Project 2045

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We’re Going to Need More Than Good Intentions

Project 2045 — Wed, 16 Sep 2026 15:23:10 GMT

I have met very few white people who say they want to be bad at race. Most of us want to be fair. We want to treat people well. We want to listen. We want our workplaces and neighborhoods to be places where people from different racial and cultural backgrounds can belong. We don’t want to be the person who says the offensive thing. We definitely don’t want to be called racist. For many of us, these are sincere desires.

I just don’t think they’re enough.

One of the things Project 2045 has made increasingly clear to me is that there is a substantial distance between wanting to participate well in a multiracial world and actually having the capacity to do it. Good intentions can get us into the room. They don’t necessarily tell us what to do once we’re there.

I Thought We Needed Better Conversations

When I first began imagining Project 2045, one of the ideas at the center of it was pretty simple: we need to get better at talking to one another. So much of our racial conversation seems to happen at the extremes. We argue about language. We debate policies. We react to the latest controversy. We try to convince someone that our understanding of race is correct. Meanwhile, many of us are surprisingly inexperienced at actually talking about race with another human being.

So I began developing what became six conversations. They weren’t designed as debates. They were opportunities to tell our stories, to listen, to talk about the values we carry and the fears underneath some of our reactions, to imagine a future together, to consider what responsibility might look like.

This year, a small group of white people agreed to spend several months trying them. And somewhere along the way, I began to realize something: the conversations aren’t really the point. They’re practice.

You Don’t Learn to Listen by Agreeing That Listening Is Important

I believe listening is important. There, done. Unfortunately, that hasn’t made me a particularly good listener. Actually listening is much harder. It means noticing the moment when someone says something I disagree with and my brain stops listening because it has begun preparing my response. It means hearing someone’s description of an experience and resisting the urge to compare it immediately with my own. It means being curious about something that doesn’t make sense to me. Sometimes it means hearing criticism without spending the next five minutes explaining my intentions.

You don’t develop those abilities by agreeing that they’re good. You develop them by practicing, and then failing, and noticing that you failed, and trying again. The same is true of most of the things I think we are going to need in the country we’re becoming.

What Are We Actually Practicing?

Project 2045 is built around a demographic reality. The United States is becoming increasingly racially and culturally diverse. But the more I do this work, the less interested I am in simply helping white people understand that change. I am interested in whether we are becoming capable of living it.

Can we become curious when our first instinct is judgment? Can we recognize that our experience of the world is not the same thing as reality itself? Can we hear someone describe racism without immediately needing to determine whether we agree with their interpretation? Can we notice when our preference has quietly become our definition of what is appropriate, professional, efficient, respectful, or normal? Can we enter a space that wasn’t designed around us without assuming it was poorly designed?

Can we receive criticism without either attacking the person giving it or collapsing into shame? Can we make mistakes without disappearing? Can we apologize without spending most of the apology explaining ourselves? Can we recognize the power we carry and make intentional choices about how we use it? Can we remain in relationship with people who see the world differently from us? Can we imagine a future in which flourishing doesn’t require us to be at the center?

Those aren’t positions. They’re capacities. And capacities have to be developed.

Knowing the Right Answer Can Actually Get in the Way

There is a strange trap available to those of us who have spent time learning about race. We can become pretty good at knowing the right answer. We know the language. We know what we’re supposed to notice. We know which books we’re supposed to have read. We know how to critique institutions. We may even know how to identify the mistakes other white people are making. None of that is necessarily bad.

But knowing the right answer can create the illusion that we have been formed by what we know. I can understand privilege and still become defensive when someone points out mine. I can believe deeply in sharing power and still get irritated when a decision is made without me. I can affirm cultural difference and still privately believe my way of doing something would work better. I can talk about listening and still interrupt. I can believe that white people shouldn’t always be at the center and still feel strangely unsettled when I’m not.

That gap interests me, because the work isn’t simply getting the answer right. The work is noticing what happens inside us when the answer costs us something.

This Is Where It Gets Awkward

Our cohort has laughed a lot. I didn’t necessarily expect that. Race is serious. The history is serious. The harm is serious. There have been moments of grief and lament in our conversations. But there have also been moments when somebody says something, stops halfway through, and realizes they have talked themselves directly into the thing they were trying not to say. And we laugh. Not because it doesn’t matter. Because we’re human.

There is something freeing about being in a space where making a mistake doesn’t automatically end the conversation. I wonder if we underestimate how important that is. A lot of white people have learned to approach conversations about race with tremendous anxiety. Don’t say the wrong thing. Don’t use the wrong word. Don’t reveal something embarrassing. Don’t get called out. Don’t screw this up. Those instincts can make us incredibly cautious. They can also make us incredibly defensive. If my primary goal is proving that I am not racist, then every correction becomes a threat. Every disagreement becomes evidence that you have misunderstood me. Every mistake needs to be explained away.

But what if the goal isn’t to prove that I am good at race? What if the goal is to become more capable of relationship across racial and cultural difference? That changes things. Because now a mistake can become information. An awkward moment can become practice. A disagreement can become an opportunity to learn something about you, about myself, or about the assumptions we’re both bringing into the room. We can get something wrong and keep going.

This Is Why We Practice

I don’t think the future Project 2045 is imagining requires white people to become experts on race. I don’t even know what that would mean. I think it requires us to become more practiced at being human alongside people whose experiences of the world are different from ours. More curious. More self-aware. Less defensive. More capable of listening. More comfortable admitting what we don’t know. More willing to examine what we assumed was simply normal. More able to recognize when we have power. More capable of staying when things get uncomfortable. More willing to repair something when we get it wrong.

Those things won’t happen simply because we want them to. And they won’t happen because 2045 eventually arrives. They happen in conversations. In relationships. In workplaces. In neighborhoods. In churches. In moments when we notice our first instinct and choose to do something different. In the awkwardness of trying something we aren’t yet good at.

The future isn’t going to ask whether we had good intentions. It’s going to ask what those intentions formed us to become.

So we practice now.

2045 Isn’t the Point

Project 2045 — Wed, 09 Sep 2026 15:22:29 GMT

I named this project after the year 2045. Increasingly, I think the year itself may be the least interesting thing about it. The name comes from demographic projections suggesting that sometime around the middle of this century, the United States will become a country in which no single racial group constitutes a majority. When I started Project 2045, that felt like a useful horizon. It still does.

But after spending the better part of this year writing, talking, listening, and sitting with white people who agreed to spend several months practicing how we have conversations about race, I think I understand the project a little differently. 2045 isn’t some event waiting for us in the future. We are already living our way toward it.

Our neighborhoods are changing. Our workplaces are changing. Our schools and institutions are changing. Our families are changing. The expectations about who leads, whose voice matters, what counts as normal, and how we live together are changing too. Some of those changes are happening quickly. Others are painfully slow. But they are happening.

So the question that interests me isn’t really what America will look like in 2045. The question is who we will be when we get there. More specifically, because this is the particular work of Project 2045: who will white Americans need to become?

This Isn’t About Surviving 2045

There is a version of the 2045 conversation that is rooted almost entirely in fear. What happens when white people aren’t the majority anymore? What will we lose? What will happen to our country, our institutions, our influence, our way of life?

Project 2045 isn’t interested in helping white people prepare to survive some future loss of status. It also isn’t an attempt to convince white people that we are uniquely terrible people. And I am increasingly convinced that we don’t primarily need another place telling white people the right words to use, the right books to read, or the right positions to hold about race. There are plenty of people doing important work in all of those areas.

I’m interested in something else. I want to know what it looks like for white people to become better equipped to participate in the country that is emerging, because the country we are becoming will require something different from us than the country we inherited required from us. That doesn’t mean everything about us needs to disappear. It doesn’t mean our voices don’t matter. It doesn’t mean we stop having convictions or preferences or expertise. It means we learn to participate in a world where our experiences, instincts, preferences, and ways of doing things are not automatically treated as the baseline. And that takes practice.

Knowing More Isn’t Going to Be Enough

When I began imagining Project 2045, I thought a lot about what white people needed to understand. I still think understanding matters. History matters. Knowing how race has shaped our institutions matters. Understanding the experiences of people different from us matters. But I’m increasingly convinced that information isn’t our greatest deficit. Capacity might be.

Can I listen to someone describe an experience that doesn’t fit my understanding of the world without immediately explaining why they’re wrong? Can I notice when my preference has quietly become the standard by which I judge everyone else? Can I be somewhere that wasn’t designed around me without assuming it was poorly designed? Can I talk about race without needing to prove that I am one of the good people? Can I make a mistake, own it, learn something, and stay? Can I recognize when I have power and use it responsibly? Can I encounter a way of leading, communicating, worshiping, working, or building community that feels foreign to me and become curious before I become critical? Can I hold onto genuine convictions while also allowing the possibility that my culture has helped shape those convictions? Can I imagine flourishing that doesn’t require me to be at the center of it?

