborhoods, the goal is not to advantage some students over others. The goal is to create conditions where students who face additional barriers have a real chance to succeed.

When public health programs target communities with higher rates of illness, the intention is not to treat some people as more valuable. It is to respond to the reality that certain communities carry heavier burdens.

These decisions reflect a deeper question about what fairness means. Is fairness about identical treatment, regardless of circumstance? Or is fairness about creating conditions where people actually have the opportunity to flourish? Neither approach is simple. Both require humility. Both require careful conversation about goals, tradeoffs, and outcomes.

What becomes clear, however, is that fairness is more complicated than many of us were taught. Treating everyone the same can feel neutral. Yet neutrality in a landscape shaped by unequal histories often preserves the inequalities that already exist.

Paying attention to different starting points can feel uncomfortable. Yet ignoring those differences does not make them disappear.

As the United States moves toward a more diverse and interconnected future, these questions will only become more important. Communities will continue wrestling with how to design schools, policies, and institutions that are both consistent and genuinely fair.

And that may require us to hold two ideas at the same time. Sameness matters. But fairness sometimes asks us to look deeper than sameness.

An Invitation

If these ideas resonate and you want structured support to understand them, Project 2045 is hosting Skill Building cohorts in 2026 that teach the conversation skills white people need for this moment. It is a space to build capacity, deepen self-awareness, and strengthen the muscles required for a shared multiracial future.

Check out cohort details and apply here.

Conversation and action is how change begins.

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I had gotten very comfortable with secondary and supportive.

After years of wrestling with race, justice, vocation, and my own location as a white man, I felt like I had answered the question, “What do I do?” I had found a lane that felt both faithful and sustainable. I had the privilege of co-creating meaningful work on teams led by people of color. I had thriving relationships. I was learning. I was contributing. I was not centering myself.

It felt like I had discerned the sweet spot of my vocation. When it came to culture work, I could bring my full self, talents, and gifts to the table working secondary and supportive to those most impacted by the issues they were addressing.

The language came from Dr. King’s insistence that, “white liberals must be prepared to accept a transformation for their role. Whereas they have been in the past the primary and spokesman for the Negro, they must now be the secondary and supportive.”

For me, that was not abstract. It meant stepping away from the assumption that my voice should lead when culture and justice were at stake. But it also meant I could not opt out. There was integrity in it. There was cost in it. There was also relief. I did not have to be the one driving. I did not have to be the one teaching. I could use my skills, my networks, my institutional fluency in ways that strengthened leadership that was not my own.

Then, early in 2020, a colleague asked me a question.

He is a Latino leader I was growing close to during the pandemic. We were talking about my work, about this idea of being secondary and supportive, about how it had changed me and clarified my calling. I explained how freeing it had been. How it had reshaped my imagination. How it had cost me and formed me.

He listened. Then he said, “Have you ever thought about just working with white people? Helping them come to some conclusions?”

It was one of those moments where you know the answer you are about to give is not your best one, but you cannot find a better one in time. I said, “No. I don’t really want to work with white people.”

Even as the words left my mouth, I knew they were thin.

I felt good about the conclusions I had come to. I felt good about the relationships I had built. I felt good about the spaces I was occupying. If I am honest, I had no interest in trying to help white folks understand race and culture better. It felt exhausting. It felt thankless. It felt like going backward.

But that answer has haunted me. What I slowly realized was that he was not challenging my integrity. He was pressing on my responsibility.

That is fine for you, he was implying, to feel like you have done your work. I am glad you can sleep at night. But for those of us still dealing with culturally underdeveloped white people every day, it would be helpful if some of you felt an obligation toward your own.

I did not love the question. And my answer felt evasive. That conversation has been deeply formative for Project 2045.

I no longer see culture work as something that simply settles my own conscience. I no longer see secondary and supportive as the final destination. It was necessary. It shaped me. It remains part of who I am. But it cannot be the whole story.

