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.