Are You Decent?

An Inquiry

Power resents being named more than it resents being resisted.

I am less disturbed by what is being argued than by how quickly morality itself has become suspect.

There was a time when ethical reflection was understood as a civic obligation. Now it is framed as intrusion. When power is named, the accusation of tyranny arrives immediately. When inequality is described, someone declares themselves victim. When humility is suggested, it is treated as coercion.

This is not disagreement. It is enforcement.

What is being policed is not behavior, but inquiry. Not outcomes, but language. Not injustice, but the right to name it without punishment.

That is the condition we are living inside.

I learned to hear privilege the way my body hears a smoke alarm. Not as information. As threat.

Someone would say the word and my throat would tighten before I understood why. The tightening came first. Then the reasons. Then the voice, ready to explain what I had earned, what I had built, what no one could take credit for except me.

I did not think I was lying. I thought I was being accurate.

What I could not tolerate was relation. The possibility that my arrival in certain rooms was not self-generated. That the door was already open. That someone else’s exclusion bore my shape.

I called that honesty tyranny.

Not because it threatened what I had. Because it complicated what it meant. Success that requires forgetting its conditions cannot survive attention. It must be defended, or it dissolves into something smaller. Something relational.

I needed it larger than that. Singular. Mine.

That need is what humility interrupts. Not achievement. Not effort. The story I tell about them. The one where I rise clean.

I have watched people I respect become unrecognizable when asked to consider how they got where they are. Brilliant people. Kind people. People who teach their children about fairness.

They refuse the question because it introduces cost where they expected credit.

Humility does not ask for apology. It asks for presence. For the capacity to remain coherent when the story of deserving includes others. That steadiness is rare. More common is the voice that rises. The body that hardens. The certainty that arrives fully formed, louder than thought.

I have been that body. I know its grammar.

When humility is neutralized, morality becomes theater. Slogans replace practice. Righteousness becomes performance staged for an audience that never examines its own position.

What disappears is not goodness. What disappears is the willingness to be implicated by it.

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I have watched proximity become unbearable.

Not the proximity that requires touching. The kind that requires seeing. Names instead of categories. Histories instead of types. The moment someone stops being the unqualified hire and becomes a person who applied to sixty positions before anyone responded.

That specificity costs something. It disrupts the story where competition is neutral and outcomes reveal worth.

So it gets avoided. Not loudly. Procedurally.

Through language that sounds fair while erasing the ground it stands on. Merit. Qualifications. Standards. Words that appear to measure everyone the same while concealing that some people arrive already fluent and others must translate while running.

I have used those words. I know what they permit.

Benefit without proximity. Victory without witness. Outcomes called fair because the process looked clean from where I stood.

Abstraction is not confusion. It is insulation. It allows harm to be described as unfortunate rather than designed. It allows decisions to hide inside procedure and call themselves inevitable.

What it cannot survive is specificity. The name. The application. The sixty rejections that precede the question about merit.

Humanity is not sentiment. It is the refusal to let abstraction do the work conscience should do.

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It happened quickly enough to feel accidental.

A comment shaped like an observation. Not cruel. Just accurate enough to shrink someone without naming them. The kind of sentence that arrives already forgiven. Laughter followed. Not loud. Not wild. Cooperative. Familiar.

I laughed too.

I tell myself now it was reflex. That the sound left my mouth before my mind reached it. But I remember the pause. A thin space between hearing the joke and joining it. Long enough to choose. Short enough to later deny that I had.

The person being discussed was not in the room. Absence stretches permission. Someone added detail. Someone else sharpened it. The laughter widened, then settled, like it knew its limits.

When I laughed, something aligned. Not my values. My body. The sound fit. It slid into the room without resistance. No one turned. No one corrected. No one looked relieved or disappointed. The moment passed cleanly.

That was the instruction.

Afterward, alone, I replayed the sound of my own voice. It did not sound unfamiliar. That was the unsettling part. It sounded practiced. As if it had been waiting.

I did not tell myself I should have done better. I told myself I understood how things worked. That decency, in rooms like that, was not required. That interruption carried risk. That laughter was safer than refusal.

The relief was immediate. No cost. No friction. Belonging intact.

The next time we gathered, the ease was already there. No rebuilding required. No distance to close. I had proven I knew how to move. The room remembered, and so did I.

That is what the laughter bought. Not status. Not approval. Just the absence of friction. The knowledge that I could be counted on not to interrupt. Not to make things harder than they needed to be. Not to choose decency when alignment was available.