Because exposure changes you. I do this work not because I have some expertise but because I have had some exposure. I do this work not because I want to be a teacher but because BIPOC friends, colleagues, and mentors have confronted me, nurtured me, and refused to let me stay shallow. I do this work because someone asked me a question I did not want to answer.

“Have you ever thought about working with white people?”

I have come to believe that love creates responsibility. Project 2045 is not about correcting white people. It is about refusing to outsource white formation to people who are already carrying too much. It is about inviting us into the world we are already living in, a country moving toward 2045 whether we are ready or not.

I was loved into a larger world. And that love now requires something of me.

Project 2045 is my attempt to stand beside my own, not as an expert and not as a hero, but as someone who has been exposed, confronted, and changed. These biography essays exist because I was asked to tell my story. And telling it has made something clear.

We have been exposed to too much to pretend we do not know.

We see the world as it is. We feel the ache. We are already raising children and grandchildren in a country that will be more multicultural, not less. There are powerful forces betting that we cannot thrive together.

I am betting that we can.

But the road to that future runs through our growth.

Some of this growth belongs to us.

Coming to this conclusion is different than doing the work. Check back for our final article in this racial autobiography that details the stories of doing white-on-white culture work.

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A few years ago, I shared an office with a colleague who is a Black woman. One morning, after a particularly heavy news cycle, she walked in and asked me a question that I did not know how to hear.

“Why don’t white people feel collective shame when someone in your demographic does something heinous in the news?” I did not even understand the question at first.

She explained that when something happened involving a prominent Black athlete or public figure, she felt it. Not because she agreed. Not because she defended it. But because she felt a sense of collective connection. A sense that whatever that person had done would ripple outward and touch the way Black people would be perceived. She described it as collective shame. Not chosen. Not logical. But real.

I remember thinking that this was so far from my lived experience that it almost felt abstract. When a white man commits violence, fraud, abuse, or public disgrace, I have never instinctively felt that it reflected on me. I have never felt required to answer for him. I have never felt the weight of collective identity in that way.

That was the gap she was naming. Over time, though, something shifted. I began to notice patterns. When another school shooting hits the news, I lament the tragedy. And somewhere beneath the grief is the quiet, dreadful assumption that it will likely be a white man.

When new revelations emerge from the Epstein files of powerful men exploiting vulnerable people, I lament the victims. And I also lament that the faces behind the power structures look hauntingly familiar.

When conversations surface about mass incarceration, poverty, or systems that disproportionately harm communities of color, I lament the policies. And I cannot ignore who largely designed, funded, protected, and benefited from those systems.

I lament that sometimes white men entitlement masquerades as freedom.

I lament that sometimes white men fragility erupts as outrage.

I lament that sometimes white men have an inability to distinguish between losing dominance and losing dignity.

I lament the way some white men have turned anger into a media strategy.

I lament the discipleship of grievance.

I lament that so much of what passes for “strength” is a refusal to self-examine.

And I lament that when conversations about this begin, the first instinct for many of us is defense.

It is important to say this clearly: not all white men are violent. Not all white men exploit power. Not all white men build unjust systems. My coworker’s point was not that every white person is personally responsible for every harm.

Her point was about identification. Some communities are formed into collective awareness because survival has required it. Others are shaped into individual insulation because dominance has allowed it. I lament we are the latter. And that insulation comes at a cost.

According to Soong-Chan Rah in Prophetic Lament: A Call for Justice in Troubled Times, lament is refusing denial but is a telling the truth about pain, injustice, and brokenness, and is both personal and communal. It does not rush to resolution but allows grief to be fully expressed. Rah argues that lament is not optional but a central language of faith. Unlike guilt, which can be overly self-centered on the judgment that something you’ve done is wrong, and my personal feelings of remorse. Guilt often is personal (“I feel bad”), while lament is corporate and prophetic (“We grieve what has happened and cry out for justice”). In contrast to guilt, lament is outward-facing and relational. Lament leads to solidarity with those who suffer and refuses to move on too quickly. Prophetic lament in Rah’s view is not purely private but communal and social, and leads somewhere. Guilt may relieve the conscience, while lament is real, raw, and authentic and transforms community.

