The Power of Stillness

Words, Silence, and Resistance in America's Moment of Contraction

The intersection of words and actions has long been a tangled knot in American life—a knot that tightens every time rhetoric is grand, and deeds fall short. I've been pondering this contradiction since watching the Joint Meeting of Congress earlier this month, where the tension between speech and silence hung in the air like an unspoken truth.

President Trump delivered his address with the confidence of someone unconcerned with consistency, his comments ranging from promises to "Get Greenland one way or another" to "banning and criminalizing sex changes on children" and "mandatory death penalty for police killers"—this last one particularly jarring coming from someone who had pardoned violent January 6th rioters who assaulted police officers.

Across the aisle, the Democrats mainly sat still—stoic, a reluctant audience. Some held ping pong paddles with phrases like "Protect Veterans," "Musk Steals," and "Save Medicaid," making them look like the automatons we've seen on "Severance," their resistance reduced to simplified slogans while the President's torrent of contradictory words and ideas to wipe out our democracy washed over the chamber. In this tableau of political theater, one could sense a vast chasm: the words of action so often spoken, so rarely enacted by either side.

It wasn't the first time I'd witnessed such discord between words and deeds.

When Words Burn

My early learning on this subject came not from political speeches but from family gatherings. Growing up in the suburbs of Chicago, I remember those trips back to the city to visit extended family. There was a pattern to these visits—excitement at first, playing with cousins, seeing the urban landscape so different from our treeless new neighborhood. But as evening descended, the rooms filled with cigarette smoke and storytelling, each tale becoming louder as glasses emptied, each narrative woven with a complicated nostalgia that seemed to both celebrate and mourn a shared past.

These adults, my relatives, bristled with resentment at my parents' suburban move. I recall my uncle dismissively calling our new home "The Boonies"—a casual judgment that carried the weight of perceived betrayal. In these gatherings, I witnessed my first lessons in code-switching: how my parents transformed between their suburban selves and their city selves, how language and demeanor shifted depending on which side of that invisible boundary we occupied.

During one such gathering, when I was about nine, I first heard an adult use the N-word. It didn't slip out accidentally in the haze of cigarette smoke—it was delivered with the casual confidence of someone using familiar language in familiar company. The word hung in the air like the smoke itself, and I was stunned. The letters seemed to materialize from my relative's mouth one by one; each letter burning fire-red, floating through plumes of smoke before searing into my consciousness.

"We don't say that in our family!" I shouted from the top of a staircase, repeating what my parents had taught me with the righteous certainty only a child can muster.

What followed wasn't just chaos—it was a collision of worlds. An uncle rushed up the stairs to drag me down. The adults weren't simply angry; they were threatened, as if I had exposed a fundamental rift that nobody wanted to acknowledge. My legs burned from the wool carpeting rubbing them as I was dragged away, the physical pain merging with my confusion. My mother and father, the same people who had instilled in me that we "never, ever would use that word," now directed their anger at me—as if I had been the one to speak it.

In that moment, I glimpsed something far more complex than family hypocrisy. I had inadvertently revealed the deep contradiction between the values my suburban parents claimed to embrace and the social realities of our relatives who remained in Chicago—a city marked by redlining, racial tensions, and the still-fresh memories of civil rights protests. My declaration wasn't just about a word; it was about exposing the fault line between two ways of living with America's racial history: one that attempted to distance itself physically and morally from that history by moving to "The Boonies," and another that remained embedded in neighborhoods shaped by segregation, where casual racism was part of the air they breathed, like the cigarette smoke filling those rooms.

My mother later attempted to explain, her words careful and measured about equality and respect for all people. But the explanation couldn't bridge the gap between our suburban isolation and our relatives' urban reality—between the principled stance against racism that was easier to maintain in homogeneous suburbs and the complex, contradictory ways race shaped daily life in the city my parents had left behind.

