When the Room Goes Still: On Sacred Spaces, Quiet Rage and Conditional Inclusion (Part Two)

Continued from Part One—”When the Room Goes Still: On Language, Surveillance, and the White Glitch”.

If this is your first time here, welcome! This is Part 2 of a two-part reflection. If you haven’t read Part 1 yet, I highly recommend starting there— it’s fire, not gonna lie.

III. The View

I was invited as a plus-one.

My partner—now my spouse—was attending a leadership retreat through the organization we were both loosely affiliated with at the time. She was there as someone respected, someone visible. A masculine-of-center queer person being recognized, not tolerated. It felt radical in a way. Unexpected.

I remember thinking, Maybe they really mean it.

Maybe this spiritual space, this church-rooted group, had finally figured it out.

I felt… welcomed. Seen. Like we were part of something progressive, even holy.

The grounds were stunning.

Pacific Northwest trees swaying like hymns. Quiet. Sacred. The kind of quiet that stills your body and lets you breathe a little deeper. It felt like a place where God might actually want to hang out.

My plan was simple. Drop Amy off, wander a little, eat my lunch near the water, pick her up after the day’s sessions. I wasn’t trying to make a statement. I just wanted to enjoy the space like anyone else.

And that’s the moment I let my guard down.

Because beauty does that to you.

Because nature doesn’t ask who you are—it just responds to presence.

Because for once, I wasn’t armored up.

That’s when the first woman approached me.

She came with that soft kind of concern that isn’t really concern. Asked if I needed help finding something. If I knew where I was. She didn’t say it harshly—she didn’t have to. It was that thin, white-polite veneer stretched over suspicion.

Say what you want to say.

Ask me what you really want to know.

But don’t dress it up in helpfulness like I can’t smell the surveillance on your breath.

I brushed it off. Kept walking. Found a spot near the water. Opened my lunch.

And then it happened again. Another white woman, same tone, same script. This time with more edge—like she’d rehearsed it. Like she thought she had the right.

All I was doing was breathing. Being. Trying to enjoy a view that, just moments ago, had felt like a gift from God.

But I wasn’t allowed to just be.

I looked around and saw a white man off in the distance, also alone, also wandering. No one approached him.

He wasn’t questioned.

He wasn’t warned.

He was allowed to belong.

And maybe…if I’d had Amy with me, they wouldn’t have said anything.

My wife is so white, I joke that she’s transparent. She translates for me when I am done code switching and just want to throw hands.

And that whiteness is often the only thing standing between me and escalation.

But she wasn’t with me in that moment.

And I wasn’t a plus-one anymore.

I was a Black person, unescorted, in a consecrated space.

And that meant suspicion. That meant silence with eyes behind it. That meant armor up.

Except I didn’t have it on.

Not fully. Not that day.

Because for a moment, I forgot.

For a moment, I was just someone who loves nature. Who loves quiet. Who loves beauty.

And then I was reminded.

I was reminded that even here—even in this sacred place, on this perfect day—I could be mistaken for a threat.

I think often of Alice Walker’s The Color Purple—how she wrote that God gets mad when you walk past the color purple in a field and don’t notice it. That’s all I was trying to do. To be in awe. To say thank you. To recognize the beauty in the moment without fear or filter.

But whiteness couldn’t let me have that.

It needed to remind me that I was being watched.

That beauty is not for me to rest in without consent.

By the time Amy came out of the building, I was a knot of rage, barely holding it together.

She wasn’t radiant. She wasn’t relaxed.

She looked emotionally spent—the way someone does when they’ve had to translate themselves all day just to be tolerated.

Being at that kind of leadership event, held on church-affiliated grounds, takes work for anyone. But for Amy—a fat, masculine-presenting queer white woman—it meant hours of code-switching in a space that read her body like a disruption. It was supposed to be affirming, but affirmation doesn’t always come without strain. She was hopeful, yes. But I could see the mental gymnastics in her eyes.

And then I told her what happened.

The women. The tone. The double encounter that stripped the sacred from the space. How I was profiled without it being called that. How I was just trying to be present in the quiet and got questioned like a trespasser.

She was furious.

Not performatively. Not with words that needed to be heard by others. Just… furious. Quiet, gut-level fury that settled into her bones.

We told a few people she trusted. Some of her fellow attendees. The response was immediate: shock, support, “That’s not okay.” One even attempted to report it through the appropriate channels. Tried to do it the “right” way.

