Ten years ago, when I first moved to a small town in southwest Ohio — the most unbelievably White place I have ever lived — I said exactly what you just did.

But since then, I’ve watched the visible ones come together and boost their signal, then step up their game in general. And yes. I find it terrifying. Because the presumption upon which my belief that it was better to have them in plain sight relied was the presumption that people would stand against overt racism in plain sight.

That presumption was in error. I myself failed to stand against it, for countless individual reasons that made sense at the time, but which I see very differently in hindsight. That, to me, is perhaps the most terrifying part — that even I can be silenced and shut down and driven from the field of struggle.

This is the truth of Whiteness, that everyone who is culturally deemed to look like me must own, and must stand against, to not be complicit.