The dissonance was profound, a fault line in my understanding of the adult world. Words and actions, I learned, often occupied entirely separate realms. This revelation was too disorienting for my young mind, and I gradually retreated to books, where narratives followed their own internal logic, where characters—even deeply flawed ones—possessed an integrity of being that the adults in my life seemed to lack. In stories, I found an honesty that eluded me in the smoke-filled rooms of family gatherings.

The Strategic Power of Stillness

Now, decades later, I find myself thinking about silence and speech in a different context. That childhood moment when I broke the silence about racism in my family has stayed with me—the moment when speaking truth resulted in swift punishment rather than reflection. I've often wondered: Was speaking out the right choice? The answer, I've come to believe, depends entirely on context, power, and purpose.

There's a growing recognition that sometimes the most powerful resistance isn't loud protest but strategic stillness. This isn't the enforced silence of my childhood, when I was physically dragged away for naming, according to my family’s silent rules, that which should not be named. Rather, it's a deliberate withholding, a calculated decision about when silence speaks louder than words.

"There are moments when the democracy expands and there are moments when it contracts," Senator Raphael Warnock observed. "We're in a moment of contraction. But our moral work—our holy work—is in this moment of contraction, to stand up, show up... And it is often in those moments that you give birth to something that is even larger and bigger and better."

What does it mean to "stand up" and "show up" in a moment of democratic contraction? For many Black community leaders, the answer is surprisingly nuanced. It doesn't necessarily mean taking to the streets in the tradition of civil rights protests—a tradition that has often been effective but that may now play directly into the administration's hands.

"The only way to get martial law declared is if you have violent protests," one activist told me recently. "With Black people's deep history of civil rights protests, the administration is intentionally goading us by their actions. We are not going to give this to him. White people, this is the answer to your question: once he sees Black bodies protesting, martial law is around the corner. Being still is our biggest gift to the country right now. We are still preserving democracy."

This perspective represents a profound evolution in resistance strategy. Throughout American history, from the civil rights movement to Black Lives Matter, visible protest has been a crucial tool for advancing justice. But in this moment, with an administration seemingly eager to provoke confrontation as pretext for more authoritarian measures, strategic stillness becomes, paradoxically, the most profound form of resistance for Black Americans—preserving democracy by refusing to provide the spectacle that would justify its further erosion.

But what about white Americans? Here, the moral calculus shifts dramatically. If strategic stillness is appropriate for Black communities who might be targeted under the pretext of "restoring order," does the same apply to those who have historically benefited from racial privilege? I would argue emphatically no.

For white Americans, strategic stillness easily becomes simple complicity. The silence that protects Black communities from being targeted becomes, for white Americans, merely another form of standing aside while democracy contracts. White Americans instead face a different moral imperative: to use their relative immunity from certain forms of state violence to stand in the gap, to be the visible resistance that can't as easily be weaponized as justification for martial law.

This division of labor in resistance isn't new. During the civil rights era, white allies often served as shields, placing their bodies between Black protesters and police violence, leveraging their privilege to create space for change. Today's moment calls for similar strategic differentiation—not everyone should respond the same way to democratic contraction. The unspoken repercussion is clear: white bodies in protest don't trigger the same response, don't activate the same deep-seated fears of Black rebellion that have haunted the American psyche since the nation's founding.

When Words Disappear

Yet as we consider the power of strategic silence for some and vocal resistance for others, we must also confront another reality: the deliberate erasure of language itself. Recent reports of hundreds of words being removed from U.S. government websites and documents—words like equity, justice, belonging, inclusion, gender, racism, and accessibility—represent more than just policy shifts. They signal an attempt to reshape what we can acknowledge, address, and protect.

This erasure creates a new moral dilemma that intersects with questions of strategic silence. For Black Americans, whose experiences of injustice have often been denied and erased throughout history, watching words like "equity" and "systemic" disappear from official language reopens old wounds—a reminder that their lived realities can be legislated out of existence in the public sphere. The strategic stillness that protects from immediate harm must be balanced against the long-term danger of allowing language that names their experiences to vanish unchallenged.

