The Color of Complicity

Open LinkedIn and scroll for a few minutes. Something becomes immediately obvious.

The silence is deafening.

Where are the white voices?

In this moment of open political cruelty, where what was once whispered in code, is now practiced in public without shame, the professional class, the business executives, strategists, coaches, influencers, consultants, remain peculiarly serene. Of course, there are a few white voices, but most people’s feeds are a carousel of clever slogans and product launches, algorithm-friendly inspiration, and sanitized calls to “lead with empathy.” Nothing too disruptive. Nothing too risky. Nothing that might make someone feel uncomfortable.

But clarity is never comfortable. And silence, in a time like this, is a fucking endorsement.

There is a deeper pattern beneath this silence, one that stretches across decades of selective memory. Progress, when it happens in this country, is never born from consensus. It emerges when someone with power and privilege decides to disturb the order that benefits them. We have told ourselves stories of change driven by movements and uprisings, and those stories are true, but they are only part of the truth. Because what has always cracked the machinery of oppression, even slightly, is when someone already inside the system chooses to use their access like a crowbar instead of a comfort blanket.

All of the major moments in our history where we evolved beyond the craven and the extractive were made possible because someone in power experienced a moment of moral clarity, a moment when the anesthesia of normalcy wore off, when the quiet complicity of business-as-usual could no longer muffle the cry of their conscience. 

Case in point ... 

In the fall of 1945, a white man in a three-piece suit sat across from a young Black man and made an impossible request. Branch Rickey looked Jackie Robinson in the eyes and said, "I need a man who won’t swing back." He wasn’t asking for restraint. He was demanding silence. He was asking Robinson to absorb every racial slur, every threat, every act of hatred, and offer no reply. The price of entry into white America’s pastime was pain, endured without protest.

Rickey had power. He was white, wealthy, religious. He had a seat at the table with his name carved into it. He could have chosen another path. He could have delayed the moment, looked the other way, or chosen a safer path. But something had cracked inside him. Maybe it was guilt. Maybe it was grace. Maybe it was God. Whatever it was, he made a choice to use his power for something bigger than himself.

Despite all of the progress we've made since that time, that kind of decision is still rare. 

I believe it is rare because few are willing to answer this question: If you’ve been given power, what the fuck are you doing with it?

Power, especially when inherited or accumulated without accountability, gravitates toward insulation. It creates an echo chamber where comfort masquerades as virtue and where the absence of disruption is confused for peace. Power tends to reward stability over truth, predictability over justice, self-preservation over transformation. It wraps itself in the language of stewardship and responsibility while doing everything it can to avoid the risk of real change. It becomes invested not just in outcomes, but in the preservation of the conditions that created it.

This is why power cloaks itself in charity while perpetuating harm. It smiles during ribbon cuttings and equity panels while signing off on layoffs, surveillance, displacement, and extraction. It offers sympathy with one hand and structural violence with the other. It needs to appear kind so it can continue to be obeyed. Look no further than Daniel Ek, the CEO of Spotify. Here is a man with extraordinary power, global influence, and access to capital, data, and culture itself. Ek positions himself as a visionary, a champion of technology and creativity. But beneath the surface of that curated image is a case study in insulated leadership.

Despite positioning Spotify as a democratizing force in music and media, Ek has continued to greenlight massive paydays for the world’s richest creators (most infamously Joe Rogan) while underpaying independent artists and refusing to shift the revenue model in their favor. His public defense of platforming disinformation, transphobia, and white male grievance isn’t framed as cowardice or complicity, it’s branded as "neutrality" and "free speech."

Meanwhile, Spotify hosts diversity summits, celebrates Pride Month, and publishes sleek equity reports. But these gestures are camouflage. The business decisions tell the real story: scale over soul, volume over values, safety over justice. Ek’s leadership embodies the exact pattern I’m naming here, where power maintains the appearance of progress while avoiding any real confrontation with its impact.

It’s not that he doesn’t know better. It’s that knowing better was never the point. Power, left unchecked, prefers the optics of care to the cost of change. And Ek, like so many others, has chosen the optics. 

And yet, clarity slips in. Even in the most insulated halls of power, there are still brief, unscheduled, undeniable moments when the truth breaks through. Sometimes it arrives through proximity to suffering. Sometimes through a betrayal that can no longer be explained away. Sometimes it’s a whisper that interrupts the performance. Even those who have benefitted most from the system are not entirely immune to the reckoning. And when clarity reaches them, when it pierces the armor of strategy, legacy, and denial, it becomes a moment of potential transformation. 

Two Examples of Power and Moral Clarity

Lyndon B. Johnson was not a man most would expect to carry the torch of moral clarity. A Southern Democrat raised in the shadows of segregation, a master of political maneuvering who had cozied up to power brokers of every shade, Johnson was no moral exemplar. He was pragmatic, crude, cunning, and often ruthless, a man who could charm and threaten in the same breath. And yet, when the nation reached a breaking point, something in him shifted.

What moved him wasn't a sudden moral awakening. It was the convergence of history, death, and duty. He had witnessed the assassination of John F. Kennedy, a man whose presidency had begun inching toward civil rights but had been cut short. Johnson understood that history had handed him the pen to finish what Kennedy could not. And perhaps more than most, he grasped that the weight of the office is not just symbolic, it is structural. He understood that power, if not wielded in moments of national fracture, becomes complicit.

When he said, "We have lost the South for a generation," he wasn’t just lamenting the political cost. He was acknowledging the depth of the disruption. He chose to sign the Civil Rights Act knowing it would alienate his base, fracture his coalition, and reshape the electoral map. But he did it anyway. Because in that moment, clarity mattered more than calculus.