I told myself this was realism. That this was how adults navigated rooms they wanted to remain in. That integrity was fine in theory but cost too much in practice.

What I did not tell myself was that I had traded something permanent for something immediate. And that I would make that trade again. And again. Until the ease became reflex and the reflex became character.

And something else settled too. Quietly. Permanently.

I learned that decency was not punished. It was simply made unnecessary. Optional. The kind of thing you could set down without consequence, so long as you remembered where you were.

That understanding stayed.

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Certain words end conversations before they begin. I know them all.

Not through policy. Through atmosphere.

Someone would say equity and the room would shift. Not visibly. Internally. Eyes would glaze. Posture would stiffen. The word carried contamination. To engage it seriously was to mark yourself as someone who did not understand how things worked.

I stopped using certain language. Not because I stopped believing it. Because I wanted to be taken seriously. I wanted to remain in rooms where decisions were made.

I told myself I was being strategic. That I could do more good by staying credible than by insisting on terms that made people defensive.

That reasoning sounded practical.

It was abandonment.

What I abandoned was not vocabulary. It was the examination that vocabulary demanded. DEIA asked where opportunity lives and who never learns the door exists at all. That question made my position relational. It introduced others into the story of my arrival. It suggested that my access was not just earned, but also granted.

I could not tolerate that suggestion while still feeling clean about where I stood.

So I let the language be dismantled. I watched frameworks that forced attention upstream get called tyranny. I said nothing. I did not argue. I did not defend.

I preserved my position by letting the tools that would have examined it disappear.

What replaced them was permission. Not freedom.

Permission to stop asking.
Permission to stop seeing.
Permission to benefit without proximity.

And to call that realism.

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I have stood in rooms where someone said something that required response. Not violence. Not spectacle. Just a comment that flattened someone not present. The kind of reduction that sounds reasonable until you imagine it said about you.

I said nothing.

Not because I agreed. Because silence was easier. Because speaking would have made me the problem. Because the room would remember that I chose friction when I could have chosen flow. Because I wanted to be invited back.

That is what decency costs. Not comfort. Position.

The ease of rooms that expect you to know when to let things pass. The sense that you understand how things work.

I understood.

That was the problem.

I understood that decency is not misunderstood in this moment. It is rejected. Not because people are cruel, but because they are insulated. Because they have been trained to expect that belonging should not require cost. That advantage should not require examination. That they can be good people without being uncomfortable ones.

Decency interrupts that training. It asks you to stay present when silence would protect you. To refuse a benefit you could take without consequence. To introduce friction where none was required.

I have refused that friction. I have chosen position over interruption. I have told myself that staying credible was more important than being inconvenient.

That choice does not make me monstrous.

It makes me typical.

That is the point.

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The people most resistant to moral attention are not resisting restriction. They are resisting implication.

Moral attention asks them to remain present when the story of their deserving becomes relational. When success stops being singular and starts being situated. When innocence begins to thin.

Innocence cannot survive that attention. It must be defended immediately, or it dissolves.

So it is defended with volume. With accusations of tyranny. With the insistence that being named is violence. That examination is punishment. That accountability is authoritarianism.

What is being protected is not freedom. It is the right to benefit without proximity. To succeed without relation. To remain innocent of one’s own position.

I have performed this defense.

That performance does not make power righteous.

It makes it brittle.

Let that be enough— for now.

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Author’s Note

Writing this required more restraint than I expected.

Not restraint from anger, but from comfort. From the ease of standing outside the question and letting critique do the work alone. There were moments where it would have been simpler to keep myself cleaner in the telling. To stay observational. To let the indictment land everywhere except where I live.

I did not do that.

This essay cost me a version of moral innocence I had learned to preserve by staying articulate instead of implicated. It asked me to remember where I aligned when alignment felt safer than interruption. Where I laughed. Where I stayed quiet. Where decency became optional and I accepted the terms.

I am not exempt from what I am naming here. That is the point.

If this piece unsettles, it should. It unsettled me first. Not because it revealed something new, but because it refused to let what I already knew remain abstract.

I am no longer interested in moral language that asks nothing of the speaker. I am interested in what remains when attention replaces performance and silence stops feeling neutral.

Whatever is taken from this essay, let it not be certainty.

Let it be accountability.

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UNSPUN publishes longform essays, op-eds, and visual documents tracing the language of power in real time.
This piece appears in UNSPUN, the publication’s central body of work interrogating truth, language, and the systems that shape both.

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