Your ex-friend is from Mississippi, which is a country you’re not familiar with. As a “Northerner” who lived and taught there for a year, I can tell you that the silence is where a good white girl trained to retreat into when talk of ‘blackness’ and racism is brought up. When I lived lived there people asked me with such mellifluous kindness in what appeared to me an even slower deliberate Southern drawl that reveal they already knew the answer after hearing my accent, “Oh, now where are yeeew from?” “I from up near Niagara Falls.” I would reply. “So your a Yankee,” I remember one middle-aged white woman behind the counter say when I answered and she got me a donut. I could feel the curtain go down when she called me a Yankee, a term I never heard before used to describe me, which sounded kind of like a slur, kind of like I was a foreigner, and outsider. I could see the curtain go down in her mind, the barrier of silence. I was in no longer in the USA where I had grown up.