Those aren’t primarily knowledge questions. They’re formation questions. And formation takes practice.

This Is Why We Talk

This year, one of the primary experiments of Project 2045 has been a small cohort of white people practicing conversations about race together. We tell stories. We listen. We talk about values and fears. We try to notice what we carry into a conversation before we start diagnosing everyone else in it. We imagine the future. We talk about what responsibility might look like. And we mess it up.

That may actually be one of my favorite things about the experience. We say something and realize halfway through that it isn’t quite what we meant. We discover assumptions we didn’t know we had. We laugh at ourselves. We get uncomfortable. We disagree. We lament things that are painful and complicated and not easily repaired. And then we come back.

That has increasingly convinced me that the goal of this work cannot be to produce white people who never get race wrong. I don’t think those people exist. Maybe the goal is to become people capable of staying in the work when we do. People who can hear something difficult without immediately defending ourselves. People who can discover that we were wrong without being destroyed by it. People who can change without believing that change is humiliation. People who can participate without controlling. People who can repair something when we have contributed to breaking it. People who are increasingly capable of living alongside people whose experiences of this country are very different from our own.

2045 Is Already Here

There is another reason the year itself matters less to me now. For millions of Americans, the supposedly multiracial future isn’t particularly futuristic. People are already living in multiracial families. They are already navigating culturally complex workplaces and neighborhoods. They are already sharing institutions with people whose experiences, traditions, assumptions, and histories are different from their own.

The idea that some dramatically different America is going to suddenly arrive in 2045 probably says more about where some of us are standing now than it does about the future. For some of us, 2045 feels distant because we have been able to live in spaces where change has remained relatively easy to ignore. That won’t remain true forever. And I don’t think that’s bad news.

I think there is an extraordinary opportunity in front of us. Not an opportunity for white people to figure out how to hold onto as much as possible, but an opportunity to become something more: more curious, more aware of ourselves, less defensive, more capable of relationship across difference, more willing to share power. More able to recognize the gifts we carry without assuming they are the only gifts worth carrying. More capable of receiving something from people and cultures we were taught, explicitly or implicitly, to see primarily as recipients of what we had to offer. More practiced at repair. More imaginative about what flourishing together could actually look like. That’s the future Project 2045 is interested in.

The Year 2045 Is a Direction

So yes, the project is still called Project 2045. I’m keeping the name. The year gives us something to point toward. It reminds us that demographic change is not theoretical. It reminds us that the country our children and grandchildren inhabit will not look exactly like the country we inherited. But 2045 isn’t a deadline, and it isn’t a threat. It is a direction.

The real work happens between here and there. It happens in the conversations we are willing to have. It happens when we become curious about something we once dismissed. It happens when we notice that what we called normal was actually particular. It happens when we stay in a relationship after getting something wrong. It happens when we stop asking only what we might lose and begin wondering what all of us might gain. It happens when we take responsibility for what we’ve inherited and become more intentional about what we pass along.

The question isn’t really what will happen when we reach 2045. We are already on our way. The more interesting question is who we are becoming as we go.

“You Actually Want to Talk about this”

Project 2045 — Wed, 02 Sep 2026 15:22:47 GMT

The core of our Skill Building Cohort is simple to say and hard to do: we are practicing becoming white people who are competent and confident having conversations about race and culture with other white people. Not experts. Not people with all the answers. Just people willing to initiate, to stay in the room, and to keep showing up for the Six Conversationsoutside of our group and inside our actual lives.

Recently, each person in the cohort checked in on how those conversations have actually been going out in the world — with a sibling, a coworker, a neighbor, a parent. I want to share what surfaced, because it says something true about all of us, not just the people in this particular group.

People are more open to this than we expected.

Almost every check-in included some version of surprise. Not that people agreed, not that the conversations were easy, but that the other person was willing to engage at all. Several in the cohort said they had built up a conversation in their head and instead found someone who simply hadn’t been asked before. Asked about race and culture specifically, and asked with real interest, by someone willing to sit in it with them.

The conversations themselves were not as hard as people feared.

This came up again and again. Not that these conversations are easy — they can still be uncomfortable, halting, imperfect. But the difficulty people had braced for, the blowup they could come, mostly didn’t happen. I say mostly because… yes… some did. What happened more often was slower, more ordinary, and more human than the stories we tell ourselves about what these conversations will be like.

People are willing to tell their story if we’re actually listening.

Cohort members kept describing the same thing: when they came with genuine curiosity instead of a point to make, the other person opened up. Not because they were persuaded of anything, but because someone finally wanted to hear their experience instead of correct it or perform for it.

And one person said some version of, “They couldn’t believe I actually wanted to talk about this.”

That line has stuck with me. It’s not a small thing, and I don’t think it’s really about the individual conversations. I think it points to something we’ve all absorbed, whether we’d say it out loud or not: that conversations about race are supposed to be emotionally dangerous, that they inevitably lead to conflict, that the safest move is to avoid the topic altogether. Most of us didn’t choose that belief. We were handed it over years of misinformation.

What this group is finding is more complicated than “that belief is wrong.” Sometimes these conversations are hard. Sometimes they do go badly. That risk is real, and I don’t want to pretend otherwise. But what’s showing up over and over in these check-ins is something different: most people aren’t avoiding these conversations because they tried and got burned. They’re avoiding them because they the door looks heavier than it is, mostly because no one has shown us it opens.

This is not everyone’s experience. I want to be honest about that. Some conversations in this cohort have been genuinely difficult, and a few haven’t gone well at all. But the through-lines from this round of check-ins were clear enough that I wanted to name them here.

We still have real work ahead of us, in this cohort and beyond it. But I’m grateful for a group willing to test that fear against their actual lives, and to come back and tell the truth about what they found.

I Almost Didn’t Start Project 2045

Project 2045 — Wed, 26 Aug 2026 15:23:02 GMT

I want to tell you the real origin story, not the polished version.

In January of 2024, I was sitting in a room with a group of leaders of color. The question on the table was simple and enormous: what is the lie of our time? After a long conversation, the group landed on an answer. The lie is that we can’t all flourish together.

I was one of only two white people in the room.

I remember asking myself, sitting right there in the middle of the conversation, what is my part in this work. What followed was close to an out of body experience. I stayed fully present, fully participating, and somewhere in that same sitting I sketched out the first draft of an idea. I even gave it a name that day: Project 2045.

A few months later, a very different Project surfaced in the national conversation. Project 2025 hit the zeitgeist, and the timing felt less like coincidence and more like a sign.

Then I sat on it. For the next year and a half, the idea chased me. There were real moments of clarity in that stretch. I spent time at a monastery working through the plans. I walked friends and colleagues through the idea to see if it held up outside my own head. I flew to Atlanta just to get honest feedback from people I trusted.

And in between those moments of clarity, I had excuses. I told myself I didn’t have the money to start a nonprofit the way it would need to be done. I was in the middle of learning a whole new professional life as a self-employed contract worker. There was my family to think about, the ordinary weight of a full life.

Those were all true. None of them were the whole truth.

The real reason, underneath the practical ones, was that I was scared of the relational cost. I want to let that sentence just sit there, because it took me a long time to be able to say it plainly. Starting this meant risking relationships. It meant asking something of people, including myself, that not everyone would want to give.

The money excuse disappeared first. When my dad died and we sold his house, I asked my wife if I could take a portion of what came from it and use it to start Project 2045. It was not a small amount, not in the context of our life and our finances. She said yes.

I used that money to gather a group of advisors. That process alone turned out to be one of the more meaningful experiences of the whole journey, sitting with people willing to think seriously about this with me.

I have joked, more than once, including directly to my founding board members, that the most likely outcome of all this would be that I’d shut it down in eighteen months and have wasted my family’s money in the process. I said it as a joke, but underneath it was a real fear I wasn’t fully willing to name at the time.

We are now almost ten months in.

In that time we have published Substack articles, including eleven articles that the group insisted I write about my own story, a step I needed to take just to get all of this out of my own head and onto a page where other people could actually see it. We are compiling those into a manuscript, aiming for publication in early 2027.

We are running a pilot cohort, with two more Skill-building cohorts already in the pipeline. We have already started planning a second stage cohort. There is a real lead on funding a storytelling project. And slowly, I am starting to see evidence that the big assumption underneath all of this may be true: white Americans are more ready for 2045 than they appear. What’s been missing isn’t the will to flourish together. It’s the competence and confidence to begin.

