43 pages • 1 hour read
Austin Channing BrownI'm Still Here: Black Dignity in a World Made for Whiteness
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2018A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
How Whiteness Centers Itself, Even in Attempts to Secure Racial Justice and Reconciliation
Like many writers, Brown acknowledges the pervasive nature of Whiteness across American history and modern culture, from implicit biases in hiring practices to displays of outright White supremacy. Yet as Brown repeatedly emphasizes, Whiteness also centers itself in well-intentioned attempts to achieve racial justice and reconciliation for Black Americans. Brown first encounters this in high school, when Ms. Phillips publicly announces in Brown’s presence the implicit racism of her seating charts. Although Brown understands that Ms. Phillips’ heart is in the right place—and, in truth, that such White admissions of racism are extremely rare—her method of decrying racism serves to signal her own White virtue rather than respect the feelings of Black students: “While I was grateful that she’d had an epiphany, or at least wanted to be grateful, the revelation made me incredibly self-conscious” (43). Later, in college, Brown reflexively prioritizes White feelings in her attempts at raising awareness and building multiracial coalitions: “I worked as if white folks were at the center, the great hope, the linchpin, the key to racial justice and reconciliation [...] It’s amazing how white supremacy even invades programs aimed at seeking racial reconciliation” (60).
Brown continues to encounter this trend at every stage of her professional and spiritual development. Despite working in a workplace that purports to be racially progressive, Brown repeatedly sees limits placed on the amount of Blackness that is deemed acceptable. She eventually concludes that the vast majority of White people—including and maybe especially those who welcome Black men and women into their organization—view Blackness as something to exploit to satisfy the shared psychological compulsions of Whiteness: “Whiteness wants enough Blackness to affirm the goodness of whiteness, the progressiveness of whiteness, the openheartedness of whiteness. Whiteness likes a trickle of Blackness, but only that which can be controlled” (70). Brown sees a stark example of this every Black History Month or Martin Luther King Jr. Day, when it is acceptable to sing the inspirational anthem “We Shall Overcome” but not the grim lynching elegy “Strange Fruit.”
This trend also emerges in Brown’s interpersonal relationships. White people will commonly reach out to ask their Black friends and acquaintances to educate them on issues of racial justice, presumably so they might serve as better allies. Yet Brown points out that an emphasis on the “dialogue” stage of reconciliation implies that systemic racism is debatable. Moreover, the tenets of White fragility mandate that whenever Black people speak the truth about racism to White people, these truths must be couched in language that Whiteness finds comfortable. Brown contends that “[o]ur only chance at dismantling racial injustice is being more curious about its origins than we are worried about our comfort” (117)
Finally, Brown sees Whiteness prioritized in the well-intentioned diversity efforts at her church. Again, dialogue is viewed as the endpoint rather than the starting point toward justice and reconciliation. Without real transformative change, these dialogues must be had again and again, which ironically serves Whiteness by allowing it to reaffirm its “goodness” again and again. Of these empty efforts, Brown writes, “They keep the church feeling good, innocent, maybe even progressive, all the while preserving the roots of injustice” (167).
How “Niceness” Props Up Myths of White Innocence
In her chapter titled “Nice White People,” Brown explores what she views as one of the most destructive myths in American society: that racism is the sole domain of “mean” people. According to this myth, White people are basically absolved of all racism as long they don’t set crosses on fire on their Black neighbors’ lawn or routinely lob racial slurs at non-White people. Given that the vast majority of White Americans meet this exceedingly low bar, the myth feeds into the idea that, except for a few bad apples, America exists in a state of post-racial harmony. Such assumptions are incorrect and, even worse, self-reinforcing.
Brown first encounters this phenomenon in high school, where the illusion of racial harmony hides uglier biases. This is best illustrated by the anecdote in which a student blames affirmative action after the University of Michigan denies her a spot. Given the lack of overt racial confrontation at her school, this student’s views went unchallenged until the end of her tenure there. Brown writes that four years of so-called “racial harmony” did nothing to challenge her “classmate’s belief that whiteness, on its own merit, made her more deserving. Our school’s ‘racial harmony’ might not have created that assumption, but it didn’t help her unlearn it either” (50).
Arguably the most pernicious element of the cult of White “niceness” is that, in absolving “nice” White people of racism, all racial tensions become attributed to Black people. Particularly at work, tense situations caused by a “nice” White person who touches Brown’s hair without asking or who makes racist assumptions about Brown’s thoughts and opinions on a perceived “Black” issue are invariably blamed on Brown. Supervisors tell her to be more understanding and sensitive to the feelings of the “nice” White person who again, because of their niceness, cannot possibly be a racist.