Rah writes, “there is power in bringing untold stories to light” and later states, “the story of suffering is often swept under the rug in order not to create discomfort or bad feelings. Lament is denied because the dead body in front of us is being denied.” Collective lament and communal grief must be pursued and practiced as a discipline for restoration. Collective lament has nothing to do with shaming a member of the community and continuing the “illusion of separateness” and detaching oneself from the broader story, but instead is primarily concerned with solidarity, acknowledging real suffering, refusing simple and superficial answers, and leading toward transformation.

Psychotherapist Francis Weller author of The Wild Edge of Sorrow, writes, “Welcoming our sorrow eases the hardened places within us, allowing them to open and freeing us to once more feed our kinship with the living presence around us. This is deep activism, soul activism that actually encourages us to connect with the tears of the world. Grief keeps the heart flexible, fluid, and open to others.”

Clarify that collective lament is not about shaming every individual member of a demographic. It is about refusing to detach oneself from the broader story that has formed us and benefited us.

Back in that office, I realized that my coworker was not accusing me. She was inviting me into a different way of being. White men are not uniquely evil. But we are uniquely positioned within American history. We have been granted disproportionate authorship of the systems we now inhabit. That authorship includes both beauty and brutality.

To refuse lament is to refuse authorship. And perhaps the deeper tragedy is not only the harm itself, but our inability to grieve it together. There is a temptation in conversations like this to rush toward reassurance. To say, “But I didn’t do that.” Or “I’m not like those men.” Or “Why should I feel shame for something I didn’t personally cause?”

Those questions matter. They deserve careful handling. But they cannot be the first move.

The first move is to just breathe and let lament happen. Not self-hatred. Not performative guilt. Not endless apology. Lament is not an admission of personal villainy. It is an acknowledgment of shared humanity. And shared humanity is where healing begins.

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For seventeen years, I worked at the same institution. I loved it. Still do and miss it most days. I assumed I would retire there. My vocational imagination was shaped inside those walls. I knew the rhythms, the politics, the pathways. It was fun and fulfilling.

Over time, as conversations about culture and justice surfaced and stalled, surfaced and stalled again, I began to recognize something I did not want to see. The kind of cultural growth it professed, and I believed was possible, was not going to take root there. Not in the ways I had come to understand it.

In his final book, Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. addressed the common question that often white folks ask who are awakening to cultural realities ask, “so what do I do?”

The question itself, when asked over and over to People of Color denotes that they are somehow responsible for our cultural growth and development. When, in truth, it isn’t on People of Color to decide what white people do about the problematic issues that stem from witness. We need to be responsible for answering the question, “so what do I do?”

Dr. King had an answer that is surprisingly simple to understand but remarkably complex live in light of how we have been taught to think about being white in the world. King says, “white liberals must be prepared to accept a transformation for their role. Whereas it was once a primary and spokesman role, it must now become a secondary and supportive role.”

Secondary and Supportive.

What I did not understand at first was that believing it would cost me something.

This posture changed my life, employment, vocation, relationships, spending patterns, learning habits, and, more importantly, my self-understanding. Few things in our lived experience have prepared us to be secondary and supportive. We are raised to believe that by walking into the room, we have a valid opinion, expertise, or understanding.

First and Primary.

Secondary and supportive did not mean I simply changed my tone in meetings. It meant I could not build my future on being the primary voice in rooms where culture and justice were at stake. It meant the next professional move could not simply be the normal ones prescribed for me.

For the first time in my adult life, I felt professionally unmoored. If I was not climbing, not leading from the front, not shaping the institution in my image, then who was I vocationally? I had built competence around being first and primary. I had very little practice being secondary and supportive on purpose.