For white Americans with privilege, the erasure of this language presents a different imperative. When words that name injustice disappear from government documents, those least affected by that injustice have a particular responsibility to keep those words alive—to speak them when others cannot without facing disproportionate consequences. This is where the privilege of relative immunity from state violence becomes a tool for preserving democratic language.

I think back to that childhood moment when I was silenced for naming racism in my family. The adults weren't just protecting a relative; they were protecting a system of comfortable contradictions that allowed them to say one thing and live another. My suburban parents, having physically distanced themselves from the racial tensions of Chicago, could claim anti-racist values while simultaneously punishing me for exposing racism within our family circle.

When institutions now scrub their language of references to equity and justice, they enact the same protection of comfortable contradictions on a societal scale. Those who benefit from existing systems can continue to claim they value equality while systematically removing the very words needed to address inequality's persistence.

This dual challenge—knowing when to be strategically still and when to speak forcefully against the erasure of crucial language—requires a sophistication of response that varies depending on one's social position. For some, preservation may require temporary silence; for others, it demands amplified speech. The moral responsibility shifts according to one's vulnerability and privilege.

The Courage to Speak and Be Still

This brings us to a central question: What does moral courage look like in "moments of contraction"? For institutions like colleges and universities now quietly rolling back diversity initiatives out of fear, the answer isn't simple. As one educator noted, "I wonder if these leaders realize that they can also be sued by civil rights organizations for complying with segregationist executive orders that are not law?" Perhaps it's "damned if you do, damned if you don't," but in such a bind, wouldn't it make most sense to act on the side of inclusion rather than exclusion?

For individuals, moral courage might look like knowing when to be loud and when to be still—a wisdom that comes from asking not "What will they do next?" but rather "What can I do right now that will make these harms less damaging? What do people need to keep safe?"

Sometimes, as in my childhood confrontation with racism, speaking out is necessary despite the consequences. Other times, as in the strategic stillness of not providing the spectacle of violence that would justify further oppression, resistance takes the form of careful restraint.

Words Live Beyond Erasure

The Jewish holiday of Purim was celebrated this month. It commemorates a story of survival and resistance. In the Book of Esther, a Persian king's advisor plots to exterminate the Jewish people. Queen Esther, who had concealed her Jewish identity, risks her life by revealing it to the king, ultimately saving her people. After their deliverance, the Jewish community responds not just with relief but with feasting and celebration—transforming what would have been a day of destruction into one of jubilation. This is why Purim is celebrated today—because choosing joy in the aftermath of narrowly avoided annihilation becomes itself an act of defiance against those who sought their destruction. The story also teaches that "hiding can sometimes lead to revelation" when done strategically, and perhaps most importantly, that "redemption begins with small, courageous acts" like Esther's decision to speak truth to power despite the consequences.

Words don't disappear when governments erase them. They live in the spaces we create, in the conversations we hold, in the commitments we make to one another. The language of justice, care, and belonging continues to flourish not just in policies but in how we engage and act every day.

As we navigate this moment of democratic contraction, perhaps our task is to engage in similar small, courageous acts—sometimes by speaking truth despite the consequences, sometimes by strategic stillness, always by remaining true to the words that matter: justice, equity, community, belonging. These words live not in government documents but in our actions, in our willingness to stand in the contradictions and work toward their resolution.

In the end, it's not just the words that matter, nor is it just the silence. It's the integrity with which we choose between them, the wisdom to know when each is needed, and the courage to bear the consequences of those choices.

The child who faced punishment for challenging racist words grew into an adult who understands the complex calculus of when to speak and when to be still. Today, this wisdom feels more vital than ever. The words that matter—justice, equity, community, belonging—survive not because they're preserved in official documents but because we carry them in our actions. Each of us must recognize what form of resistance our position demands: the strategic silence that prevents violent provocation or the vocal persistence that keeps erased words and democracy alive. As Senator Warnock reminds us, these contractions give birth to new possibilities—if we have the wisdom to match our words and our silences to the specific demands of this moment.