There’s a particular kind of silence that smells like pine air freshener and pending litigation. You know the one. A celebrity gets called out, a brand is trending for all the wrong reasons, a university issues an email that says “We hear you” but definitely doesn’t. Suddenly: we’re listening. We’re learning. Our thoughts and prayers are with… Fill in the blank.

This isn’t silence, actually. It’s language shaped like a noise-canceling headphone. It says: Please don’t look at us too closely. Please don’t ask for anything inconvenient. Please accept this well-lacquered vagueness as solidarity. 

Welcome to the golden age of strategic silence — and its sister act, performative language that says nothing at all. Because while we like to think of silence as a void, a vacuum, an absence — in public life, it’s often the most curated thing of all. A brand saying nothing during a crisis? Not apathy. A spreadsheet. A risk assessment. A 2-week internal chain of emails in legal, comms, and marketing asking, “Can we afford to say anything — and can we afford not to?”

And that’s the question. Who can afford to stay quiet?

Because the truth is: silence is a currency, and like all currencies, it’s not distributed equally.

Let’s be clear: this isn’t a callout post. This isn’t “we need to talk about…” energy. This is about tracing how silence operates like a prestige dialect — who gets to speak in subtext, and who’s punished for not showing up in full syntax and citations. Who is allowed to be enigmatic, and who gets written off as evasive. Who is praised for being measured — and who’s dismissed as angry, unclear, or “not doing the work.”

This essay is about that gap.

It’s about the power of omission. The reverence of “no comment.” The theology of “thoughts and prayers.” And the way silence, like language, is read differently depending on who holds the mic — or drops it.

The Power to Be Silent

Silence doesn’t mean you have nothing to say. It means you don’t have to say it. And that’s a very different game.

The sociologist Pierre Bourdieu called it symbolic capital — the invisible credit that powerful people accumulate. Some folks are so credentialed, so protected, so deeply embedded in systems of legitimacy that even their silences are considered eloquent. A judge’s pause. A CEO’s “no comment.” A politician’s refusal to engage. These are read as dignified restraint — not avoidance.

Meanwhile, people without that protection? They have to narrate their trauma, cite sources, build a bibliography, and still risk being ignored. Think: activists who have to relive their pain in press conferences to get basic coverage. Parents of school shooting victims having to sob on camera for a piece of legislation that might save the next kid. The cost of being heard is often a public dissection of your grief.

Case in point: Obama’s gravitas vs. activist exhaustion

Barack Obama — king of the long pause. The furrowed brow. The careful cadence. People called it presidential. Measured. Almost mythic. But that same reverent silence, when applied by activists like Brittany Packnett Cunningham or Patrisse Cullors? Gets interpreted as unclear, “not enough,” or “too emotional.”

It’s not about tone — it’s about who’s allowed to wield it. And in this hierarchy, silence is a privilege masquerading as neutrality.

The Corporate Quiet: Liability with a Logo

Let’s talk about the real masters of the artful dodge: brands.

In May 2020, after George Floyd’s murder, corporations found themselves under pressure to say something about racial injustice. Many said nothing for days. When they finally did, it sounded a lot like a Word doc auto-filled by ChatGPT trained on HR guidelines: “We are heartbroken.” “We’re committed to learning.” “Our thoughts and prayers are with the Black community.”

Which, to be clear, is nothing. But it’s a strategic nothing. A statement that feels like something without doing anything.

The spreadsheet behind “we hear you”

Take Bank of America. They pledged $1 billion to advance racial equity. Sounds good! Meanwhile, investigative reporting showed that they maintained client relationships with companies that profited off prison labor and predatory lending in Black communities. [Insert clown emoji here.]

Or Amazon, who added a Black Lives Matter banner to their homepage… and then banned union organizers and fired employees for organizing walkouts over pandemic safety conditions. These contradictions aren’t just hypocrisy — they’re the product of comms departments who know how to sound emotionally engaged while remaining structurally unchanged.

The phrase “thoughts and prayers” is the corporate version of “don’t worry, we noticed”. It’s what you say when you need to fill the air — but not the gap.