There was a season where I understood secondary without supportive. It looked like withdrawal. I stepped back, but did not yet know how to step in differently. I confused humility with disappearance. I told myself that if I just removed my voice, I was doing the work. In reality, I was protecting myself from the vulnerability of following. I am suspect of anyone with privilege who believes we can somehow deny or abdicate that privilege. By virtue of being white in the US American context we have privilege in every room we walk in whether we think we are denying it.

Eventually, I made a decision that clarified the posture. If I believed King, then my next role needed to reflect that conviction. I found work under the leadership of a Person of Color doing cultural work. Not adjacent to it. Not advising from a distance. Under it. In truth he needed a white man to be in rooms he knew would be adversarial. That shift did not make me a hero. It made me a learner again. I had to flex. My instincts were not final. My timing was not central. My voice was not always needed. I had to bring my skills, relationships, and access in service of someone else’s vision. But, I clearly had a role.

And I began to understand something I had previously missed. Secondary does not mean smaller. It means directional. Supportive does not mean silent. It means accountable.

I think stepping back and learning is an important step, but not the final one. We can truly bring all of our skills, gifts, talents, abilities, privileges, and wealth to the table in support of cultural initiatives and justice. The question is, are we willing to do so in the service of the causes of justice? How can we follow leaders who will inevitably think, act, and lead in ways that may not be intuitive for us?

Since then, several leaders have allowed me to practice this posture. Allowed is the right word. It has required work and patience on their part. Secondary and supportive is not a credential you claim. It is a trust that is extended.

The question “So what do I do?” no longer feels abstract to me. It feels personal.

I do not abdicate my privilege. I try to identify and leverage it.

I do not center my perspective. I begrudgingly situate it in a wider context.

I do not opt out. I show up — but not at the front where I so often want to.

It is still an identity struggle. For someone raised to believe that walking into a room automatically conferred authority, this has been the most disorienting and liberating shift of my vocational life.

And I am still learning how to do it.

-------------

I built a comfort zone around secondary and supportive. In truth it kept me in positions to know that I was genuinely of service to movements of culture and justice in way that were tangible.

I thought secondary and supportive was the final destination but as usually happens, it became a necessary posture for a deeper step of risk and vulnerability that was to come

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There are moments when something happens so quickly inside us that we barely notice it. A feeling rises before a thought forms. A conclusion settles in before evidence arrives. We lean toward one person. We hesitate around another. If someone asked us why, we might struggle to explain it. Not because we are hiding something, but because the reaction came first and the reasoning came later.

Most of us like to believe that our decisions are thoughtful and deliberate. And often they are. But human beings are not only rational creatures. We are patterned creatures. Our brains are constantly sorting, categorizing, and making predictions. They are trying to keep us safe, help us feel at home, and make sense of a complicated world. To do that, they rely on shortcuts.

Shortcuts are not inherently bad. If you had to analyze every single choice from scratch, you would be exhausted before noon. So your mind stores impressions. It builds associations. It notices repetition. Over time, those repetitions begin to feel like truth.

If the news repeatedly pairs certain groups with crime, your body may register alertness before your values weigh in. If leadership in your workplace has always looked a certain way, you may instinctively associate competence with that look. If your childhood neighborhood was mostly one race or class, comfort may quietly attach itself to familiarity.

None of this requires conscious hostility. It does not require you to think you are better than anyone else. It simply requires exposure. What we see repeatedly, we begin to expect. What we expect, we begin to trust. What feels familiar, we experience as normal.

The trouble begins when these quiet patterns influence decisions that shape other people’s lives. When two identical resumes feel different because of a name. When confidence sounds like strength in one voice and aggression in another. When a teacher interprets curiosity as potential in one student and as disruption in another. In those moments, something subtle is doing work beneath the surface.

This is why conversations about racism cannot stop at overt acts. Most people do not walk around intending harm. And yet, as we have already seen, the outcomes in education, wealth, housing, and incarceration remain deeply unequal. If the structure continues to produce disparity, we have to ask how those larger patterns also shape our smaller, everyday judgments.

We live inside stories that were built long before we arrived. Those stories taught us who belongs, who leads, who is dangerous, who is trustworthy. Even if we consciously reject those narratives, our reflexes may still carry traces of them. Culture seeps in quietly.

