This is how quickly it happened. One moment we were passing sumptuous kebob platters around the table making polite introductions, and the next we were swapping trauma stories that we—all people of color, many LGBTQ—had experienced in what were essentially white Christian spaces.*

There was the black nonprofit worker who attended a Christian conference in the rural Southeast, where she had to walk past white men staring her down from pickup trucks draped in confederate flags; there was the Indo-Latinx therapist who saw white Christians co-opt practices from other cultures, such as drumming or yoga, while erasing and demonizing the people they came from; and then there was me, the Chinese-American journalist who spoke at a Virginia Christian college where a white man verbally attacked and followed me prompting the provost to hide me in a secured room.

Among my dinner companions there was no need to explain the specter of racial violence and erasure lurking in our lives. Understanding came immediately, as did suggestions for coping in such a hostile climate: essential oils for anxiety, Valerian root for insomnia, comedy for the […]