I could be wrong. Eighteen months was never a scientific number, just a fear wearing the costume of a joke. But this feels like it has life past that mark. And the truest thing I can say right now is that I am not doing this alone, and I am deeply grateful for the people journeying with me.

When We Are Not the Center Anymore

Project 2045 — Wed, 19 Aug 2026 15:22:05 GMT

When You’re Not the Center Anymore

One of the tools we will need for a more multiracial future is the ability to loosen our grip on our own way—our convictions, preferences, instincts, and even our understanding of what is right.

For most of my life, I have moved through spaces where the basic assumptions made sense to me. The way meetings worked. The way decisions got made. What counted as professional. What made something fair. How disagreement was supposed to happen. What constituted a reasonable response. None of these things felt particularly cultural to me. They mostly just felt normal.

That is one of the strange things about being white in the United States. Your cultural instincts can spend a lot of time masquerading as common sense.

Of course, I know intellectually that my way of seeing the world is only one way of seeing it. I’ve written about this. I’ve taught about it. I’ve spent years in diverse spaces with people whose experiences and cultural frameworks are different from mine.

But knowing something and experiencing it are two different things.

And the experience can be irritating.

When the Center Moves

There is a difference between welcoming different people into a space and allowing their presence to change the space.

The first is relatively easy to imagine. Come in. Join us. We want you here. Pull up a chair.

But underneath that welcome can be an assumption that the basic architecture will remain intact. The meeting will still work like a meeting. Leadership will still look like leadership. Decisions will still get made the way good decisions get made. Fairness will still mean what reasonable people know fairness means.

Except reasonable people don’t always agree. Neither do cultures.

When people with different histories and experiences genuinely share a space, the result isn’t simply greater diversity. The center of gravity begins to move.

Things that once seemed obvious become negotiable or disregarded.

Ways of communicating that once felt normal become one option among several. Expectations about time, leadership, conflict, expertise, relationship, accountability, urgency, and decision-making bump into other expectations. And suddenly my instincts aren’t the instincts anymore and my way forward might not be right way forward.

Because it means that there are also times when I don’t get what I want.

If I am accustomed to spaces generally making sense according to my cultural expectations, a space that doesn’t can feel surprisingly uncomfortable. If my perspective doesn’t carry the weight I expect it to carry, I can experience that as not being heard. If a decision is made differently than I would have made it, I can experience that as unreasonable. If my understanding of fairness doesn’t prevail, I can experience the result as unfair.

And sometimes maybe it is. That’s what makes this difficult. The goal isn’t to distrust every instinct I have because I’m white. Nor is it to assume that someone from another racial or cultural background automatically has the better read on every situation.

My perspective still matters. It just isn’t the measuring stick. There is a difference between having a voice and expecting my voice to set the terms. There is a difference between participating and expecting the results to be my preconceived decision.

There is a difference between being disregarded and simply not being centered.

The Loss of Certainty

We often talk about racial change in terms of power. Who has it? Who doesn’t? Who needs to share it? Those are important questions.

But I wonder if one of the quieter things white people have to give up is certainty. The certainty that the way I experienced something tells me what actually happened. The certainty that what feels reasonable to me is objectively reasonable. The certainty that what feels fair to me is fair. The certainty that if something makes me uncomfortable, somebody must be doing something wrong.

That doesn’t mean abandoning judgment. It means holding my judgment differently. I can think something should have gone another way and remain curious about why it didn’t. I can disagree with a decision without immediately assuming the process failed. I can believe my perspective has something important to contribute without believing it should settle the question.

I can even be right and not get my way.

Let that sink in. That can be a great challenge. But sharing life with people who see the world differently requires more flexibility than that. Sometimes the world isn’t going to bend toward me.

The Work Is to Stay

The temptation when our convictions, preferences, and instincts no longer carry the weight we expect is to pull away. To decide the process is broken. To find another space where things make more sense. Or simply to stay physically present while quietly concluding that everyone else has gotten it wrong.

The work is to stay.

To stay engaged when we don’t get our way. To remain curious when something that feels obvious to us isn’t obvious to everyone else. To notice the frustration that rises when a decision doesn’t reflect what we believe is best. To keep listening when our instinct is to make our case one more time, a little more clearly, because surely then everyone will understand.

This isn’t about becoming passive. It isn’t about abandoning our convictions, withholding our perspective, or pretending we agree when we don’t. Sometimes we should push back. Sometimes the process really is bad. Sometimes we may actually be right.

The work is learning to hold all of that without requiring our way of seeing things to become the center.

And if we can stay there, something more than multiracial community becomes possible.

We change.

Because this isn’t only something white people need to do so that people of different races and cultures can flourish around us. We need it for ourselves. We need experiences that expose the limits of our own instincts. We need to discover that what feels normal to us is not necessarily neutral, that what feels obvious is not universally obvious, and that what feels right may still be shaped by a lifetime of having our cultural assumptions reinforced.

That can be uncomfortable. It can also make our world bigger.

We become more curious. More flexible. Less certain that our first interpretation is the only interpretation. Better able to listen without immediately translating someone else’s experience into our own categories. More capable of being changed by people rather than merely making room for them.

Maybe that’s ultimately what it means to move ourselves from the center: not thinking less of ourselves, but no longer needing ourselves to be the reference point.

And we may discover that life is richer from there.

It’s Not About Race…

Project 2045 — Wed, 12 Aug 2026 15:22:23 GMT

One of the most predictable moments in conversations about race comes when conflict enters the picture.

A disagreement at work.
A tense interaction on the street.
A difficult conversation between neighbors.
A misunderstanding between coworkers.

If the people involved come from different racial or cultural backgrounds, someone will almost always say:

“This isn’t about race.”

Sometimes they’re right. The disagreement may not have started because of race. It may genuinely be about a missed deadline, a poor decision, different expectations, or conflicting personalities.

But that doesn’t mean race isn’t part of the equation. Race doesn’t have to be the cause of a conflict to shape the way people experience it.

We know that our experiences form the assumptions we carry into every interaction. We know that people are often judged differently for the same behavior. We know that some perspectives are treated as more “normal” or “objective” than others. None of this requires conscious intent. It’s simply part of living in the world we’ve inherited.

When racial difference is present, race becomes one of the variables.

Think about gender.

If a conflict arises between a man and a woman in the workplace, it would be naïve to insist that gender has absolutely nothing to do with how each person experiences the situation. The disagreement may not be about gender, but decades of workplace expectations, power, communication patterns, and lived experience inevitably shape how both people interpret what is happening.

Race works much the same way. It isn’t always the headline. But it is almost always in the room.

The challenge is that those of us whose experiences are most consistently reflected back to us by our world often have the hardest time noticing this. When society regularly confirms your perspective, it begins to feel like reality itself rather than one perspective among many.

That’s why “It’s not about race” often feels true to one person and incomplete to another.

One person is describing the subject of the disagreement. The other is describing the environment in which the disagreement is unfolding. Those are not the same thing.

Here’s the twist that has become increasingly important for me. Race is still a variable even when everyone involved shares the same racial identity.

Because race isn’t only something that exists between people. It also shapes the stories we inherit, the expectations we carry, the institutions we trust, and the ways we understand ourselves.

Two white coworkers may both assume that a system should work in a particular way because they’ve been formed by similar cultural expectations. Two Black men may read a moment of respect, dignity, or dismissal through shared experiences that have shaped their lives.Two Latino neighbors may carry common assumptions about family, authority, or belonging. None of this determines how people will respond. But it helps explain why we respond the way they do.

Race is always doing formative work because race is always present. Recognizing that doesn’t mean every disagreement becomes a conversation about race. It simply means we stop pretending race disappears the moment we stop talking about it.

Maturity isn’t insisting race explains everything. Neither is pretending it explains nothing. Maturity is learning to ask, with curiosity rather than defensiveness:

How might race be one of the variables here?

Privilege Becomes Perspective

Project 2045 — Wed, 05 Aug 2026 15:22:23 GMT

Many of us can acknowledge that people or the way society is structured has opened doors for us by virtue of the neighborhoods we grew up in, the schools we attended, the financial stability we inherited, the mentors who believed in us, or the institutions that generally worked in our favor. Recognizing those advantages can be uncomfortable, but it is necessary.

It is also only the beginning.

What we call privilege is the accumulated effect of opportunities, assumptions, and systems that make life easier for some people than for others. Privilege doesn’t simply shape the lives we live. It shapes the way we imagine the world.

The harder question isn’t, What advantages have I received?

The harder question is, What assumptions have those advantages taught me to make?

That is a much more difficult question because privilege doesn’t just give us opportunities. It quietly forms our worldview. It teaches us what feels normal, what feels fair, what feels safe, and what feels true. And like all good teachers, it is most effective when we don’t realize it is teaching us anything at all.

