Thanks for this heartfelt post Maha. Your voice gives me insight into some situations I’ve never experienced and a few that chime with my own experience. When I had read your post, I thought about Sherri Spelic’s recent lovely post about incuriosity https://medium.com/@edifiedlistener/incuriosity-is-a-thing-619ad8bf45b3#.ae35rm7dk . Ever since I read it, I have been thinking about silencing and incuriosity. We are painfully aware of others’ incuriosity and how it silences us. In the case of structural inequalities such as the racial one that you describe and the gender one revealed in some media expectations of Hillary Clinton, we need big collective responses to change structures and reduce inequality. But I think that we can all experience and sometimes maybe unwittingly collude in silencing. Combatting that needs for us to be more curious and also to listen carefully. As a teacher, i found this a constant challenge but telling myself to shut up and listen made me a better teacher.