Staying in the room

Panels. Podcasts. Webinars. Interfaith dialogues. I do a lot of these conversations. Voluntarily. Eagerly, even.

They’re the kind of thing that gets organized by people with genuinely good intentions who genuinely believe that putting people with genuinely different perspectives in a room together will genuinely make the world a slightly better place. And they’re right. I believe that too. It’s why I keep showing up.

This though… it ain’t about showing up. It’s about staying… in the room, I mean.

It costs me something and I want to talk about what it costs, because I truly don’t think that people see it, and, more importantly, I think it matters.

And to be hella clear, it’s not about me… it’s not just my experience.

It’s the experience of anyone who has ever been the only [insert identity here] in a room full of people who themselves share a broadly similar framework and who have, with all the best intentions in the world, invited you to be a part of the conversation and provide ‘the other’ perspective.

It’s the Black woman at the dinner party who gets asked to do the work of explaining racism over dessert. It’s the gay colleague who becomes the spokesperson for an entire community because he happened to mention his husband. It’s the Jewish kid in the dorm room who gets asked to answer for the decisions of a country he’s never lived in because someone saw a headline. It’s the woman in the meeting who gets invited to “give us the female perspective” as if fifty-one percent of the human race has a single perspective to give.

Some of you know what this is like. Some of you don’t. Some of you, like me have been on both sides of it, in the majority group in one discussion, but in the minority in another.

And some of you have no fucking idea what I’m talking about.

Well… let me explain what it’s like from the inside.

You show up. Loaded up with good faith and a genuine desire to engage. You believe that your presence matters. You believe that your perspective adds something. You believe that the conversation is better with you in it than without you. And all of that is absolutely and indisputably true.

And then the conversation starts, and you realize something that you already knew but had allowed yourself to forget, which is that you are not a participant.

You are a respondent.

The others show up with frameworks and arguments and institutional authorities and charts and presentations and perspectives that they want to share.

You have showed up with yourself.

And the structure of the conversation — not by anyone’s malice, not by design, just by the gravity of numbers — is that they present and you respond. They assert and you react. They build a case and you are, whether anyone means it this way or not (and I am confident that they don’t), the defendant.

And so you spend the entire time not saying what you came to say.

Because what you came to say is: Can we talk about the future? Can we talk about what’s happening right now? Can we talk about the thing that actually matters, which is how real people are actually suffering while we sit here arguing about events that happened before any of us were born?

But that’s not what they came to say. They aren’t there for a conversation, or a discussion that is focused on understanding each other better. They are there to literally present a case.

And every time you try to talk about what you think matters, you’re back in the dock, because if you don’t respond, your silence becomes agreement, and if you do respond, you’ve just given the conversation another thirty minutes of exactly the kind of debate you were trying to move past.

This is the trap. And it is not a trap that anyone sets on purpose. It is a trap that is built into the architecture of being the only one.

Here’s another thing that happens.

Someone says something that lands in your gut like a fist. Not a slur. Nothing so crude. Something intellectual. Something framed as analysis. A comparison that equates your side with the worst things that have ever happened to theirs. You’re presented with a framing that says your community’s longing for home is not grief but pathology. Or made the focus of a historical argument that tells you that your people’s pain is their own fault and the solution is for them to stop being who they are.

And you have about four seconds to decide how to respond.

And you know — you know — that the person who just said the thing that landed in your gut is not your enemy.

They are a just another human person with their own wounds, their own history, their own grief that is no less real than yours.

You know that.

You hold that.

And you still have to respond.

And you can’t lose your temper. If you lose your temper, you become the angry [insert identity here], and everything you say afterward gets filtered through that anger, and the people in the room will remember the anger and not the argument.

You know this.

You have known this your entire life. I’m not saying that’s right. I’m saying that’s what it is.

You can’t be dismissive.

If you’re dismissive, you’re not engaging seriously, and the whole point of being in the room is that you engage seriously, and also, some of what was said contains real truth, and you know that, and pretending otherwise would be dishonest and you refuse to be dishonest.

You can’t be silent.

Silence is agreement. Silence is defeat. Silence is what they want, “Look, he cannot respond to my brilliant insight,” and you will not give them what they expect, not because you’re stubborn but because silence is a luxury that people with backup can afford and you don’t have backup. You are the only one in the fucking room.

And so you find your way, somehow, to the words. In real time. With your heart pounding in your fucking throat and your stomach loop-de-fucking-loops. You find the precise way… the measured way… the generous and intellectually serious way to respond… the way that honors the truth in what was said while naming what was missing.

And you do this not because you are a saint, because come on… who are we fucking fooling… but because you have been doing it your entire life and you are, at this point, very fucking good at it.

And afterwards, they are kind and pleasant and generous and they thank you for being a part of this conversation when what they mean is thank you for not making this uncomfortable and what they don’t understand is that it was uncomfortable the entire time.

For you.

Not for them.

Uncomfortable for fucking you.

What I’ve found, and I wish I didn’t have so much data to source the insight, is that the real work, for me, is rarely the actual conversation. The real work is what it takes to stay in the conversation.

There’s a particular flavor of this that I want to name, because I think it’s the part that’s hardest to explain to people who haven’t lived it.