· If I have generally been treated with dignity by institutions, I naturally come to trust institutions.

· If people who look like me have regularly occupied positions of leadership, leadership begins to look like people who look like me.

· If my race has rarely complicated an interaction, I may conclude that race rarely complicates anyone else’s experience.

· If my culture has been reflected in classrooms, churches, media, and public life, I stop seeing it as my culture. It simply becomes “normal.”

None of these conclusions require prejudice or bad intentions. They are simply the worldview that privilege quietly constructs over a lifetime.

This is where implicit bias becomes especially important.

We often think of implicit bias as hidden prejudice, but I think it is broader than that. It is the collection of assumptions we carry into every interaction before we’ve consciously thought about it.

· When someone tells us about discrimination, what is our first instinct? To believe them? To question them? To explain it another way?

· When we see unequal outcomes between groups, what explanation immediately comes to mind? Personal choices? Cultural differences? Historical systems? Bad luck?

· When someone responds differently than we would, do we assume they are overreacting? Or do we wonder what experiences have taught them to respond that way?

Those first reactions don’t come out of nowhere. They have been formed over years of living within a particular story.

This is why conversations about race can feel so frustrating. Two people can witness the same event and honestly arrive at different conclusions—not necessarily because one is lying, but because each has been trained by different experiences to notice different things.

Privilege doesn’t simply influence our answers. It influences the questions we think to ask. For much of my life, there were questions I never thought to ask because the world generally worked the way I expected it to.

Who designed this system? Who benefits from it? Who has to adapt? Whose culture is assumed? Whose stories are missing?

Those questions weren’t hidden from me. They simply weren’t necessary for me to navigate my daily life. That may be one of privilege’s greatest powers. It allows us to mistake our experience for reality itself.

My worldview doesn’t simply shape how I interpret the world; it shapes the world I help create. If my thinking has been formed by privilege and I never stop to examine it, I will inevitably make decisions that reflect an incomplete picture of reality. Those decisions may feel fair, reasonable, or even generous to me, but they can still disadvantage others because they are built on assumptions that fail to account for experiences outside my own.

This is how broken ways of seeing become broken ways of living. They don’t survive because people intentionally defend them. They survive because people like me continue to recreate them from unexamined assumptions about what is normal, necessary, and true. Every time I fail to question the worldview privilege has given me, I risk reinforcing patterns that exclude, burden, or diminish others. Privilege isn’t the only problem. Believing my privileged perspective is simply reality is

This, I believe, is the deeper work of Project 2045.

Our goal isn’t to produce white people who can recite the definition of privilege or reluctantly admit they have benefited from it.

Our goal is to become people who recognize that every one of us sees the world through lenses shaped by our experiences. The invitation is not to throw those lenses away, but to discover that they are lenses in the first place.

When we begin to see that, we can finally ask one of the most important questions of all:

What parts of the world have I never noticed because privilege taught me I didn’t need to?

That isn’t a question of shame. It’s a question of growth.

And growth may be one of the only tool we have for becoming the kind of neighbors the future will require.

What I Can't Say with White People in the Room

Project 2045 — Wed, 29 Jul 2026 15:22:09 GMT

The one thing I can’t always tell white people is that I do not fully trust them when push comes to shove.

Not because I believe every white person means harm. Not because I think every white person is secretly cruel, consciously hateful, or incapable of love. Many white people I know would describe themselves as affirming, compassionate, justice-minded, and committed to the flourishing of Black people, queer people, and other marginalized communities. Some have done real work. Some have told the truth about racism. Some have wept over the violence of this country. Some have given their time, money, and bodies to movements for justice.

And still, I do not always trust what will happen when the cost becomes personal.

Because whiteness is not merely an attitude. It is not only a set of conscious beliefs or explicit prejudices. Whiteness is a formation. It shapes what people fear, what they expect from reality, what they assume they are owed, what futures they imagine, what threats they perceive, and what their bodies interpret as danger. It teaches people how to predict the world. It trains the nervous system. It tells some bodies that they are neutral, innocent, rational, and entitled to comfort, while telling other bodies that they are suspicious, excessive, dangerous, or disposable.

I am never unaware of this.

I am never unaware that the subconscious architecture of this country has been designed against the Black body. And more specifically, it has been designed against the Black queer body in ways that are often so deep, so ordinary, and so well-disguised that even people who would call themselves loving may not recognize the reflexes moving through them. Anti-Blackness does not always announce itself as hatred. Sometimes it sounds like concern. Sometimes it calls itself “discernment.” Sometimes it appears as hesitation, suspicion, distance, correction, tone-policing, or the sudden need to “slow down” when Black people name what is true.

This is what makes it so hard to talk about. The danger is not only in the people who know they hate us. The danger is also in the people who believe they love us but have not yet interrogated what their love requires them to surrender.

There is a difference between affection and solidarity. There is a difference between being moved by Black suffering and being willing to be changed by Black truth. There is a difference between admiring Black brilliance and trusting Black perception. There is a difference between celebrating Black culture and relinquishing the assumptions that make whiteness feel like safety.

What I often cannot say plainly is that I do not trust white people to stay with it when the going gets tough.

I do not trust, without evidence, that they will remain present when the conversation stops being inspiring and starts becoming indicting. I do not trust that they will stay when anti-racism is no longer a value statement but a rupture in their relationships, their institutions, their theology, their careers, their family systems, or their sense of self. I do not trust that they will choose truth when

truth costs them belonging. I do not trust that they will keep listening when their bodies begin to experience accountability as annihilation.

Because whiteness has taught people to confuse discomfort with danger.

It has taught them that ease is a birthright. It has taught them that convenience is normal. It has taught them that they should be able to move through the world without being deeply interrupted, without having to work too hard to be understood, without having to constantly translate themselves, defend themselves, or prove their humanity. Whiteness forms people to expect that reality will bend toward their comfort. So when that comfort is challenged, the challenge can feel existential.

This is why the work of uprooting whiteness is so difficult. It is not simply a matter of learning new language or adopting better politics. It is not accomplished by reading a few books, attending a workshop, or knowing how to say the right words in public. It requires a kind of death. It requires the unraveling of an identity that has been mistaken for personhood. It requires the loss of innocence, the loss of centrality, the loss of presumed authority, the loss of being able to narrate oneself as good without also being accountable to the harm one has inherited and perpetuated.

And many people do not want that kind of loss.

Even when they say they want justice, they may not want the grief that justice requires. Even when they say they want liberation, they may not want to confront the ways their own belonging has been built on someone else’s exclusion. Even when they say they love Black people, they may not want to give up the internal arrangements that make Black truth feel threatening.

So they cling.

They cling to whiteness because whiteness has offered them a name, a place, a shield, a story, a hierarchy, a way to feel secure in a world that is otherwise terrifyingly uncertain. They cling because losing whiteness can feel like losing the self, even though what is being lost is not the self but a false arrangement of power. They cling because they have been told, in a thousand subtle and overt ways, that without whiteness they will be nothing, or unsafe, or unmoored.

And when people are afraid of losing an identity, they will often choose violence before they choose transformation.

They may cling to anti-Blackness not because they have consciously decided to hate Black people, but because anti-Blackness stabilizes the world whiteness built for them. It gives them somewhere to put their fear. It gives them someone to suspect. It gives them a way to avoid the abyss of not knowing who they are without superiority, innocence, or control.

That is the part I cannot always say.

That I know the love may be real, but I am watching for what happens under pressure.

I am watching what happens when Black grief is inconvenient. I am watching what happens when Black anger is not eloquent. I am watching what happens when Black queer embodiment refuses to be palatable. I am watching what happens when the room does not center white processing. I am watching what happens when repair requires more than apology. I am watching what happens when the question is no longer, “Do you care?” but “What are you willing to lose?”

Because care without cost is not yet trust.

Trust is built in the places where whiteness usually retreats. Trust is built when white people resist the urge to defend themselves before they understand the harm. Trust is built when they stay in the room without demanding comfort from the people they have wounded. Trust is built when they believe Black perception, even when it disrupts their preferred version of events. Trust is built when they stop treating their intentions as more important than impact. Trust is built when they do not make Black people responsible for managing the emotional fallout of white awakening.

Trust is built when white people choose accountability over innocence, solidarity over reputation, truth over ease.

I want a world where trust can be possible. I want relationships where truth does not have to be rationed according to what whiteness can tolerate. I want communities where Black queer bodies are not treated as problems to be managed, symbols to be celebrated, or threats to be contained, but as sacred bearers of wisdom, beauty, desire, grief, and divine image. I want white people to be free, too — not centered, not excused, not coddled, but free from the death-dealing lie that their humanity depends on domination.

But freedom requires a reckoning.