That’s what moral clarity does. It makes the familiar intolerable. It wedges itself between your ambition and your legacy, and forces you to choose. And sometimes, miraculously, unpredictably, it finds its way into those we would least expect. Not because they deserve it, but because truth will not be denied. Not forever.

MacKenzie Scott inherited unimaginable wealth through her marriage to Jeff Bezos and emerged not as a brand builder or industry mogul, but as one of the most disruptive philanthropists of this century. Rather than hoarding influence or polishing her image, she began transferring billions of dollars into the hands of those actively working to dismantle the very systems that had enriched her. Her giving has gone to organizations like the Movement for Black Lives, the National Bail Fund Network, the Transgender Law Center, Latin American women' s rights organizations, Indigenous-led climate justice groups. These groups do not exist to host galas or hand out awards, but to shift power and dismantle the systems that create and protect concentrated wealth. These organizations are in the work of structural disruption. They organize bail reform, defend trans rights, reclaim Indigenous land, and challenge carceral and colonial infrastructures. Their mission is not charity; it’s transformation. They don’t seek to be included in the system. They exist to build a different one.

She gave with no strings, no panels, no PR rollouts. Her gifts came unannounced and unrestricted, defying the typical philanthropic playbook. She once wrote, “I’m attempting to give away a fortune that was enabled by systems in need of change. In the effort, I have no doubt that many will do it better. That said, I won’t wait. And I will keep at it until the safe is empty.” 

She could have disappeared into her wealth. Instead, she chose disruption. She used her access not to preserve the old world, but to resource those trying to build a new one. That’s what it looks like when someone in power answers to truth instead of ego.

Where is your clarity?

Clarity doesn’t often arrive when it’s convenient, and it doesn’t come with a polished agenda. It shows up when you begin to listen to the lives impacted by the systems you move through every day. It may show up in a quiet moment, in a conversation you can’t forget, or in a stillness that feels heavier than usual. It doesn’t require a breakdown or a tragedy. But it does require your attention.

You don’t have to be a president, billionaire, or activist with a giant following to take a stand. You have a voice. You have platforms. You have skills, experience, and influence, whether you’re in a C-suite or a studio apartment. You can write, speak, hire, fire, invest, divest, vote, teach, advocate. The expression of moral clarity is not limited to grand gestures. It lives in how you show up, who you defend, what you build, and what you refuse to stay silent about.

For me, moral clarity began in 2016, when I watched Donald Trump win the GOP nomination. Something in me tightened and became a knot in my chest I couldn’t name yet. It wasn’t just about politics. It was about the kind of people who cheered for him, the things they were finally saying out loud, and the silence from people who looked like me. That knot only grew.

By the time George Floyd was murdered in 2020, the knot had become a fist. It was no longer possible to pretend that silence was neutral. Then came the pandemic with anti-science rhetoric, anti-mask tantrums, and anti-vax conspiracies. I watched as white Christian nationalism flexed its power without apology. And then January 6 happened, and the dam broke inside me. I realized I could no longer afford the luxury of restraint.

It wasn’t enough to feel these things. I knew I needed to do something. It started with choosing not to use my talents to support brands that remained socially neutral or willfully complicit. That small act of refusal created space for something deeper. I began to say out loud what I used to only whisper. I stopped editing myself in white-dominant rooms. I became the voice that names the elephant, pokes the bear, asks the uncomfortable question before someone else has to. I stopped being agreeable. I started being disruptive. I put my reputation, my brand, my business on the line by talking about “politics” in business circles.

That is my path. Yours will likely be different, because discovering moral clarity is deeply personal. There’s no formula. No five-step plan. No certification or scorecard. Finding moral clarity isn’t about reading the right books or saying the right things on social media. It starts when you listen to your own inner voice about what you are seeing in the world right now. 

To nurture that clarity, you must be willing to ask yourself hard, specific questions, not to punish yourself, but to tell the truth: 

Who is harmed by the systems I benefit from? 

What decisions am I making for comfort that someone else pays for with their dignity

When am I silent, and why?

These questions are an invitation into a deeper relationship with reality, with consciousness, and with the parts of you in each of us that weeps for injustice. They take you beyond giving a shit doing shit. 

Clarity and courage are sisters. You have to do something with the clarity, or it can easily atrophy. It is my suggestion that you find a place that feels dangerous to your ego and start there. Maybe it is saying “no” to watering down your messaging. Maybe it is speaking up on LinkedIn, or at the family dinner, or at church, or at a school board meeting. Whatever it is and wherever it is, it will require courage.

Further, if you are afraid to say something, I ask you to consider what it is like to be under the heel of oppression. To feel the weight of the authoritarian boot as it destroys your life. Imagine the sting of tear gas in your eyes, the horror in your heart of someone you love being taken from you, the impulse to run, hide, get away. Then imagine what it is like to look around and see all of the silent white faces. 

So I ask again:

What is your power for?

If you’ve been given power in this era of collapse and uprising, then your answer to that question is your legacy. It will be carved into whatever remains of your work. It will echo in the lives you touched… or ignored.

Clarity will not protect your comfort. It probably will not scale your business. It will not win you applause. It will rearrange your alliances. It will offend your mentors and friends. It will ruin your suburb-friendly brand. It will likely do all these things, but here’s the trade-off:

It will resurrect your soul. 

And a soul on fire is still a damn good business model and brand strategy and life legacy.