Before You Enter the Forum
Please take a few minutes to understand the purpose, tone, and expectations of this space.
The Little White Lives Forum exists to support learning, reflection, and growth around race, whiteness, and lived experience. This is a space for curiosity, honesty, and care — not debate, defensiveness, or performance. We expect questions, missteps, and moments of discomfort. What we ask in return is a willingness to listen, reflect, and engage with respect for one another.
You don’t need to have the right words here. You do need to be open to learning, willing to sit with discomfort, and willing to stay in honest relationship with the conversation. Humor, offered with care, is always welcome.
A Note for Black Readers
Welcome.
The Little White Lives website — and this forum in particular — exists because white people have been conditioned, for generations, to rely on Black people and other people of color to explain racism to us, absorb our confusion, and carry the emotional weight of our awakening.
This forum was created to interrupt that pattern. The responsibility for learning, unlearning, questioning, and sitting with discomfort belongs to us.
If you choose to participate here, you are welcome to do so on your own terms. If you choose to observe quietly, you are equally welcome.
This forum is primarily a space where white people do our work — out loud, imperfectly, and in community with one another — so that we stop placing that burden where it does not belong.
Most importantly:
You are not expected to teach.
You are not expected to reassure.
You are not expected to perform patience, forgiveness, or grace.
Participant Expectations
This forum is meant to be a thoughtful, accountable space for reflection and conversation. To help protect that spirit, participants are asked to enter with care.
1. Come with curiosity, not certainty.
You do not need to arrive with perfect language or complete understanding. Questions are welcome. So are uncertainty, discomfort, and honest reflection. What matters is a willingness to keep learning.
2. Speak from your own experience.
Use “I” statements when you can. Share what you are noticing, remembering, questioning, or struggling to understand. Try not to speak for whole groups of people or turn one person’s experience into a universal truth.
3. Expect discomfort.
Conversations about race, whiteness, family, memory, privilege, and history can stir defensiveness, grief, shame, resistance, and confusion. Discomfort is not a sign that something has gone wrong. Often, it is part of the work.
4. Do not debate someone’s lived experience.
You may ask questions. You may reflect. You may disagree with an idea. But this is not a space for dismissing, minimizing, or arguing someone out of what they have lived.
5. Avoid performance.
This is not a place to prove how good, aware, guilty, enlightened, or “on the right side” you are. The goal is not to perform innocence or virtue. The goal is to tell the truth, listen carefully, and grow.
6. Take responsibility for your own learning.
Links, books, articles, videos, and questions are welcome. But no one here is responsible for carrying another person’s entire education. Do your own reading. Sit with what comes up. Return with reflection.
7. Repair matters.
Missteps will happen. If someone points out harm, pause before defending yourself. Listen. Reflect. Ask what repair might look like. Apology is not about self-punishment; it is about responsibility.
8. Protect the privacy of the space.
Please do not screenshot, quote, copy, or share another participant’s words outside the forum without their clear permission. People need room to speak honestly without fear of being exposed elsewhere.
9. Use care with humor.
Humor is welcome. Cruelty is not. Sarcasm, mockery, or jokes that land at someone else’s expense can shut down trust quickly. Let humor open the room, not wound it.
10. Remember why we are here.
This is a space for white people to do our work — out loud, imperfectly, and in community — so that we stop placing the burden of our learning where it does not belong.