When Will We Begin to Listen? On the Meaning of Black Silence in a Democratic Crisis

Recently, my Instagram has been feeding me videos of Black people speaking volumes through their silence.

One of the most viral examples of these “silent” videos features the host of NBC game show Password, Keke Palmer, and her celebrity guest, Yvette Nicole Brown. Players may give their partner one-word clues to unlock the password. Palmer must communicate to Brown that their password is “Titanic” in one word. Palmer says, “Rose,” then looks at Brown with intensity. She repeats, “Rose,” and tilts her head from one side to the other. She says her clue again, sitting up straighter and smiling. Brown laments that she doesn’t feel confident in her answer and asks Palmer to say it again. Palmer tries to boost her partner’s confidence, telling her that she knows her partner knows the answer because they have, indeed, had an entire Black conversation. Brown relents and says, “Titanic?” Team captain Jimmy Falon and the other guests are stunned.

Online, Black folks are constantly having this sort of public-private conversation about global current events, the federal administration’s dangerous incompetence, and democratic backsliding at all levels of governance.

Needless to say, the US is embroiled in a sociopolitical dumpster fire. Examples abound, from ongoing book-banning efforts to the on-again-off-again federal investigation of an elite cabal of sexual predators, and from the rise of white Christian nationalism to the increasing number of Congressional Republicans’ social media posts spewing explicit Islamophobia. The US president is demanding a bill that would constrain voting rights, and he is inspiring panic about the integrity of the 2026 mid-term elections. There are preventable measles outbreaks in the US. The military, which now excludes transgender people, is engaged in an unexplained offensive “situationship” in Iran. College students and citizens are being abducted, and children are being used as bait by ICE. Federal funds to support life-sustaining university research have been slashed. And access to Medicaid and affordable reproductive healthcare resources are being significantly reduced across the country.

No serious writer prefers to rely on clichés, but from the view of many Black Americans, this highly curated list of self-inflicted maladies offers the perfect portrait of well-worn adages.

No serious writer prefers to rely on clichés, but from the view of many Black Americans, this highly curated list of self-inflicted maladies offers the perfect portrait of well-worn adages: “Those who do not know their past are doomed to repeat it” and “The past is never dead. It’s not even past” and “History doesn’t repeat, but it rhymes.” We—all Americans—have seen many of these insidious maneuvers employed by those who are supposed to wield the government’s power to promote the general welfare of its people and ensure domestic tranquility—and we have seen them resisted by the stalwarts of democracy, not as it is, but as it could be.

The tools and strategies that are being used on good White protestors, undocumented children, transgender patriots, Democrats, and Republicans who fight against their party’s leader have been practiced on Black folks across American history.

When the 15th Amendment lowered the barriers for Black (male) citizens to vote, a slew of facially race-neutral policies stripped many Black folks’ right to the ballot for a century. The SAVE Act mimics this strategy. When Reconstruction ended, schoolbooks that did not portray the South’s Lost Cause as a war of valor were banned. DOGE’s bumbling AI search-find-and-destroy tools represent a high-tech effort at the same. In the mid-twentieth century, the US government experimented on poor Black men in Tuskegee, Alabama, to understand the life-cycle of syphilis; the men were coerced into remaining in their study for decades despite the fact that the disease’s cure, penicillin, had been discovered. The Secretary of Health and Human Services seeks to withhold recommendations for life-saving vaccines for children and pregnant women.

Congressional Democrats have recently demanded the use of body-cams to be worn by DHS and ICE officers, but the police-killings of many unarmed Black people have been captured on film, then used to defend the police’s fears, and thus, their actions. Black folks have been used as scapegoats for the rising government budgets, and anti-Black stereotypes fueled voters to significantly reduce access to affordable healthcare and educational assistance. Today, able-bodied workers who need subsidized healthcare will have to stretch further to access those resources due to the nationally implemented “work requirement” policy.

Some of the silence is designed to amplify the missing, the previously ignored, the co-opted, the terrorized, the gaslighted, and excluded voices of the country’s most ardent supporters of a multiracial democracy.

Black folks have seen the face of the US’s prerogative state—the side of the government that dispenses arbitrary jurisprudence, discriminatory law enforcement, and violence against those who challenge its authority and dominant ideologies. The testimonies of residents captured by Operations Midway Blitz, Charlotte’s Web, and Metro Surge—and their attorneys mimic those previous stories of state-sanctioned lawlessness.

Black folks have sounded clarion calls to protect democracy, to expand access to high quality education, to ensure Americans have a shared understanding of their history in its beauty and hideousness, to lower barriers to political participation, to enhance access to affordable health care, to guarantee that people have access to food, housing, clean water and air, to prevent the law from being used to protect harmful policing practices, and to ward against wage-theft and corporate welfare in a society where public welfare is viewed a drag on the economy.

At times, these calls are considered. Sometimes policies are implemented. Occasionally, we experience a moment of racial reckoning. But invariably, these calls are co-opted by conservatives to demonize those on the short end of the stick. Much-needed policy designs are watered down by well-meaning liberals who believe that incrementalism is the world’s best political strategy. Under both regimes, Black voices and ideas are silenced.

So too can silence be wielded to offer lessons. Some of the silence that Black folks employ is a response to—and rejection of—accusations that they are having too much fun while others suffer. Some of the silence is derived from the maturity of knowing that some things do not need to be said—things like, “We told you so.” Some of the silence is protection of Black language and of Black joy. And some of the silence is designed to amplify the missing, the previously ignored, the co-opted, the terrorized, the gaslighted, and excluded voices of the country’s most ardent supporters of a multiracial democracy.

The question is, when will we begin to listen?

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Black Evidence: A History and a Warning by Candis Watts Smith is available from W.W. Norton & Company.