This can feel threatening at first. Especially for people who have worked hard, faced real struggle, and do not see themselves as prejudiced. But acknowledging these hidden leanings does not erase effort or deny hardship. It simply recognizes that none of us formed our instincts in a vacuum.

The invitation here is not shame. It is awareness. If a reaction rises quickly, we can learn to pause. If a judgment forms instantly, we can ask what shaped it. If comfort or discomfort appears, we can become curious about why.

Growth rarely begins with accusation. It begins with noticing. And when we learn to notice what happens beneath the surface, we begin to create space between instinct and action. In that space, something new becomes possible.

An Invitation

If these ideas resonate and you want structured support to understand them, Project 2045 is hosting Skill Building cohorts in 2026 that teach the conversation skills white people need for this moment. It is a space to build capacity, deepen self-awareness, and strengthen the muscles required for a shared multiracial future.

Check out cohort details and apply here.

Conversation and action is how change begins.

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Project 2045 is built on an assumption.

Not a certainty. Not a guarantee. But a conviction shaped by experience, listening, and years of watching how people actually live their lives rather than how they perform online.

The assumption is this:

There are a lot of white people in America who genuinely believe that we can flourish together in a future shaped by racial and cultural difference. God, I hope I am right.

This isn’t a fringe position. And it isn’t a timid one.

I wouldn’t describe it as a “middle space” between progressive and conservative. That language still assumes the poles are the most important thing in the room. I think this is closer to a majority space—a wide, often quiet group of people who are ready for the realities of a 2045 world but feel under-equipped to engage it now.

They are not apathetic. They are not hostile. But they are hesitant.

Not because they don’t care, but because the public conversation has trained them to believe that unless you are perfectly fluent, fully updated, and ideologically precise, you should probably stay quiet.

So many people sense where the country is headed demographically. They understand what 2045 represents. They don’t experience that future as a loss. They imagine it as something that could be good—something expansive, even hopeful. And yet, when it comes to talking about race, culture, and difference, that internal clarity collapses into external silence.

Because wanting to flourish together is not the same thing as knowing how to talk about it and knowing how we get there.

The Confidence Gap

Another assumption I’m working from is this:

Many people lack both the competence and the confidence to articulate what they want to be a reality about race in a polarized society.

They feel it intuitively. They live it relationally. But they don’t know how to say it out loud without fear of retaliation or misstep. They worry about using the wrong language. About relying on outdated terms. About being exposed as unenlightened or behind.

So instead of learning publicly, they retreat privately.

Meanwhile, the loudest voices in the room are often those who don’t want a society where we all flourish together across difference. Some of them, backed by a long history of structural inequality, are quite confident that we cannot flourish together. For those voices, 2045 isn’t just a date. It’s a threat.

And when those voices dominate the conversation, everyone else learns the same lesson:

Better to stay quiet than get it wrong.

What Racism Has Stolen From Us

Racism embedded in society hasn’t only harmed communities of color. It has also robbed all of us of the practice required to become a people committed to mutual flourishing.

It has short-circuited our capacity for honest learning. It has turned curiosity into risk. It has replaced doing this work together with performance.

So when people cautiously step toward the conversation. They’re often met with a temperature that is too high for growth. The pressure to be right overwhelms the opportunity to become more capable.

That doesn’t mean accountability doesn’t matter. It does. But accountability without space for learning creates fear, not transformation.

Turning Down the Temperature

Project 2045 is grounded in the belief that we need spaces where the temperature is lower—not because the stakes are small, but because the work is long.

Spaces where people can build competence and confidence. Spaces where learning together matters more than fluency. Spaces where we practice talking about race not to win, but to understand.

The future we’re heading toward will require more from us than correct language. It will require resilient relationships, moral imagination, and the ability to stay present in difference without collapsing into silence or defensiveness.

That kind of capacity doesn’t emerge in viral moments where we justifiably turn to outrage. It is formed slowly, together, over time.

