We’re less than a week from Christmas, and it’s tempting, so tempting, to change the conversation to anything but that deeply uncomfortable one: race.

That topic seems difficult to broach for a white person and yet vastly more painful for a black American. It’s been on all of our minds since August when a white police officer, Darren Wilson, in Ferguson, Missouri, shot and killed Michael Brown, an unarmed 18-year-old. It’s the topic that somebody’s bound, after a glass of wine, to bring to your holiday table.

How will you respond when a family member makes a casually racist comment? Silence is often most appealing. It’s so awkward to speak up in the midst of all that well-orchestrated peace and joy. So not a Hallmark moment.

Since Michael Brown’s death, even well-meaning white people have managed to get it wrong. There’s the tone-deaf nature of the “all lives matter” slogan, which tries to be color-blind, but winds up missing the point. There’s the cheerfully misspelled “Crimeing While White” Twitter campaign which manages to celebrate more and more egregious examples of white privilege in action.

Given all the ways one can go wrong, wouldn’t it be prudent this Christmas season to just choose silence?

I explored that question with a former student last week, a 6’5”, 230-pound young black man, who was generous enough to give me a glimpse of his life in that parallel universe. He’s 22 and he lives on the West Side now, but the last several years he lived in Cheney. There this former football player would walk across campus in the darkness at 8 or 9 p.m. and feel afraid. He was hyper-aware of when and how he could safely reach into his pocket to pull out his cell phone.

I traveled to New Orleans just over a year ago for a college journalism conference with this young man and five young white women. The moment I arrived at the conference registration desk, a faculty member from a New Orleans college warned me about the high crime rate in the city and urged me to caution my students.

Given my background, as a white woman, who over the years has known and interviewed so many women who have been sexually assaulted, my mind immediately leaped to the safety of the five young women in our group. After I did a bit of research on New Orleans crime rates, though, my focus shifted. When the seven of us walked down Bourbon Street together, our black former football player might have been mistaken for the group’s bodyguard. But, statistically, if anyone needed a bodyguard, it was him.

Last week, I asked my former student to fill me in on his reactions to these national conversations about race. He responded honestly. He thinks he knows what it might have felt like to be Michael Brown or Eric Garner. “I’m a large guy, too,” he said. “I think of myself as a gentle person.”

On Black Friday he joined a protest at Westlake Center after a grand jury in Missouri decided not to indict Wilson. My former student was astounded by the slant of the Seattle news stories. Reporters, he said, went with the angle that white kids were disappointed that the protest disrupted a tree-lighting ceremony and caused the mall to close early. He was incredulous that Seattle journalists appeared to feel sorrier for white kids missing a tree lighting than for black kids who died too young.

“Those kids don’t get a Christmas,” he said. “They don’t get to sit around a tree with their family.”

I asked him how he’d like to see white people respond to this issue.

He asked for introspection, and the awareness that America’s most brutal racism isn’t ancient history. “My great-grandmother picked cotton and cleaned white people’s houses,” he said. “That’s not that long ago.”

My smart, thoughtful student said the best thing white people can do is talk with other white people. He asks that when Aunt Louise makes a casually racist comment at the dinner table, we speak up. He’d like for us to say, “That’s not right, and that’s what makes black people so angry.”

Aunt Louise votes, my former student points out. She, and, more importantly, the children and grandchildren listening around the table, can influence the direction of this country. Ignoring her this holiday season can only stifle change.