____________________________

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

Growth Always Asks Something Of Us

Project 2045 — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 15:22:18 GMT

One of the things I hear most often from white people is a desire to do something.

What should I read? What should I do? How do I help? They are good questions. But underneath them is another question we don’t ask very often:

What am I willing to give?

Most forms of growth require some kind of investment. We understand this in nearly every area of life. We don’t expect to get physically healthy without giving time to exercise. We don’t expect to become experts in our profession without years of learning and practice. We don’t expect to build strong relationships without investing time, attention, and care. We don’t expect to become financially secure without planning, discipline, and sacrifice. We don’t expect to master a craft without practice, feedback, and persistence.

Growth costs something. Yet when it comes to racial growth, many white people seem surprised by the cost. We often approach this work hoping it can fit conveniently into our lives. We want a book recommendation, a podcast episode, or a documentary that will help us understand what we need to understand so we can move on to the next thing. We want awareness without disruption.

But meaningful growth rarely works that way.

If white people are going to prepare for the world of 2045, we will need to take responsibility for our own development. We cannot expect people of color to carry the burden of our education. We cannot expect understanding to simply appear because we have good intentions. Like every other important area of growth, this one requires investment.

The first cost is time. Many of us have spent years learning our professions, studying our hobbies, deepening our faith, or following things that interest us. We have devoted thousands of hours to becoming the people we want to be. Yet when it comes to understanding race, culture, and the systems that have shaped our society, we often expect a shortcut.

There isn’t one. Understanding takes time. Listening takes time. Building relationships takes time. Learning histories that many of us were never taught takes time. None of this is unusual. It is simply how growth works.

The second cost is money. This may feel uncomfortable to say, but we spend money on the things we value.

We pay for gym memberships because health matters. We pay for conferences because professional growth matters. We pay for therapy because emotional health matters. We buy books, take classes, hire coaches, and invest in experiences that help us become who we want to be.

If becoming culturally mature matters, then it should not surprise us that it may cost money as well.

Money has a way of revealing what we truly value. Most of us can point to things we willingly spend money on because they matter to us—club sports for our kids, a new kitchen, concert tickets, streaming subscriptions, weekend getaways, charitable causes, or saving for retirement. None of those things are wrong. But if we believe preparing for a diverse and equitable future matters, then it is worth asking whether any of our resources are directed toward that future as well. Supporting local entrepreneurs, funding educational opportunities, investing in community organizations, or helping expand opportunities for others are all ways our financial choices can begin to reflect our stated values.

But the deepest cost is neither time nor money.

The deepest cost is identity.

Most white people I know think of themselves as good people. I certainly do. We try to be fair. We try to treat people well. We try to live according to our values. The challenge is that growth often asks us to question stories we have long believed about ourselves.

We may discover that our understanding of history was incomplete. We may learn that opportunities we assumed were simply the result of hard work were also influenced by systems that benefited some groups more than others. We may realize that experiences we considered universal were actually shaped by culture.

None of this makes us bad people. But it can make us uncomfortable people. And discomfort is often the price of growth.

In some ways, racial development asks white people to let go of a simpler version of ourselves. It asks us to move beyond the idea that being a good person is enough. It invites us to become more curious, more aware, and more willing to see ourselves as participants in a much larger story.

That process can feel costly because it is. But every meaningful transformation costs something.

The question is not whether growth will require an investment. The question is whether we believe the investment is worth making.

Cohort Update: We Can Do This

Project 2045 — Wed, 15 Jul 2026 15:22:01 GMT

One of the core beliefs behind Project 2045 is that we cannot learn our way into a new future alone. We need spaces where we can practice together, ask better questions, listen more deeply, and be honest about where we are still growing.

Over the past several months, I have had the privilege of piloting our first Skill Building Cohort with a group of people willing to give their time, attention, and stories to this work. We are practicing being white people who are doing our own work. It is hard to put into words what an honor it has been.

When we first started imagining this cohort, we knew we wanted it to be different from many of the conversations people have experienced around race and culture. We were not trying to create a space where people simply consumed more information or learned the “right answers.” We wanted to create a space to practice. A space where we could build the muscles required to have honest conversations. A space where we could learn how to stay present with ourselves and one another.

And that is exactly what this group has done.

We have laughed together, including plenty of moments laughing at my own mistakes, experiments, and places where the pilot process was still very much a pilot. We have adjusted together and learned together.

We have made room for our own stories and the stories of others. We have slowed down enough to ask not only what we think about issues of race, culture, and belonging, but how our own experiences have shaped the way we see the world.

We have also made space for lament.

One person in the cohort described the experience of wrestling with these conversations as realizing they could not simply go back and live the same way. They used words like “sad,” “confused,” and “a reckoning.” That moment has stayed with me because I think it captures something important about this work.

Growth is not always the immediate excitement of discovering something new. Sometimes growth is the difficult realization that there are things we can no longer ignore. Sometimes it is looking honestly at the ways our society has been formed and asking new questions about how race and culture have shaped the world we inherited.

That kind of reflection takes courage.

Throughout the cohort, we have talked honestly about moments when we found that courage. Moments when we stepped into a conversation, asked a question, listened differently, or chose not to avoid discomfort. And we have also talked about the moments when we did not have that courage.

Those conversations may have been some of the most important ones because they remind us that this work is not about perfection. It is about practice. It is about becoming the kind of people who can keep showing up.

Maybe the most encouraging thing we have discovered together is that we can do this.

The conversations we are practicing are not as dangerous as we have often been told they are. They can be uncomfortable. They can challenge us. They can reveal things we have not seen before. But when entered with curiosity, humility, and care, they can also create connection, understanding, and possibility.

As we reach the halfway point of this first cohort, I find myself incredibly grateful and deeply mindful of the work ahead. Each person has recognized places where they are growing. Each person has also begun to see the work that remains unfinished—not just individually, but for all of us collectively.

That is the gift this first group has given Project 2045. They have not simply participated in a program. They have helped shape what this work can become as we are in conversation about two other fall cohorts.

I could not be more proud of the courage, honesty, and openness this group has brought. And I could not feel more responsibility for what we continue to learn together as we move into the second half of this journey.

White Is Not A Cultural Background

Project 2045 — Wed, 08 Jul 2026 15:23:10 GMT

White is a culture. Many white Americans struggle to see white culture because we have spent most of our lives swimming in it. Like fish in water, what surrounds us can become invisible. I also suggested that white culture has values, stories, assumptions, and expectations that have shaped American institutions and public life.

But there is another side to that conversation.

While white functions as a culture, it is not a cultural background.

For most of us, our cultural background comes from somewhere else.

For most of my life, I thought white or American was my cultural background. If someone asked about my ancestry, I would usually shrug and say I was generic white. A mutt. I didn’t know much beyond that.

My family’s mythology was that we were Norwegian and probably more Native American than our racist grandfathers were willing to admit. Like many family stories, those claims floated around without much evidence. They were simply part of the narrative.

Several years ago, I took one of those DNA ancestry tests. To be honest, I only took it because of the medical information. Knowing my ancestry meant so little to me that when the results came back, I didn’t even bother looking at them for almost a year.

When I finally opened the report, I learned something surprising.

The racist grandfathers were apparently correct.

But it turns out I am mostly British and Irish not Norwegian. So I now joke that I am basically a beer-drinking colonist. The results fit better than I expected.

Later I mentioned this to a historian friend of mine. He laughed and said, “That makes sense.”

Then he started telling me my story.

He explained that many Irish peasants fled to London looking for work during times of famine and economic hardship. Later, many of those same families crossed the Atlantic looking for opportunity in America. He said, “I would bet that’s your family.”

Now there may be a way to prove that theory right or wrong, but I will probably never spend the time to find out. Still, hearing it changed something for me. Suddenly I wasn’t just generic white anymore. I could begin to imagine actual people. People who struggled. People who migrated. People who hoped for something better. People whose decisions eventually made my life possible.

The experience made me think differently about ancestry.

Not long after that, I attended a work conference where I was placed in a small discussion group. There were seven of us. Everyone in the group was a woman of color except for one Black man and me.

We became instant friends.

At one point we skipped a session and spent our time talking honestly about the conference, our jobs, race, society, and life. It was one of those conversations that felt more valuable than anything happening on the official schedule.

At some point I made a joke about being generic white and not really knowing my ancestry.

The group got quiet.

One of them finally responded.

“That’s one of the problems with white people.”

I laughed.

She wasn’t joking.

“You’ll never grow and heal unless you do your own ancestry work.”

At the time, ancestry work sounded a little new-agey and woo-woo to me. It wasn’t language I would have chosen for myself. But one conviction I have developed over the years is that People of Color often understand whiteness better than white people do.