This is the assumption I’m working from:

That many people are more ready than they appear. That the desire to flourish together is already here. And that with the right kinds of spaces, conversations, and practices, that desire can grow into something durable enough to carry us into 2045.

This is my hope, this is my assumption. I hope we are more ready than we sometimes appear to be.

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For five years of my professional life, I reported to someone who described himself as a Black radical intellectual. He was brilliant, gregarious, and carried an authority that shaped every room he entered. Over time, we became professionally close. He helped me navigate my first real experiences supervising cross-cultural staff. I was the campus pastor, and he found value in my pastoral presence—both for the institution and, eventually, in his own life.

After he left the institution, our relationship continued. Phone calls stretched long. Lunches turned into afternoons. We stayed connected through life changes and made intentional choices to remain in each other’s orbit.

It was during one of those lunches that he asked me a question that has quietly reordered how I understand myself, my formation, and the depth of my white spiritual identity.

“Do you think we would have gotten this close if I hadn’t been your direct supervisor?”

The question landed heavier than it sounded.

I paused—not because I didn’t have an answer, but because I was measuring my response. I had grown accustomed to calibrating my words around him. I did not want to sound naïve or self-deceived in front of someone whose intellect I deeply respected.

I offered something cautious and unfinished. “I’d have to think about that,” I said, “but I think yes.”

What I didn’t say was that I was convinced the answer was yes. I believed that I would have noticed his work, been drawn to his ideas, and sought out a relationship. I trusted my own narrative of openness, curiosity, and good intention.

He responded immediately. “I don’t.” There was no edge in his voice. Just clarity.

What followed took a long time to absorb. He told me that I would not have developed in the ways I needed to unless he had authority in the relationship. That authority forced me to engage him seriously—to reckon with his way of thinking, his critiques, his expectations, and his values. My job depended on it.

Still missing the point, I pushed back. I asked whether we might have found each other anyway in a small institution. Whether shared interests and proximity could have done the work that authority did. He stopped me again. That wasn’t the lesson.

What he was naming was not the outcome of our relationship, but its conditions. Our relationship began with him holding power over me. That power disrupted my comfort. It required attention. It demanded growth—not because I was especially virtuous, but because I was self-interested.

I needed to stay in right relationship with my boss.

The painful realization came slowly, over the course of a week I would rather not repeat. What I had to face was this: my growth did not begin with moral clarity or relational courage. It began with necessity. Without authority pressing in on me, I would not have chosen the discomfort that formation required.

This is where the question did its real work.

I had spent years believing in my better nature. I had learned the language of justice and equity. I could name structural racism. I could talk about privilege. But I had not yet confronted how deeply self-interest shaped my formation. I easily mistook proximity for virtue and intention for transformation.

In this case, authority interrupted me. Only authority could.

The relationship mattered deeply to me. It still does. But I have had to relinquish the story that I brought something special to it at the beginning. I did not arrive generous or brave. I arrived needing a paycheck. I arrived needing approval. I arrived needing to keep my job.

The question still lingers with me, not as accusation but as a guide: What does it actually take for me to grow? And how often do I confuse my values with my willingness to be changed?

Project 2045 exists because I no longer trust easy answers to those questions.

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Finally Finding a Place to Land

My cultural growth is a struggle, ongoing, but not without places to land. I found one. It brought me to a place where I could be fully me as a white man doing this work.

And that’s where the story will pick up next.

Check back in for the next article (9 of 11), where we explore how to bring our whole selves into spaces of justice and culture.

Some people move through the world with fewer obstacles in their path—not because they worked harder or deserved it more, but because of how they are perceived and positioned from the start. They are more likely to be trusted, believed, and given the benefit of the doubt. Their mistakes are treated as detours rather than dead ends.

This isn’t simply about having more resources or better outcomes. It’s about encountering fewer barriers along the way. Fewer suspicions when entering a space. Fewer closed doors disguised as “policy.” Fewer moments where effort is questioned before it is even seen.

