THE CODE WE DON’T TALK ABOUT (AND THE MEN WHO BREAK OUR TRUST)
Spirit and Dom from slowburnlove.com enjoying lunch together while the room quietly takes notice. This is the fishbowl moment so many of us know, being watched while minding our business.
This weekend I picked up lunch at a local sub sandwich place with a young man who helps me with my lawn care sometimes. He's Gen Z, still figuring life out, good kid. We walked in and I didn't think twice about it until a white guy stared at me hard as we came through the door, then caught himself and looked away.
We ordered our food and sat down to wait. While we talked, many others came in, none of them Black, and a white woman waiting in line started doing the same thing, staring at the two of us -as if we were aliens, lol. Being in a small fast food place as the only Black people and nowhere to hide, it felt like we were in a fishbowl. That look of "what are they doing here," even though I've lived in this neighborhood, this same house, this community for over 27 years.
It has felt this way for more than 35 years and you never fully get used to it. I stay because it's affordable, but this city ranks in the top five most systemically racist cities in the country. The financial gap tells the story, most white residents here make $85,000 and up, most Black residents make $27,000 and under, a gap our white friends and allies rarely seem to know exists in their own city, one that affects these spaces psychologically as much as financially.
That gap sat with me while I watched the news out of Mississippi this past week. Nolan Wells, 18, went missing during a July 4th trip to Horn Island with a group of friends who were all white, and was later found dead. The investigation is still open, with no confirmed cause of death and no confirmed link to race. But what spread across social media wasn't grief alone. It was thousands of Black people, myself included, recognizing that something familiar, he appears to have been the only Black person in that friend group that day, and that detail is why his story hit so many of us so hard.
That leaves a harder question. No matter how many years you've lived somewhere or how many white friends you have, are you actually safe in all white spaces? We need to be accountable to our own intuition, not just to what's in front of our face. If reading a room as unsafe gets you called difficult, that's a small price for a truth telling you some people in your life are not actually safe spaces for you.
I asked my GenZer how he handles moments like that. He said he thinks about it before he even leaves the house. If he's hanging with his all white friends and there isn't at least one other Black person in the group, he doesn't go. A rule he's always just intuitively followed.
That stopped me. Living where I do, it's something I never had to name out loud but I do it too. It's that "who all gone be there" checking we do in the community when we want to know the socials of a gathering before we decide to attend. We check the room without realizing we're checking it, making sure at least one more of us will be there, at least those of us conscious of it. Sometimes work doesn't give us that option. But when we do have a choice, we still sometimes ignore our own instincts and walk in as the only one anyway.
I thought back to when I was pregnant with my first child in the early 90s. My coworkers, all white, took me to a local corn festival to celebrate. I grew up in inner city Chicago listening to house music and hip hop, and I stood there feeling completely out of place while they had a great time getting drunk and listening to country and rock and roll, something not typically my taste. I was in “vibrational survival mode” the entire day, lol, though I truly appreciated the gesture.
However, if someone suggested that to me today, especially while pregnant, I would say no without hesitation. Integration taught a lot of us to believe we're supposed to be able to fit anywhere, that discomfort is just something to push through to be agreeable. But comfort and safety aren't the same thing. What's interesting is I didn't get stared at during that corn festival in the 90s, but I got stared down at a sub shop in 2026. Our intuition still matters. If something doesn't feel safe, that feeling is information, not an overreaction. Honor it.
Something else happened this week that stuck with me more than the staring did. Earlier, this young man was on the phone with his girlfriend, telling her he hadn't been working more than an hour, when he'd actually been helping me for at least three. I said it out loud without thinking, that he'd been working more than an hour. He put his finger to his lips so his girlfriend on the other end of the phone line wouldn't hear me. At lunch I asked him why lie like that? White lies don't stay small. They add up, and eventually trust breaks. He didn't have a real answer.
I brought up something else from earlier too. I had shown him how to make a pie shaped cut on a tree branch, diagonal, not straight across. He did the opposite, then tried to convince me he hadn't. I told him plainly, I watched you cut it straight across, it had the horizontal cut. The tree didn't lie. He still tried to talk his way around it.
So I asked him directly, why do men gaslight women? Is that a Black men thing or just a man thing? He laughed and said it's because men hate women. He said it like a joke, but I don't think he was fully joking. That same conversation has been all over social media this week, men who say they want relationships with women but seem to also dislike or hate them.
That got me thinking about what creates a man like that. Perhaps these men grew up holding their mothers as perfect, almost untouchable, defending her every decision while holding the women they date to an impossible standard. A mother never allowed to be human, flawed, or wrong, raises a son unable to see any woman honestly, including her. That imbalance later shows up as resentment toward every woman who doesn't fit the mother fantasy he was raised on.
You can love your mother deeply and still be honest about her mistakes. The men who can't do that are the ones I pay closest attention to and run from. That inability to hold love and honesty at the same time for your mother is a real red flag, not just a personality quirk.
Here's what I think we can do about it, as individuals and as a community.
Black men can...
Talk to your sons early about respect for women in practice, not just in words
Notice when you defend your mother's flaws instead of naming them, and ask why
Call your friends in when they joke about hating women, don't let it slide
Practice telling the truth in small moments before it becomes a habit of hiding
Show younger men what it looks like to disagree with a woman without gaslighting her
Black women can...
Trust the small moments, a lie about an hour of work is still a lie
Watch how a man talks about his mother, whether he can honestly name her flaws or only defends her
Don't excuse gaslighting as a joke, even dressed up as humor, call him out
Pay attention to your intuition in rooms and relationships, both feel unsafe for the same reasons
Teach the young women around you that a red flag noticed early is a gift, not an overreaction. That red flag will follow you for years to come.