After all, I have spent most of my life living inside the fishbowl. Many people of color have spent their entire lives learning how to navigate it.

So I listened.

Over time, I have become convinced they were right. White may function as a culture, but it is not a cultural background.

My cultural story did not begin with America. It began with people whose names I do not know. People who lived in places I have never seen. People who carried hopes, fears, traditions, and dreams long before they became part of the American story.

Part of learning how to navigate a multicultural society is learning who we are. Not just as Americans. Not just as white people. But as people whose stories started somewhere before America.

For many white Americans, something was lost when our ancestors became white. This was an intentional strategy of the American experience. Distinct histories were folded into a broader category. Irish became white eventually but not fully embraced at the beginning for concerns over economics of immigration. Italians became white. Germans became white. Poles became white. Over time, many of us forgot where our stories began.

Recovering those stories does not solve everything. It does not erase racism. It does not automatically make us more culturally aware.

But it does give us roots.

As one of the women at that conference told me, “You are still the dream fulfilled of someone in your family who came before you. Someone who made a cross-continental journey and hoped for a better life.”

I think about that often. Not because it makes me proud. Because it makes me grateful.

And because it reminds me that before I was white, my family had a story.

White Is a Culture

Project 2045 — Wed, 01 Jul 2026 15:22:08 GMT

One of the most common responses I hear when talking about race is some version of, “I don’t really have a culture.” Sometimes people will say, “I’m just American,” or “My family is pretty normal.” What they usually mean is that they do not have a culture that feels particularly visible to them.

That is often how culture works when you are surrounded by it.

Imagine a fish swimming through water. If you asked the fish to describe water, it might struggle. Water is not something the fish visits. It is the environment in which the fish lives. It is so constant that it becomes invisible. Culture often works the same way. We tend to notice other people’s cultures much more easily than our own.

For many white Americans, culture can feel invisible because many of the assumptions, values, and norms associated with white culture have become the default settings of American society. We are taught in schools, reinforced in workplaces, reflected in media, and built into many of our institutions. When something is treated as normal for long enough, it can stop looking like culture and start looking like reality itself.

This is why I believe it is important to say something that can sound surprising at first: white is a culture.

To be clear, I am not saying all white people think alike, vote alike, or share the same experiences. Nor am I suggesting that white culture is the only culture in America. I am saying that there are patterns, values, assumptions, and ways of seeing the world that have historically shaped white American culture and continue to influence our way of life today.

White culture is difficult to define precisely because it is so broad and because it contains diversity within it. Yet there are several values that are often associated with dominant white American culture. These include a strong emphasis on punctuality and time management, productivity and efficiency, individual achievement, future planning, direct communication, competition, personal responsibility, and the belief that hard work should lead to success.

None of these values are inherently bad. The point is to recognize them as cultural values rather than universal truths. Every culture emphasizes certain things and downplays others. What feels obvious or natural to one group may feel strange or even unhealthy to another.

The challenge comes when one culture becomes dominant. A dominant culture tends to assume that its values are simply the way things are supposed to be. Its stories become the stories everyone learns. Its heroes become the heroes everyone studies. Its holidays become the holidays everyone recognizes. Its expectations become the expectations that schools, businesses, and institutions reward.

This is not unique to white culture. Any dominant culture tends to work this way. Throughout history, dominant cultures have rewarded those who understand their rules, reinforced the values that support them, and worked to preserve the systems that benefit them. That is simply how power operates.

The United States has been shaped primarily by white cultural norms for much of its history. As a result, many Americans of every race have learned to navigate those norms because they are the norms that often determine success in schools, workplaces, and public life.

At the same time, America has never been made up of only one culture. People bring different histories, traditions, values, and ways of understanding the world. Some cultures place greater emphasis on community than individual achievement. Some value relationships more than schedules. Some understand success through the lens of family obligation rather than personal accomplishment. Some prioritize harmony where others prioritize directness.

As our country becomes increasingly diverse, we have a choice. We can continue assuming that one cultural framework should define public life for everyone, or we can learn how to make room for multiple ways of being human. We do not have to pretend to abandon white culture because we cannot do it. But we do have to recognize that white culture is a culture. And learn that, while a dominant white culture has often pushed others to flex to it, our job is to learn to flex our cultural values to those outside of the dominant.

That means recognizing that our way is not the only way. It means learning to listen before assuming, adapting before demanding, and becoming curious about how others experience the world. In a nation where no single group will hold a majority, the future will belong to people who can move comfortably between cultures while building bonds across cultural differences. The first step in that journey is recognizing that white is a culture. It is the fishbowl we are swimming in.

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What to a White Person Is Juneteenth

Project 2045 — Sat, 20 Jun 2026 15:22:22 GMT

Next week, I am attending a webinar from Faith 250 on Frederick Douglass’s famous speech, What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?

In that landmark 1852 address, Douglass challenged the nation to confront the contradiction between its celebration of liberty and the ongoing reality of slavery. Rather than rejecting the ideals of the Fourth of July, Douglass called America to live up to its own promises of freedom, justice, and human dignity for all people.

Thinking about the webinar has inspired me to ask a different question:

What to a white person is Juneteenth?

Before answering that question, it helps to remember what Juneteenth is.

Juneteenth commemorates June 19, 1865, the day enslaved people in Texas learned they were free, more than two years after the issuance of the Emancipation Proclamation. On that day, Union troops arrived in Galveston and announced the end of slavery, marking a significant moment in the nation’s long journey toward freedom. Over time, Juneteenth became a celebration of Black resilience, culture, community, and the ongoing pursuit of justice and equality. In 2021, Juneteenth was officially recognized as a federal holiday in the United States, inviting all Americans to reflect on both the progress made and the work that remains.

Three times in the last few years I have visited Galveston, Texas, the birthplace of Juneteenth. I have stood before the incredible mural that tells the story. I have visited the art gallery housed in the historic building. I have listened to the Sam Collins II, Professor Juneteenth, explain the significance of the site and the history it preserves.

What stands out to me every time is the power of public history.

The space itself tells a story. Across the street stands one of the largest slave auction sites in Texas. The distance between those two places is measured in steps, but it represents generations of struggle, suffering, courage, and change. The experience reminded me that history is not just something we read in books. History lives in places. It lives in stories. It lives in what we choose to remember and what we choose to forget.

That is one of the gifts of Juneteenth. It makes history accessible. It invites us into stories that many of us were never taught. It helps us understand not only what happened, but why it matters.

When Juneteenth became a federal holiday in 2021, some rightly questioned whether symbolic recognition was enough. The critique was familiar and important. Malcolm X once warned, “The white man will try to satisfy us with symbolic victories rather than economic equity and real justice.”

That critique remains a necessary measure of our justice efforts. Symbolic victories alone are not enough.

And yet, I find myself increasingly grateful for Juneteenth. Not because a holiday solves injustice, but because remembrance matters.

In a moment when we are seeing active efforts to erase, minimize, and inaccurately rewrite parts of our nation’s history around race and racism, spaces of public memory become even more important. This very week, a federal appeals court ruled that the Trump administration can replace slavery-related exhibits at Philadelphia’s President’s House site in advance of the celebration of the nations 250^th birthday.

What we remember shapes who we become. What we forget shapes us as well.

So what, to a white person, is Juneteenth?

It is an opportunity to celebrate freedom. It is an opportunity to lament the long delay between emancipation declared and emancipation experienced. It is an opportunity to tell the truth about our shared history. It is an opportunity to honor the resilience, courage, and contributions of Black Americans.

And perhaps most importantly, it is an opportunity to practice remembering. Because a people who cannot tell the truth about their past will struggle to imagine a more just future.

Juneteenth reminds us that freedom is worth celebrating, truth is worth preserving, and history is worth telling.

What I Don't Say with White People in the Room

Project 2045 — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 15:22:33 GMT

There are things I do not say when white people are in the room. Not because I lack words. I just wonder, if it is worth it.

Is it worth the energy I’ll expend calculating how honest I can be before somebody becomes defensive? Is it worth the time I’ll take to choose my words carefully so that we avoid exposing someone’s fragility? Is it worth the relational capital I’ll spend naming what just happened and possibly derailing the entire room? There’s an emotional cost to explaining, contextualizing, reassuring, clarifying, comforting, and educating - and some days that cost feels very expensive.

So sometimes I just let things go.

I let somebody interrupt me.
I let somebody explain my own experience back to me.
I let somebody assume agreement instead of asking for it.
I let comments slide that I would absolutely push back on in another setting.

Because sometimes getting through the meeting matters more than honesty. And that is the part many white people do not understand. They think silence means agreement. They think professionalism means comfort. They think the meeting “went well” because nobody openly challenged anything.