The Cost of Breaking Silence: Colin Kaepernick and the NFL

Sometimes, silence is too dangerous to be allowed. Sometimes, the quietest acts make the most noise. And when that happens, the people who benefit from silence will punish you for breaking theirs.

Colin Kaepernick didn’t shout. He didn’t disrupt. He knelt. Quietly. On the sideline. During the anthem. It was an act of protest so minimal it barely qualified as a gesture — and yet, it split the country open. He said nothing, and the NFL responded with everything: outrage, erasure, silence-by-force.

The protest began in 2016. Kaepernick was clear from the beginning: he was kneeling to protest police brutality and racial injustice. But his silence — the act of not standing — was quickly reframed. Critics, commentators, and politicians accused him of disrespecting the flag, the troops, the league, the game. His refusal to narrate his protest in the language of patriotism was treated as betrayal. And so the league did what institutions always do when confronted by inconvenient silence: they made him disappear.

Kaepernick played his last NFL game that same year. The league never officially banned him. They didn’t have to. He was simply never signed again.

This is the part that matters: the punishment was not for speech. It was for refusing to perform the right kind of silence. The kind that’s hollow. The kind that serves power.

Fast forward four years. After George Floyd’s murder in 2020, public pressure mounts. Protests swell. Brands scramble. And suddenly — like magic — the NFL is in a listening mood. Commissioner Roger Goodell releases a video: “We, the National Football League, admit we were wrong for not listening to NFL players earlier and encourage all to speak out and peacefully protest.” It’s warm. Polished. Broad enough to apply to anyone. It’s also conspicuously missing one name: Kaepernick.

It’s the institutional equivalent of “we’re listening” — with the volume turned way down.

But the contradiction doesn’t stop there. That same year, Nike — Kaepernick’s longtime sponsor — launches a national ad campaign featuring his face with the tagline: “Believe in something. Even if it means sacrificing everything.” The same campaign that cost Nike millions in boycotts… also won them a Cannes Grand Prix and record-breaking brand engagement.

Silence, once punished, had become marketable. And Kaepernick — still unsigned — had been transformed from liability to symbol. Not by changing his message. But by waiting until that message was safe to monetize.

That’s the calculus. Institutions don’t change when they’re moved — they change when it’s profitable. And the same silence that once got you erased? It might get you canonized later, if someone can repackage it in a way that doesn't threaten power.

Celebrities, Brand Management, and Moral Inflation

You know what they say: with great platform comes… a hellish amount of PR scrutiny.

Celebrity silence used to be expected. In fact, it was part of the mystique. Audrey Hepburn. Prince. Beyoncé (until she wasn’t). But now? Now everyone’s a micro-brand. Everyone’s expected to have a position. A statement. A link in bio. “Silence is complicity” gets thrown around — sometimes rightly, sometimes carelessly — and what used to be PR strategy is now political posture.

Taylor Swift and the case of the carefully curated silence

Let’s rewind to 2016. Trump is rising. The culture is shifting. Every major pop star has taken a side — except Taylor Swift. The internet notices. And drags. Her silence feels protective, calculated, suspicious.

Fast forward to 2018. She finally breaks the silence and endorses two Democratic candidates in Tennessee. Voter registrations spike. She gives a rare interview saying she regrets not speaking up sooner. And her brand begins a slow evolution into Political Pop Star 2.0. But it took years — and it was safe by then.

Compare that to…

Megan Thee Stallion: No silence, no luxury

In 2020, Megan Thee Stallion performed on SNL and paused mid-song to say, “We need to protect our Black women.” She followed it with a New York Times op-ed — eloquent, urgent, unflinching.

But here’s the thing: no one let her be silent. That option wasn’t on the menu. The expectation was not only that she would speak — but that she would do it perfectly. If she’d said nothing, she’d have been accused of abandoning her community. If she said too much, she’d be accused of overstepping.

Megan’s speech was brave. But it was also necessary. Because silence for her wasn’t prestige — it was peril.

Monitoring the Situation: When Institutions Say Nothing with Feeling

There’s a particular flavor of silence that academia has perfected. It’s not as slick as corporate PR, but it’s gentler. Softer. It smells like paper and policy. And it arrives on university letterhead, just in time to avoid taking a stand.

