It’s rare that I’ve ever been fully surrounded by people who look like me, by black folks and faces. I was adopted into a white family, lived and went to school in a place where mine was the only black face for miles, I’m married to a white man (though he is a professor of race and history) and I have worked in a variety of mainstream media jobs where the majority, if not all, of my colleagues were white. The majority-black spaces that exist in America, few and far between, often feel as though they have been thrust upon us, rather than created by our design, as the validity of those spaces are constantly measured against the egregiously overvalued sanctuaries of mainstream whiteness.

Still, when I am in a roomful of black people, or an all-black environment, I feel renewed, seen, held up and realized. A striking ease of proximity falls over me in a way that never exists in the rest of my life – even with my family. It’s a tidy, elegant joy that runs through me like a kind of cultural poetry: succinct, distilled and mighty. Nobody tries to stifle or gloss over their concern about what it must feel like for me to be here, in this space. There are no quick glances of sudden regret at having said something potentially offensive or racist. It is a space where I will never be exoticized, and where any criticism of opinion or intellect comes from a place of infinite mercy.

I love my family and they love me, of course, but throughout my life it has become increasingly clear that they did not, could not and do not understand why race and racism in America was and is so important for me to talk about and reckon with – or, in some cases, that I even experience racism at all.

During holidays and family gatherings, I am always the one to bring up something in the news that has to do with race, because, in the country in which we live, the KKK still marched proudly in parts of the south after lawmakers voted to take down the Confederate flag. On the 50th anniversary of the Voting Rights Act, Republicans are still trying to find ways to make voting for black people difficult, if not impossible. More black men are incarcerated or under surveillance by the criminal justice system today than were enslaved during the 1850s (think about that for a minute).

Micro-aggression racism is everywhere, all the time. Image after image on social media, in every possible form of media delivery, tells us that the only way to be good, the best, preferred, successful, smart is to be white. White strangers make unsolicited remarks about my hair as if it were a dazzling bird of paradise perched atop my head. Often when I bring up racial issues in white spaces, my family members, friends and/or colleagues answer with either silence or discomfort. Or worse, someone will say something that reveals their own racism. The assumption is alternately that I’m a black militant or that I represent all black people in America. My individualism is obscured.

So when we were invited to spend a recent holiday with one of my oldest and best girlfriends, Caryn, and her family, I was thrilled and relieved to think that my 10-year-old son, Kofi, and I would be in the company and comfort of blackness. With the relentlessness of black deaths, so many of them black men, at the hands of the police, it felt important that he spend time with Caryn’s son, Kofi’s close friend and peer whose skin is browner than his own: while my husband and I have discussed with Kofi what it means to be a young black male in America – and he has many black friends at school – I secretly hoped the two would talk privately amongst themselves about race in America, and give each other strength and encouragement in the process.

Who was I kidding? I needed the strength and encouragement.

What I didn’t anticipate, though, was the form in which that strength and encouragement would come. Not once, from the time we arrived to the time that we left, did the issue of race come up in conversation. Instead, we took turns holding and cooing over the new god baby, laughing about old memories, taking pictures and talking recipes, cooking and serving each other meals, listening to Aunt Penny’s stories and turning a blind eye to the big kids’ all-day video game playing.

We didn’t have to talk about race to bridge any divides. The power of being surrounded by black people is that the sheer sense of community is enough. I didn’t feel the urgency to bring up the toxicity of racism that I did with my white family, because I felt constant, ongoing pushback to it – in the cadence of our content, the steadfast grip as we held hands to say grace, and the strength in our numbers.