Meanwhile, I am sitting there making real-time decisions about whether honesty is emotionally safe, strategically useful, or simply too expensive.

Sometimes I disengage completely. Not visibly. I know how to stay in the room. I know how to nod. I know how to participate enough. I know how to survive professionally. But internally, I may have already left the room. When there’s no time for honesty, curiosity, slowness, or accountability; when everything has to move quickly, stay productive, and stay on schedule, I begin to question whether I should bring my full self into the meeting.

My white colleagues often say they want honesty, but honesty takes time. It’s taken me years to realize it, but when everything has to stay fast, efficient, polished, and on schedule, it’s an indication that honesty is probably not a priority. And all the things that emerge with and on the other side of honesty takes time. Real listening takes time. Repair takes time. Accountability takes time. True relationship takes time.

A lot of white people say they want honesty, but what they really want is confirmation delivered through a different voice. They want a Black or brown person to echo what they already think in language that feels just challenging enough to be interesting but not disruptive enough to require change. And often what white institutions want is diversity without disruption. They want my presence. They do not always want my perspective.

My honesty is disruptive. And I’m not going to apologize for it. I know it’s not always welcome. I know it’s inconvenient and slows things down. And I know that I am not always right. I also know, more times than not, my feedback and perspective is helpful.

So I’ll hold back. I’ll measure my responses. I’ll choose my words. I’ll do a ton of work to avoid telling my colleagues the truth. Cuz no one likes the black contrarian. Truth is, when I avoid the cost of being honest, it actually costs my white colleagues more. When I can’t bring my honesty, I can’t be in true relationship with you.

I was thinking recently about my brother who passed away a few years ago. One of the things I miss most about him is our fights. The wrestling. The arguing. The times when the honesty led to anger. Pushing each other. The intensity.

We loved each other enough to be honest, and that honesty led to conflict. But the conflict was never meant to destroy each other. The conflict was the mechanism that would lead to resolution. Without the conflict, boundaries were never addressed. Without relational rupture, we would never have learned accountability and repair. Without pushing back, we would not know each other’s vulnerabilities and be able to respond with care. We fought because we were real with each other.

And honestly, that is part of what I sometimes want with white people too. Not politeness or diplomacy. Certainly, not careful corporate language.

Realness.

Sometimes I say “whiteness” sharply because I want to see if you can stay in the conversation. Sometimes I push because I want to know whether you can handle honesty without collapsing into defensiveness or guilt or withdrawal.

Because the truth is: The people I love, I fight. The people I trust, are the people I feel safest push back on. When I believe in you, I risk honesty with you. And sometimes what whiteness, institutions, and racial systems have stolen from us is the ability to actually struggle honestly with one another without treating conflict itself as failure.

Some white people experience any discomfort as rejection, hostility, or unfairness. But many of us learned long ago how to lose small things every day and keep functioning. We learned how to stay at the table without being centered. We learned how to absorb discomfort without making it everybody else’s emergency.

Sometimes I want white people to learn that too.

I want them to lose an argument and survive it.
I want them to be uncomfortable and survive it.
I want them to not be centered for a moment and survive it.

Because maybe then we could finally become real with each other. And honestly, I think many of us are starving for relationships where we no longer have to manage white comfort in order to tell the truth.

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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

Seven Generations

Project 2045 — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 15:22:59 GMT

One thing I have been trying to do lately is learn about race, repair, community, and responsibility from traditions outside the narrow Western frameworks I inherited.

Not because Western traditions have nothing to offer. They do. But because I am increasingly aware that many of the assumptions I absorbed about individuality, urgency, success, ownership, and progress are not universal truths. They are cultural inheritances. And like all inheritances, they shape what we can and cannot easily see.

One idea that has stayed with me is often called the Seventh Generation Principle. Many people know the phrase vaguely now, mostly because of the cleaning supply company, but the underlying idea is far more demanding than a marketing slogan.

The principle asks communities to consider how today’s decisions will affect people seven generations into the future.

Not seven months.
Not the next election cycle.
Not next quarter’s numbers.
Seven generations.

I find myself stopped in my tracks by that. Because one of the easiest things to do in moments of social tension is to convince ourselves that delay is neutral. That waiting costs nothing. That if conversations about race, inequity, segregation, distrust, or historical harm feel complicated or uncomfortable, we can simply postpone them until society becomes calmer or more prepared.

But postponement has consequences too.

Every year we fail to build a better world has a cost. Every year communities remain isolated from one another shapes the imagination of children growing up inside those divisions. Every year we avoid difficult conversations about history, belonging, fear, and repair leaves future generations to inherit tensions we were unwilling to address ourselves.

In many Western traditions, we do not spend much time thinking about ancestors. At least not in the active sense. We might research genealogy or preserve family photos, but we do not often ask ourselves what obligations we hold toward those who came before us or those who will come after us. We do not usually organize our lives around becoming worthy ancestors someday.

That language used to feel distant to me. Maybe even overly romantic. But recently someone asked me a question I have not been able to shake:

What kind of ancestor do you want to be? Not what kind of career do you want? Not what kind of brand do you want? Not what kind of online identity do you want? What kind of ancestor do you want to be?

I do not hear that question as pressure to become some heroic figure. Honestly, I hear it more as an invitation toward responsibility and humility. Because I am increasingly aware that future generations will live inside worlds shaped partly by what we normalize now.

· They will inherit the conversations we avoided.

· The fears we fed.

· The communities we neglected.

· The courage we practiced.

· The bridges we built.

· The stories we chose to tell about one another.

And if I am honest, I think part of why Project 2045 matters to me is because I am trying to internalize the urgency of that reality that really isn’t in a future space of the year 2045. It is absolutely here now. The demographic changes happening in America are not theoretical anymore. They are already reshaping schools, neighborhoods, churches, politics, friendships, and public life. We can respond to those changes with fear, denial, competition, nostalgia, or resentment. Many people already are.

Or we can begin practicing another way of being together now, before polarization becomes, as one political commentator suggests, calcification.

I do not think this work asks us to become perfect, performative, or self-righteous people. If anything, it asks us to become more honest ones. Honest enough to have slower conversations in a culture obsessed with speed and reaction. Honest enough to stay present when discomfort appears instead of immediately retreating into defensiveness or avoidance. Honest enough to believe that shared futures are still possible, even in a society increasingly shaped by fragmentation, suspicion, and isolation.

I do not think this work is only about being “good” people. I think it is about deciding what kind of inheritance we want to leave behind.

Unsafe Topics?

Project 2045 — Wed, 27 May 2026 17:32:32 GMT

One of the more unsurprising discoveries from our first Project 2045 pilot cohort was how many people carried the same implicit message about race from childhood:

This is dangerous territory.

Not necessarily because someone sat us down and said those exact words. In many cases, nobody had to. The lesson was communicated indirectly through tension, avoidance, silence, warnings, jokes, sudden changes in tone, or the visible discomfort of adults whenever race emerged in conversation.

For many of us, race became associated with volatility long before we developed the language to describe what we were experiencing. We learned that these conversations could rupture relationships, embarrass families, expose ignorance, provoke conflict, or get someone labeled as racist, angry, divisive, naïve, or oversensitive. So many people internalized the same basic instinct: better to avoid it.

And avoidance makes sense when your nervous system has learned something is unsafe.

One of the problems with conversations about race is that many people think the primary challenge is intellectual disagreement. Sometimes it is. But often the deeper challenge is physiological before it is ideological.

Our bodies react before our carefully constructed thoughts do.

We can feel it happen in ourselves in real time if we are paying attention. Our breathing changes. Our shoulders tighten. Our faces grow warm. Our heart rate increases. Our thoughts begin speeding up and we quietly stop listening as carefully as we were a moment before. Instead of curiosity, we begin preparing defenses, explanations, rebuttals, or escape routes. Sometimes we become argumentative. Sometimes we shut down completely. Sometimes we overexplain, rush toward reassurance, or become hyperaware of possible judgment or rejection. Much of the time, we think we are simply having a conversation, when in reality our nervous systems have already started responding as if we are under threat.

In other words, many of us are not just having conversations. We are managing perceived threats. And if we do not understand that dynamic, we often moralize reactions that are at least partially physiological.

This does not mean every feeling should govern the conversation. It does not mean discomfort is inherently harmful. It does not mean accountability disappears. But it does mean that understanding our nervous systems matters if we actually want better conversations instead of endlessly repeated cycles of fear and defensiveness.

Part of maturity is learning to notice what is happening inside us without immediately obeying it. That is harder than it sounds. Especially because many of us inherited almost no tools for staying grounded in difficult conversations. We inherited either avoidance or escalation. Silence or explosion. Performative certainty or total withdrawal.

