December 6, 2025

Every so often, a moment online will stop me in my tracks—not because it’s dramatic or messy, but because it reveals something real. That’s what happened when a few days ago, I came across a Facebook post by a well-known Black food critic. He posed simple question about an old diner he walked into, situated in a midsized Midwestern town. He explained in his post that nothing happened; that he wasn't treated with disrespect, wasn't targeted with collective side-eyes from patrons, no slurs. He could only explained that he sensed a shift in the air, the kind of energetic tap on the shoulder Black folks learn to trust. 

His question? “When this place opened decades ago, did it allow everyone to dine in?” It was a straightforward and direct question spoken out of curiosity, not meant to be accusatory, or inflammatory. And yet the comment section promptly took off like a runaway train—hundreds of replies deep—and somehow no one, not a single person, could answer the question plainly. To me, it felt like a moment when everyone in the room looks away at the same time because they are avoiding the obvious elephant in the room? Yeah. It was that. 

What fascinated me as an onlooker or lurker wasn’t the restaurant, the decade, or even the location. It was the collective avoidance. It was odd to watch so many people manage to talk around a truth without ever touching it. And it didn't matter the race or gender.  

If you’ve spent any time in mid-sized American cities, you might know what I'm talking about.  There’s a certain politeness, a certain “let sleeping dogs lie” philosophy that runs deep. The past becomes something everyone supposedly “moved past,” even if it’s sitting right there like an elephant in a vintage vinyl booth. The answers were split between those who knew the answer but chose not to explicity post it.  Many, not all, were Black. Perhaps they’ve learned the cost of telling certain truths out loud. They've seen how their perspectives are aggressively challenged.  They have been the targets of pushback couched in “well actually…” responses. So they share these histories quietly—within family, within community, in memories that don’t get uploaded to the cloud. 

Meanwhile, there were a mix of Black and white commenters who chimed in with a version of: “I never saw anything discriminatory here.” Which is its own kind of confession, if you truly understand what you're reading or hearing. What emerged in that comment thread wasn’t clarity—it was curated silence. A gentle tiptoeing around history. A refusal to post uncomfortable memories to the Internet, where it all lives forever.  It doesn't feel like denial, more like a collective holding of breath. It reminded me of how certain American Midwestern cities—especially those not known for loud public discourse on race—treat racial history like family business. Instead, it's something to be managed privately, tucked away neatly, spoken about sparingly. There’s a fear that naming the past might disrupt the present, or worse, disrupt someone’s nostalgia. 

But here’s the thing: When a simple question produces hundreds of comments with no answer, the silence–or the rhetorical avoidance—becomes the answer. Scholars have written extensively about this. Researchers like Eduardo Bonilla-Silva and Michael Omi talk about how racial meaning gets negotiated through coded speech, silence, and deflection. Avoidance isn’t accidental; it’s baked into how people navigate racial hierarchy. And in places where the stakes of saying the wrong thing run high, the avoidance becomes a kind of cultural fluency. 

And the critic? He didn’t need confirmation. Black folks have a long-standing relationship with intuition, especially in public spaces. We can walk into a room and sense the lingering history even if nobody says a word. Call it survival, inherited knowing, or whatever you want—the point is, the body remembers what the brochures forget. 

This isn’t about one restaurant, one city, or one thread. It’s about how racial memory is handled in small-town America. How so many communities choose to smooth over the past rather than face it. How stories that should be spoken aloud end up whispered, archived in hearts instead of history books. And how, even now, a simple question can still make people flinch. The truth is this: A place doesn’t become welcoming just because time has passed. A city doesn’t become inclusive simply because nobody wants to talk about what happened before. And silence—no matter how polite—doesn’t change the past. It only protects the present from having to reckon with it. 

Sometimes the real story isn’t what people say. It’s what they refuse to say. And when people — Black and white — choose safety over clarity, familiarity over truth, silence over the discomfort of naming how race actually works in their city, nothing changes. And that survival instinct, that learned caution, is the backbone of racial avoidance.