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.