This essay deploys a disruptive moment of giving up tenure to rethink silence and voice in the context of institutional whiteness from the standpoint of a racialized Asian/immigrant/woman faculty. I narrate moments during my first tenure-track years weathering the quiet and invisible storms of whiteness at a historically white institution in the Midwestern United States. In (re)writing my story, I (re)orient my identity as an immigrant Other in US academia, reclaiming my family's oral history to inform my ways of speaking in/with comforting silence. I conclude with a discussion of racialized acts of speaking (up) as an interactive rather than singular moment.