After a hate crime. A campus suicide. A public health failure. A protest. A scandal involving donors or endowment investments. Whatever the crisis, the message is rarely clear — but it is always composed.

You know the email: “We are monitoring the situation closely.”

Or its cousin: “We recognize that this is a difficult time for many in our community.”

Or its emotionally supportive sibling: “We encourage anyone in distress to reach out to our wellness resources.”

Sometimes, institutions will name the tragedy. Sometimes not. Sometimes they say “violence” without saying who was harmed. Sometimes they offer “solidarity” without identifying with whom. But what they never do — unless forced — is name power. Or take a position. Or make a promise that binds them to a future action.

In other words: this is silence wrapped in empathy language.

Take the case of elite universities during COVID-19. Many kept campuses open longer than public health guidelines advised — or reopened them quickly after outbreaks — in part to preserve tuition income. Yet the emails to students were full of “care”: “We understand the hardship this has created.” “Our decision reflects our deep commitment to student wellbeing.”

Care, in this context, was the aesthetic of accountability — not the substance.

This language isn’t random. It’s strategic. These institutions are fluent in soft silence: language that feels like moral clarity but functions like plausible deniability. It’s the linguistic version of an institutional shrug — warm, composed, and entirely non-binding.

And just like “thoughts and prayers,” this form of rhetorical softness works because it disarms critique. If you challenge the university, they can point to their email. “We acknowledged the pain. We sent flowers. We hosted a listening session. We did the thing.”

But the thing is never policy. It’s never redistribution. It’s never reckoning.

It’s an email — written by a team, edited by legal, signed by the provost, and deleted by everyone else two minutes after reading.

Which is exactly the point.

Because when language is structured not to reveal values, but to avoid stakes, what you get is a community built on paper — and silence posing as presence.

Thoughts and Prayers: A Genre of Disappearance

There are few phrases more instantly recognizable — or more instantly hollow — than “thoughts and prayers.”

After a school shooting. After a police killing. After a wildfire or flood. The phrase floats in like a kind of soft, bureaucratic incense. “Our thoughts and prayers are with the victims and their families.” It appears in press releases, emails, tweets, and podium statements within hours. It’s almost liturgical now — a standardized unit of grief, pre-approved for public distribution.

But here’s the thing: “thoughts and prayers” wasn’t always meaningless. It has roots in Christian condolence culture, where it once functioned as a genuine — if modest — offer of intercession. As in: you’re not alone in your sorrow; we’re holding you in spiritual presence. In that context, the phrase made sense. It wasn’t a policy; it was a prayer.

What hollowed it out wasn’t overuse — it was misuse. Over time, politicians and corporations began reaching for it whenever they needed to publicly acknowledge tragedy without doing anything to prevent it from happening again. It became a linguistic firewall — something you say instead of taking responsibility. Instead of passing legislation. Instead of accountability.

The turn came, unmistakably, after Sandy Hook. The horror was immediate. So was the flood of statements. Thoughts and prayers. Our hearts are broken. We grieve with the families.

But then — nothing.

No new federal gun control legislation passed. No national reckoning. Just the repetition of the phrase, over and over, until it calcified into performance. By the time Parkland happened in 2018, students were tweeting “We don’t want your thoughts and prayers” within minutes of the news breaking.

And yet, the phrase persists.

Because it works.

It’s legally non-binding. Emotionally generic. Spiritually adjacent. It suggests sympathy — but not guilt. Support — but not solidarity. It doesn’t even require belief. Atheists in government use it. Corporate accounts use it. Billionaire donors who fund the conditions that caused the crisis? Also using it.

In that sense, “thoughts and prayers” isn’t a phrase anymore. It’s a genre.

It’s the same genre as “we’re listening.” “We stand in solidarity.” “We are committed to learning and growing.”

It’s the genre of language that simulates presence while avoiding consequence. Words that fill the space left behind by policy, justice, or actual risk. It’s what you say when you need to sound like you care — but can’t afford to act like it.