Very few people were taught how to remain regulated while discussing subjects tied to identity, history, morality, belonging, or pain. And yet that capacity may become increasingly necessary in the years ahead.

The demographic and cultural changes happening in America are not slowing down. We are going to live, work, worship, vote, raise children, and build communities alongside people with different histories, assumptions, experiences, and fears. If our nervous systems interpret every difficult conversation as existential danger, we will continue retreating into smaller and smaller tribes where we feel temporarily safe and permanently disconnected.

This is part of why slowing down matters.

Not because slowing down magically solves conflict, but because speed often intensifies nervous system reactions. Fast conversations reward certainty, performance, and reaction. Slow conversations create more room to notice what is happening internally before we immediately externalize it onto everyone else.

Sometimes growth begins with something as simple as recognizing what is happening inside us in the middle of a conversation. We notice that our chest tightened when a certain topic came up. We realize we suddenly became defensive or stopped listening carefully. Maybe we felt embarrassed, wanted to escape, wanted to win the conversation, or wanted reassurance that we were still a good person. Those observations may seem small, but they are often the beginning of self-awareness instead of automatic reaction.

Those observations may sound small, but they are often the beginning of self-awareness instead of automatic reaction.

And honestly, I think many of us need permission to realize that struggling in these conversations does not automatically mean we are bad people. It may simply mean we are human beings attempting to unlearn years of fear, avoidance, tribal conditioning, and inherited anxiety around subjects we were rarely taught how to navigate well.

The goal is not becoming emotionless. The goal is becoming more aware, more grounded, and more capable of staying present long enough for real understanding to emerge.

Showing Up

Project 2045 — Wed, 20 May 2026 15:22:54 GMT

White people often feel anxious entering conversations about race because many of us are trying to answer the wrong question.

We ask ourselves: What should I say? How do I avoid messing up? How do I prove I care?

But maybe a better question is simpler: How do I show up well?

Most of us already understand what healthy showing up looks like in everyday life. If a friend is going through a divorce, we do not usually walk in with a ten-step strategy for fixing their life. We listen. We check in consistently. We resist making their pain about our own discomfort. We understand that support sometimes means being present without needing control.

Or imagine visiting someone else’s hometown for the first time. Most healthy people naturally become more observant. We ask questions. We pay attention to local customs. We recognize that the people who live there understand certain things better than we do because they have lived them.

Race conversations can require a similar posture.

For many white people, especially those raised to avoid conversations about race altogether, it can feel tempting to either withdraw completely or overcompensate by trying to sound exceptionally informed. But neither response builds real relationship. Real growth often begins with curiosity, consistency, humility, and the willingness to stay engaged even when conversations become uncomfortable.

Sometimes showing up well means listening carefully to experiences we have never personally had instead of immediately comparing them to our own. Sometimes it means asking thoughtful questions instead of rushing toward debate. Sometimes it means noticing who gets interrupted, dismissed, doubted, or exhausted in conversations and adjusting our behavior accordingly.

And sometimes showing up simply means staying. Staying when conversations feel awkward. Staying when we realize we still have things to learn. Staying when the cultural momentum shifts and talking about race becomes unpopular again.

Because that is part of the challenge of the current moment.

A few years ago, many institutions openly encouraged conversations about race and equity. Now some of those same conversations are being scaled back, defunded, politicized, or avoided altogether. Many people feel uncertain about what can safely be said in workplaces, schools, churches, or public spaces.

Our present moment is not simply pushing back on institutional commitments to racial equity or making these conversations less fashionable. The consequences are landing on real people. Some have lost jobs connected to diversity and equity work. Some finally believed new opportunities, mentorship pipelines, scholarships, or leadership pathways might actually become available, only to watch those doors quietly close again. Others are carrying the exhaustion of feeling newly vulnerable in workplaces, schools, churches, and communities where the social climate has shifted dramatically in just a few years.

So the question for white people becomes more concrete and relational: how do we show up when these realities stop being abstract debates and start affecting the actual lives of people around us? Not by rushing to rescue or centering our own guilt, but by remaining present. By refusing to disappear when pushing in becomes inconvenient. By listening carefully, checking in when helpful, using whatever influence or stability we have to support others, and recognizing that this moment has real costs. Real people suffer when justice work stops being culturally rewarded.

In moments like this, it becomes easier to quietly disengage. To decide that the tension is not worth it. To convince ourselves that the problems are too complicated or too divisive to keep talking about. But relationships do not deepen because conversations are easy. They deepen because people remain present through difficulty.

Showing up today may look less dramatic than people imagined. It may look like sustained friendships across difference. Reading and learning without needing praise for it. Speaking up when something harmful is said in a room where silence would be easier. Raising children who are comfortable with difference rather than afraid of it. Supporting communities and organizations doing long-term work, even when there is no social reward attached to it.

The future probably will not be shaped primarily by people who mastered the right language online. It will be shaped by ordinary people willing to practice humility, curiosity, courage, and sustained presence over long periods of time. None of this requires perfection, but it does require a thoughtful approach to showing up.

We Already Understand Repair

Project 2045 — Wed, 13 May 2026 22:46:55 GMT

We already understand repair
What happens when the harm is larger than any one person

One of the strange things about growing up is realizing that “making things right” becomes far more complicated the older we get.

When we are children, the moral universe often feels relatively clear. If you hurt someone, you apologize. If you break something, you try to fix it. If an entire class mistreats a substitute teacher, sometimes everyone loses recess because everyone participated in creating the environment where the harm happened. Even as kids, we understand instinctively that responsibility is not always purely individual. Sometimes we are part of something larger than ourselves, for good or for harm.

Most of us learned this before we could even fully explain it. But adulthood introduces a harder reality. The systems we participate in become bigger, more layered, and far more difficult to untangle.

We begin to realize that many of the comforts we enjoy are connected to suffering somewhere else. Cheap clothes often come from underpaid labor. Fast shipping depends upon exhausting warehouse conditions and transportation systems that strain both people and the planet. Entire industries operate because consumers like us benefit from convenience, affordability, and distance from the consequences.

As we mature, many of us learn to hold two truths at once: I may not have personally created the problem, and I still participate in a world shaped by it.

Race works this way too.

For many people, conversations about racial inequality become difficult the moment they feel personally accused. We instinctively move into defense mode. I did not own slaves. I did not create segregation. I did not design discriminatory housing policies or unequal school systems or hiring disparities or mass incarceration.

And for many people, that statement is true.

But the deeper question is not only, “Did I personally create this?” The deeper question is, “What does it mean to live inside something that still shapes all of us?”

Because racial inequity was never only about individual prejudice. It became embedded into neighborhoods, wealth accumulation, education systems, infrastructure, policing, healthcare access, and generational opportunity. Like many large systems, it compounded over time. Advantages accumulated in some communities while barriers accumulated in others.

That does not mean every individual life is simple or easy. It does not mean every white person has lived without struggle. It does not mean every person of color has experienced the same realities. Human lives are always more complicated than slogans.

But it does mean we inherited a society that was uneven long before we arrived. And eventually every society and its individuals have to decide what it means to repair what has been damaged.

Some forms of repair happen at levels far beyond my direct influence. Policies. Investments. Schools. Housing. Healthcare. Criminal justice reform. Economic opportunity. Those decisions involve governments, institutions, corporations, and civic systems much larger than any individual person.

But that does not mean ordinary people are powerless. Repair won’t happen if those who have benefited don’t get involved.

Repair also happens through the kind of people we become as long as there are tangible outcomes.

It happens when we listen instead of immediately defending ourselves. It happens when we learn history we were never taught. It happens when we notice who has access to opportunity and who consistently does not. It happens when employers examine hiring practices. When organizations examine leadership representation. When schools examine disciplinary disparities. When neighborhoods ask why some communities have resources that others never received.

Repair can look like investment. Advocacy. Shared relationships. Supporting businesses and organizations that have historically lacked access to capital. Staying in hard conversations instead of retreating from them. Raising children who know how to talk honestly about culture and history without shame or hostility.

None of these actions “solve” hundreds of years of inequity overnight. Large societal wounds rarely heal that way. But this is also true: ignoring damage has never repaired anything.

One of the great temptations in conversations about race is believing that because the problem is enormous, nothing meaningful can be done at all. But most repair throughout human history has happened through ordinary people deciding they did not want to pass unresolved harm endlessly into the future.

We understood this instinctively as children.

If something is broken, we should try to make it right.

The older we get, the more complicated that becomes. But perhaps maturity is not abandoning that instinct. Perhaps maturity is learning how to live it out in a world where the damage is larger than any one person alone can fix and, at the same time, finding our role in the repair.

Do Your Homework

Project 2045 — Wed, 06 May 2026 15:22:51 GMT

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.