Brown writes that Whiteness continually contorts its definition of “nice” to avoid taking responsibility for even overt displays of racism. In a phenomenon Brown calls “the Relational Defense,” White people who are caught on tape uttering the most vicious racial slurs appeal to the fact that their friends and family know them to be “good” people. Yet even if that person is literally a saint in every respect, the act in question must be called out for what it is: racism. Moreover, that an otherwise good person with so many close friends and family members nevertheless felt the need to utter such vile language should make Americans more concerned about the pervasive nature of racism, not less. Finally, Brown points out that “even the monsters—the Klan members, the faces in the lynch mob, the murderers who bombed churches—they had friends and family members. Each one of them was connected to people who would testify that they had good hearts” (104).
The Conflicts Between the Church and Racial Justice Movements
For Brown, some of her earliest encounters with Blackness come through the church. Her home church in Toledo provides an invaluable outlet to nurture and express her Blackness. Yet as Brown grows older, she observes several contradictions between her religious organization and her commitment to racial justice. It must be pointed out that these contradictions exist not between Christianity and racial justice, but between the “church” and racial justice. For example, in the absence of efforts at true reconciliation, the church’s focus on qualities like compassion, charity, and forgiveness comprise another form of White “niceness” that allows little room for anger: “Because I am a Christian, my anger is dismissed as a character flaw, showing just how far I have turned from Jesus” (123). On the contrary, Brown discusses the Biblical story of Jesus’s Cleansing of the Temple, in which He angrily casts the merchants and moneylenders out of the holy Temple. Through this story, Brown manages to reconcile her anger over racial injustice with her identity as a Christian.
Brown undergoes a similar transformation with respect to her cousin Dalin. Prior to his imprisonment and death, Brown reflexively accepted a dichotomy common to her fellow parishioners that delineated “good” churchgoing Black men and “bad” Black criminals. Again, Brown contrasts this attitude with the story of Jesus, who was himself arrested, incarcerated, branded as a criminal, and killed because of it.
Furthermore, she laments the church’s emphasis on largely empty reconciliation as opposed to true racial justice. This attitude has less to do with anything inherent in the Christian faith and more to do with the power structures and politics of the church. To avoid alienating believers and potential converts, the church avoids overtly political speech on many—but not all—issues. Yet as Brown argues, “[R]econciliation can never be apolitical. Reconciliation chooses sides, and the side is always justice” (167). Moreover, such apolitical attitudes ignore how the church itself benefits from entrenched power structures: “The white Church considers power its birthright rather than its curse” (167).
How Racism Evolves—and How It Stays the Same
Like many racial justice scholars, Brown long believed that the arc of systemic racism in America could be broadly described like this: When slavery ended, the South built a new apparatus of White supremacy in the form of Jim Crow laws, which through legal discrimination and a tacit acceptance of White supremacist terror turned Black Americans into second-class citizens. When the successes of the Civil Rights Movement prohibited legal discrimination on explicitly racial grounds, the War on Drugs and mass incarceration created a new racial caste system, one built on presumably race-neutral language that nevertheless targeted Black men at disproportionate rates. In other words, “racism never went away; it just evolved” (150).
Yet as Brown watches tanks and police in riot gear treat Black protesters in Ferguson like enemy combatants in a war, Brown considers that racism hasn’t evolved as much as she thought, at least not since the 1960s. She writes:
But as I stared at my screen in horror and sadness, watching Black residents being treated like enemies of the state, it seemed to me that racism hadn’t evolved at all. Instead of confronting Black residents on horseback with nightsticks, police now showed up in tanks with automatic rifles strapped to their backs (150).
In other words, systemic racism only evolved to the extent that the police now have much greater firepower. Brown considers this point again in the wake of the 2015 Mother Emanuel shooting in Charleston, in which a White supremacist killed nine Black parishioners. She sees clear parallels to the 1963 bombing of Birmingham’s 16th Street Baptist Church that killed four Black girls. As a frequent churchgoer, Brown always wondered what it would have been like to be born in another time, when going to a Black church meant confronting the possibility of falling victim to White supremacist violence: “I stopped wondering when the distance between past and present closed yet again one evening in June 2015, when a white supremacist walked into Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church” (153).