And to be clear, this isn’t an attack on spiritual expression. If you say “thoughts and prayers” and you mean it — if you also donate, vote, protest, support survivors, or organize for change — that’s different.

This critique is for the institutions. For the brands. For the universities, corporations, and politicians who use “thoughts and prayers” like a cloaking device — a way to stay visible without being accountable.

Because at this point, we don’t need more copy-and-paste grief. We need the thing it keeps replacing.

Silence as Ceremony, Resistance, and Refusal

Now, let’s shift. Because not all silence is evasion. Not all silence is spin.

Some silences are sacred. Some are strategic refusals. And some — especially in movements led by Indigenous, disabled, and historically excluded communities — are acts of sovereignty.

Standing Rock: prayer over soundbite

In 2016, the Dakota Access Pipeline protests drew thousands to the Standing Rock Sioux reservation. The movement was spiritual as much as political. Protesters prayed. Stood silently. Held ceremonies. They refused to perform rage in ways that made them legible to white media or liberal politics.

And the result? The press mostly ignored it. Or mischaracterized it. Because that silence — that slow, ritual resistance — didn’t fit the narrative cycle. There were no viral videos of yelling. No 30-second clips of chaos. Just Indigenous people holding ceremony on stolen land, asking the state to stop poisoning their water.

Silence wasn’t apathy. It was ancestral. It was deliberate. But it wasn’t heard.

When Speaking Hurts, and Silence Costs More

There’s a weird pressure — especially now — to say something about everything, all the time. If you’re silent, you’re complicit. If you speak, you’re polarizing. If you wait, you’re too late. If you act fast, you’re “reactive.” There’s no perfect window. No right tone. Just an ever-refreshing set of expectations to manage.

I’ve felt that pressure. As a strategist, as a researcher, as a person. I’ve ghostwritten statements for institutions that needed to “say the right thing” but weren’t ready to do the right thing. I’ve built messaging frameworks where the goal was clarity — but also absence of accountability. I know what it looks like behind the curtain, and I know how often silence is the message. Not the absence of one.

And I’ve also been on the other side of it — navigating a chronic health condition, identity, grief. Sometimes I didn’t speak because I didn’t have the energy. Or because I was still figuring out what I thought. Or because I didn’t trust the room to hold what I had to say. Sometimes silence wasn’t protection — it was survival.

There’s something painful about watching institutions be praised for “restraint” while individuals are punished for hesitation. There’s something exhausting about always needing to articulate your pain while others get to maintain their mystery. And there’s something violent about being forced to speak as proof that you care, when speaking costs more than you can afford.

So I’ve learned to ask: What’s the silence protecting? Who benefits from the delay? What would saying something actually require of the speaker?

And I’ve learned this too: not all speech is presence, and not all silence is absence.

Some silences are full. Some are sacred. Some are strategic in the best way — a refusal to play the game, a reclamation of time, a buffer between thought and performance.

But some are just silence. Expensive, polished, PR-coated silence that looks like care and functions like insulation.

If you’ve ever been told your silence is suspicious, you already know what that costs. If you’ve ever watched someone else’s silence be praised as “measured,” you know what that reveals.

And if you’ve ever had to speak before you were ready just to be heard — you know the difference between choosing silence and being left with none.

So what now?

In the age of AI-generated apologies, bot-written press releases, and CEO statements run through seven lawyers and a crisis comms team, silence has never been louder.

It’s time we stopped pretending that not saying anything is neutral.

Silence is a full sentence. But like every sentence, it has a speaker. A subject. A consequence.

This isn’t a call to scream louder. Or to never shut up. Or to always post your take within 24 hours of a global event.

It’s a call to pay attention to the silences. Who’s allowed to have them. Who’s not. Who uses them to escape — and who uses them to resist.

Because in the noise of modern discourse, we’ve mistaken speech for presence. We’ve mistaken silence for absence. But silence is neither.

Silence is a dialect of power. And like all dialects, it needs decoding.

So next time you hear “we’re listening” or “thoughts and prayers,” ask yourself: what aren’t they saying — and who had to speak first to make them say anything at all?