This article examines how a progressive, rural/small city community in the USA wrestles with race, racism, and school equity in the public arena of print media. It inquires into the tensions, limitations, and possibilities for race-conscious discourse in the face of both explicit racist hate speech and benevolent liberal race talk. Based on ethnographic and cultural discourse analyses of local print media, this article draws from critical race and whiteness theories to examine how racist hate speech, occurring in a non-education context of a police-related tragedy, and benevolent liberal race talk on school equity issues mutually reinforce the logic of white racial dominance. It also locates the possibilities of race-conscious talk as generative speech that demands a response.