And this uneven terrain doesn’t exist in a vacuum. Opportunity is not randomly distributed. When some paths are cleared and smoothed, others are narrowed, blocked, or made steeper. Access for some is often built on restriction for others. Safety for some comes at the cost of scrutiny for others.

Over time, these differences compound. Advantages stack. Setbacks multiply. What looks like individual success or failure is often the predictable result of how the ground itself is shaped.

What we mean by “privilege.”

Privilege refers to unearned advantages or benefits granted to individuals or groups based on characteristics like race, gender, socioeconomic background, or ability—advantages that are not the result of merit or effort.

Privilege is not simply about having more.

It is about having less standing in your way.

And crucially, privilege does not exist in isolation. It is often created and sustained at the expense of others who face barriers, exclusions, or penalties that you do not. We often tell stories about success that center grit, discipline, and perseverance. Those things matter. They are real. But they are not the whole story.

Privilege is not earned in the way a degree or a promotion is earned. It is something you receive without asking for it and often without noticing it—because it feels normal. It shows up in access to good schools, safe neighborhoods, generational wealth, favorable assumptions from institutions, and a criminal justice system that is more forgiving. It shows up in who is presumed competent, innocent, or deserving of the benefit of the doubt.

This is where the conversation often gets uncomfortable.

“But I Grew Up Poor”

One of the most common responses when privilege is named is some version of this:

“I grew up poor. How can I be privileged?”

That question deserves to be taken seriously.

Growing up poor is real hardship. It shapes a life in deep and lasting ways. Acknowledging privilege does not erase that experience or deny the work it took to survive and move forward.

But here is the uncomfortable truth many of us were never taught to see:

If you grew up poor and are now economically stable, that does not disprove the presence of privilege. In many cases, it demonstrates how the broader patterns of opportunity worked in your favor.

Not because you worked harder than others. Not because you deserved it more. But because your identity aligned with conditions that made upward movement more likely and less obstructed.

Privilege does not mean you were handed success. It means your climb was not made steeper by forces tied to who you are.

Why Privilege Is Harder to See Than Inequality

For many white people in particular, it is often easier to recognize that others face barriers than it is to recognize that we benefit from advantages those others do not receive. There is a psychological difference between saying,

“That group has been treated unfairly,”

and saying,

“My path was smoother because someone else’s was made harder.”

You can acknowledge racial disparities in housing, education, or incarceration and still tell a true story about your own struggle. But recognizing privilege asks for something more personal. It asks us to see ourselves not just as individuals but as participants in larger patterns.

Privilege is not the absence of struggle. It is the absence of certain kinds of struggle. One of the most important things to understand about privilege is that it is relational.

Privilege exists because opportunity is not evenly distributed. When some people are consistently given access, protection, and second chances, others are consistently denied them. That does not mean every gain for one person directly harms another. But over time, patterns emerge. Advantages accumulate. Disadvantages compound. The gap widens.

This is why privilege cannot be reduced to individual morality. You can be kind, generous, and well-intentioned and still benefit from arrangements that disadvantage others.

Why Naming It Matters

Understanding privilege this way does not deny effort. It does not erase hardship. And it does not claim that everyone in an advantaged group lives well or easily. What it does is name a reality we cannot address if we refuse to see it.

When we talk about privilege as “unearned” and “at the expense of others,” we are saying two things at once:

• Some people benefit in measurable ways simply because of who they are.

• Those benefits correspond with real costs, barriers, and exclusions experienced by others.

If we want a society where outcomes are more closely tied to effort, contribution, and care—rather than identity—we have to start by being honest about how opportunity actually works now.

Not to assign blame. But to tell the truth clearly enough that change becomes possible.

An Invitation

If these ideas resonate and you want structured support to understand them, Project 2045 is hosting Skill Building cohorts in 2026 that teach the conversation skills white people need for this moment. It is a space to build capacity, deepen self-awareness, and strengthen the muscles required for a shared multiracial future.

Check out cohort details and apply here.

