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

Installment #4

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.

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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