For an untenured faculty member, perception is everything. For outsiders, such as women of color, the task of negotiating and performing identity can prove rather burdensome because of the need to counter negative stereotypes based on race, gender, and class. For many junior faculty members, a recurring conflict is the longstanding tension between voice and no voice: to speak or not to speak becomes the question. How, then, can women of color, especially those from poor or working-class backgrounds, draw the line between following advice for survival and resisting their own subjugation? The tenure process is an exhausting one, and each individual must do what allows her to sleep at night. Although the author went through the tenure process recently and emerged relatively unscathed, she constantly struggled with the issue of silence, and continues to do so now. Through it all, she has learned that there are good silences, bad silences, and unforgivable silences. Female faculty of color can be silenced in many aspects of their job. They can be silenced through their difficulties in saying no to extra service burdens that involve diversity, especially where they know their voices will not otherwise be represented; or through their shame in talking about the daily biases they face in the classroom, biases that are often invisible to white colleagues; or through their feelings that they are impostors in the academic world. Female faculty of color have to ask themselves, how can we balance the act of not speaking without losing self and yet speak without losing the game?