Conversation and action is how change begins.

Share

Subscribe now

My biggest professional mistake came after I had already learned the language of privilege.

I understood it well enough to name it. I could see how my whiteness, my maleness, my position, and my credibility inside an institution had smoothed paths for me that others never received. I had become a public leader in an organization and was entrusted with stewarding one of its most important pieces of identity. I knew that if the institution wanted to grow, if it wanted to live into the values it aspired to, it would need perspective that did not come from another white man in the seat that I occupied.

That awareness felt like progress. It felt like maturity.

So, I did what I thought was the right thing. I helped grow the organization’s capacity to a point where I could step into a different role and hire someone new into that space. We brought in a leader whom I believed deeply in. Someone capable with a proven track record. Someone who could help move us toward a more diverse and equitable future. I remember the feeling of satisfaction I carried. This, I told myself, is what it looks like to make room.

Then I handed them the keys and tried to get out of the way.

I believed my absence would create space for their success. I believed stepping back was the same thing as sharing power. I believed less of me was support. I also believed the institution was more ready than it actually was.

That approach was a disaster.

What I failed to understand is that privilege does not disappear when you exit the room. Power doesn’t evaporate because you want it to. In fact, my absence didn’t remove power dynamics at all. It simply left them alone to face forces I had been protected from my entire career.

They encountered resistance, barriers, and blockades almost immediately. Resistance that never announced itself publicly. Scrutiny that never came with clear explanations. Doubt that hid behind politeness. Meanwhile, I stayed absent, convinced I was doing the enlightened thing. I thought I was honoring their leadership. I thought I was resisting the urge to control.

What I was actually doing was abandoning them.

Their work didn’t need my silence. It needed my presence. It needed me to use every ounce of credibility, access, and authority I had accumulated to stand between them and the resistance they were absorbing. It needed me in closed-door meetings. It needed me interrupting narratives before they hardened. It needed me taking blows that would never land on me the same way.

I had recognized privilege, but I had not recognized power. And privilege always comes with power.

I also believed too much in the organization’s ability to become who it said it wanted to be. My optimism about its desire for change outpaced its actual capacity for change. I confused stated values with practiced ones. I assumed intention equaled readiness.

The result was devastating. The person could not succeed in that environment. They left, hurt and disillusioned. And I was left stunned, trying to understand how something that felt so right had gone so wrong.

There are parts of that story I cannot change. There are ways I failed that still sit heavy in my body. My mistakes had consequences, and someone else paid for them more than I did.

When we brought in the next person, I did everything differently.

This time, I did not disappear. I understood my role was not to be neutral but to be active. I took responsibility for fighting behind closed doors so they could work in freedom out front. Their leadership was still scrutinized, but it no longer happened without resistance. I stood in the way of harmful dynamics. I named things early. I used my power intentionally. It cost me relationally or professionally.

That experience taught me something I wish I had learned sooner: identifying privilege is only a beginning. It might get us ten percent of the way there. The rest requires action.

I’ve heard rhetoric suggesting that the role of white people is to deny our privilege. I don’t believe that’s possible. Privilege isn’t a volume knob we can turn down. I don’t believe it is something we can opt out of. It’s embedded in systems that respond to us whether we want them to or not.

The question is not whether we have privilege. The question is whether we will use the power that comes with it on behalf of something better, fuller, and more just.

I carry deep regret about who I wasn’t in that first season. About the ways my learning outpaced my courage. About the harm that followed my absence. I don’t write this as a story of redemption but as a confession. Growth does not erase impact. Awareness does not undo damage.

What it can do is change how we show up next time.

Privilege acknowledged but unused is not humility. It is negligence. And that negligence has consequences that often we are not the ones who have to bear them.

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Coming Face to Face With Authority

Making these mistakes finally helped me see a path forward. One I never wanted to admit I needed to be on

And that’s where the story will pick up next.

Check back in for the next article (8 of 11), where we explore how learning about race and cultureneeded me to finally submit to authority.

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