In theory, civic participation in voluntary association expands citizens’ horizons; in practice, thoughtful conversation about race can be impossible in public. The article examined two civic groups-- a volunteer group devoted to school issues and a recreation group devoted to country-western dancing --in a multi-racial West Coast suburban region. One of the goals was to investigate how the act of speaking about race can mean something in itself. The whites in these two groups were “doing things with words” together, using references to race as “moves in games.” Avoidance of public speech was not just a result of participants’ way of “thinking through race,” not primarily the symptom of a bond of shared, secret racism. It was a bond of interactional norms that revealed members’ understanding of the very meaning of public speech itself, showing what they assumed the nature of the civic forum itself was. Paradoxically, in the two voluntary associations, members who could voice anti-racist sentiments in private “backstage” settings could not do so in more public settings. The very act of speaking carried meaning itself. The article suggests that this meaning-making can help in understanding civic life and the reproduction of racism therein. Notes, references