It’s the moment when you realize that you are expected to be a scholar of the other side’s perspectives and justifications. Not just familiar with it. Not just respectful of it. A scholar. You are expected to know the history, to acknowledge their traumas, and to genuflect before the historical imperatives that forced them to do this or do that, and to contextualize every predation visited upon you as an understandable, if regrettable, consequence of their context.

And you do it.

You do it because you believe in it.

Not as performance. Not as a strategy. You do it because you believe the core of the you that makes you you, that understanding the other side’s contexts and acknowledging them is not a concession but a prerequisite. Because you know that solutions, if they ever come, will be built on these foundations of mutual recognition, and you are willing to do your part of that work honestly and without shortcuts.

But then you look across and you ask yourself: is anyone doing that work in the other direction? Is anyone in this room expected to be a scholar of my contexts? Is anyone required to genuflect before my historical imperatives? To acknowledge that the things that were done to my side of the issue were not just unfortunate but devastating, not just regrettable but defining?

And the answer, most of the time, is an utterly irrefutable no.

Because the architecture of the conversation — the architecture of the world, frankly — has arranged things so that some people’s context is the text and another people’s context is the footnote. One people’s trauma is the thing that must be understood and honored and centered. The other people’s trauma is the background. The unfortunate but necessary cost.

Your pain is the Gospel. Mine must be ever the Gloss.

And you sit there thinking: my brother, your truth is no more true than mine. History and data can be marshalled to support just about any point of view. The truthfulness of your truth is a function of where you stand and how you see the world. It is not objective truth.

But when you are the only one in the room, you don’t get to say that. Because everything you say is heard as a position statement on behalf of your entire people.

You are not, then, just a person with a perspective. You are the representative of a side.

And if you say something nuanced — if you say, for instance, that your own community’s leadership has failed catastrophically, or that there are faults in your own side, and you mean it, genuinely, not as a rhetorical concession, but because it’s true and you refuse to pretend otherwise — that nuance gets picked up and used, not as evidence of your honesty, but as a confession.

See, even he admits it.

Your ethical honesty and moral compass become nothing much more than ammunition. Your complexities become their talking points.

The reverse never happens: members of majority frameworks are rarely (at least, in my experience) expected to perform the same self-criticism.

Nobody asks them to begin their remarks by acknowledging the worst things their side has done. That’s not how the architecture works. The architecture works like this: they present their narrative as history. You present yours as perspective. Their truth is truth. Your truth is “a different take,” or, (FML), “interesting.”

To be clear, I don’t think this is a conspiracy. I don’t think the genuinely good folks who organize these things are sitting in a back room designing the structure to create these imbalances. But intent and impact are different things.

There is often an asymmetry that is baked-in-structural and not, at all (at least I don’t think) intentional.

But when the narrative you are in dialogue with has had decades of institutional and ideological support and your narrative has had decades of being told to wait its turn, it’s not that the room is rigged, it’s just built on a foundation that was poured before you arrived, and that foundation has a tilt to it, and everybody in the room is standing on it, and the people who aren’t sliding downhill never ever ever notice the fucking angle.

I want to pause here and say something that I mean with my whole chest: I am grateful for every single one of these invitations. Every one. The people who organize these conversations are doing something that matters. They are doing the work of creating spaces where difficult things can be said out loud, and that work takes courage, and it is necessary, and it is often thankless, and I have nothing but respect for the people who do it. Truly. And the fact that I sometimes leave these rooms carrying a heaviness that takes the rest of the day to metabolize does not diminish what those rooms are trying to be. It doesn’t. I want that to be absolutely clear.

The problem is often just math. When you are three and I am one, the room has a center of gravity, and it’s not in my chair. That’s not anyone’s fault. It’s just fucking physics. But physics or not, it’s worth noticing. It’s worth designing around.

If I could ask one thing of the people who build these rooms — and I’m speaking now to the awesome fucking folks who do the tough and thankless work… the organizers, the moderators, the hosts who are trying so hard to get it right, and who are, in fact, getting so much of it right — it would be this: notice who in your room is the only one.

Notice what you’re asking of them that you’re not asking of everyone else.

And ask yourself if there’s something you can do — not to make it easy, because it will never be easy — but to make the weight a little more evenly distributed.

Just sit with it.

That’s all I’m asking.

Sit with the discomfort of it for a minute.

Because sitting with discomfort is what we have to do every time we’re the only [insert identity here] in one of those rooms.

And I do it and will continue to do it, every time, and willingly, and with an open heart. I’ll keep going to these things. I’ll keep showing up. I’ll keep sitting in rooms where I am the only one, and I’ll keep finding the words, and I’ll keep being “measured” and whatever the fuck else people need to call it to feel comfortable with what they just watched me do.

Because the alternative is not being in the room.

And not being in the room means the conversation happens without you. And a conversation that happens without you will decide things about you. And that, for anyone who has ever been the only one, is the thing that is more exhausting than any panel, any podcast, any argument about history that happened before anyone in the room was born.

Not being in the room is a shitty option, but some days, staying in the room costs more than others.

Boy fucking howdy.