But nothing came of it.

No phone call. No apology. No one pulled me aside to say, You mattered.

Just a soft, sterile silence.

The same institution that had been proud to center her queerness couldn’t find the same voice when harm happened to me. It didn’t matter that I was her partner. That I had every right to be there. That I had done nothing but breathe.

IV. The Aftermath

There was no apology.

No one pulled me aside.

No one followed up.

No one said, You should’ve been safe here.

And despite all of that—

I joined the organization.

I told myself it was a good job. That it was stable. That I could bring change from the inside.

I told myself that maybe the incident on the retreat grounds was a fluke.

That maybe it was two people acting on their own biases, not a reflection of the whole.

I told myself a lot of things.

Because the truth is, survival teaches you how to do mental math with your dignity. You start calculating what’s tolerable, what’s strategic, what’s worth pushing back on and what you have to swallow if you want the check, the title, the access, the healthcare.

I joined knowing what had happened.

Knowing who had been silent.

Knowing that beauty can turn hostile in a blink.

But I also joined with hope. Not the fairytale kind—the muscle memory kind. The kind Black folks are born into. The kind we carry in our bones when there’s no guarantee anything will change, but we show up anyway because we’ve got mouths to feed, futures to build, ancestors watching.

It’s the kind of hope that doesn’t sparkle. It grits its teeth.

And still—there was grief.

Not the loud, operatic kind. The slow drip.

The grief of knowing exactly what an institution is… and choosing to walk into it anyway.

Not because I believed in it.

But because I believed in me.

I joined for the stability.

A steady paycheck. Health insurance. Paid time off.

The things you’re taught to prioritize. The things that make you feel safe—or at least safer.

And for a while, that was enough.

Wake up. Clock in. Pay the bills. Put something toward the debt.

Rinse. Repeat. Survive.

There’s a rhythm to it, a simplicity.

You start to measure success by what doesn’t fall apart.

You learn to quiet the voice in your head that says, This isn’t right.

You tell it, But it’s stable.

And the world claps for you, because capitalism loves a story where you keep showing up even when you’re being slowly erased.

But lately, I’ve started to see it for what it is.

We’re like penguins in a zoo—standing on painted ice, waiting for the next fish to fall from above.

We don’t question the walls.

We don’t ask who’s holding the bucket.

We just open our beaks and call it provision.

And the saddest part?

We’ve convinced ourselves that looking up and catching scraps is enough to be grateful for.

But I remember what it felt like to be free for a moment.

On that trail. In that view. Before the questions.

Before the silence made the beauty disappear.

And once you’ve tasted freedom—even briefly—it becomes harder to accept the zoo as your sanctuary.

None of this is isolated.

Not the glitch in the meeting when I said “BLM land.”

Not the retreat turned interrogation.

Not the silence from leadership.

Not the paycheck that keeps coming while something in you is quietly being chipped away.

These are not accidents.

They’re patterns. Systems. Scripts.

And the people upholding them? Most aren’t even villains.

They’re just afraid.

Afraid of discomfort.

Afraid of accountability.

Afraid that if they sit still long enough, they’ll have to face what their institutions were built on.

But fear is not an excuse for silence.

And silence is not the same as safety.

We are still watching white people try to navigate power without acknowledging how they inherited it.

Still watching them perform progress while clinging to comfort.

Still watching systems declare themselves inclusive while quietly laying off the people who made that inclusion possible.

And what’s worse—

They expect us to be grateful for the scraps.

To smile. To nod. To say thank you for the handbook, the resource group, the occasional catered lunch during “heritage month.”

They want us to be penguins in a zoo.

Well-fed. Well-behaved. Quiet.

But the truth is—

Sometimes the most revolutionary thing you can do is not smile.

Is to let the silence stretch long enough for it to echo.

Because underneath all the noise, this country is still reckoning with its reflection.

And we’re still being asked to contort ourselves into shapes that keep other people from feeling guilty.

Keep the status quo intact.

Keep the bottom line from being disturbed.

But I’ve lived long enough, worked long enough, sat in enough meetings with enough buffering silence to know:

We can do better.

We have to.

If this reflection resonated, I hope you’ll share it. If you’ve ever had a moment where the world expected your silence, feel free to drop a comment—or just sit in the stillness with me. 💎