And the Truth Shall Set You

Austin Channing Brown, I’m Still Here: Black Dignity in a World Made for Whiteness

Austin Channing Brown wants White people to understand what it takes to survive a day in her skin. She wants us to think about how our unspoken assumptions narrow her choices, how our demands for understanding impinge upon her freedom. For her, this isn’t an academic exercise in statistics and probabilities. As a Black woman working in White spaces, the implications of Whiteness are a challenge she faces daily.

Brown uses her own autobiography, as a career activist in a Christian outreach ministry, to commence her story. In this, Brown’s story overlaps thematically with other activists I’ve read recently, including Danté Stewart and Ibram Kendi. However, Brown places the autobiographical content front and center: her writing is deeply positional. By that I mean this isn’t everyone’s story, it’s Brown’s, coming from her position as both Black and a woman.

From this position, she identifies patterns in her life starting with individual incidents. Her childhood, in a primarily White Christian school, where her teachers’ “colorblind” optimism clashes with students who harbor, and speak, profound hatred. Her multifaceted religious upbringing, and the collision between White and Black expressions of Christianity. Her professional activism career, as frequently the only Black person in overwhelmingly White spaces.

As Brown’s story unfolds, patterns become clear: White people make her responsible for their feelings. When confronted with the atrocities which racism has wrought, White people come blubbering to her, begging for absolution. When racism’s lingering presence threatens White people’s sense of self, White people lash out, expecting her to absorb their anger. Whatever happens, Brown finds herself constantly managing White people’s feelings.

Brown’s memoir of interactions with White people and Whiteness includes events that are sometimes frightening, but most often heart-wrenching. From well-meaning people coming to grips with their own inherited privilege and unexamined prejudices, to others refusing to come to grips and instead displacing their feelings into rage, Brown conveys the feelings which others bring to her. The problem is, managing others’ feelings shouldn’t be her responsibility.

Austin Channing Brown

Throughout her narrative, Brown’s Christianity informs her story. She describes how, in attending her first minority-Black church, she discovered an ethic of service and celebration that motivated her subsequent life— an ethic sadly missing in many majority-White congregations. (I can relate.) Her willingness to serve, and to reach across racial lines to build consensus in workplaces, schools, and other public places, comes explicitly from her Christianity.

This Christian ethic has limits, however. At what point does Brown get to stop maintaining others’ feelings? When White people react adversely to being challenged on America’s existing system, when is she allowed to refuse the battle? She recounts her story with a mix of emotions: great love for those who need her guidance, but also great fatigue at having to repeat the same battles ceaselessly. Surely God respects her weariness.

It’s difficult to synopsize this book without short-changing Brown’s story. Though the book is itself short for its genre, under 200 pages, she leads her readers through enough changes that the book feels epic, without feeling long. She moves from intimate recounting of her own story, to broader themes, and back again with ease. This is Brown’s personal story, but she emphasizes, it’s also the story of millions of Black Americans daily.

I read widely about race in America today. Stories like Brown’s aren’t new to me. Yet she makes clear something that’s percolated silently in my brain, without previously finding expression: that despite whatever progress we’ve made, our system still sees Whiteness (and, less explicitly, maleness) as America’s default position. People like me might sympathize mightily with Brown’s story, but the system allows us to forget. Brown doesn’t have that freedom.

Like Stewart or Kendi, Brown writes not only to convey her life lessons, but to present those lessons in one place, permanently. Instead of having to teach the same lessons time after time, she can present her book. And it’s important for us readers, too: though Brown says little I haven’t read in other writers, it’s good to hear it again. Because though I already believe her, I also have the privilege of occasionally forgetting.

Brown’s story is brief without being scanty, and personal but not sentimental. We can read her memoir with an open heart, or give copies to our loved ones who need to understand what “the system” means. Her Christian thread also makes her book valuable in churches, a space nominally dedicated to liberation, though we often lose sight. She takes us on an important, necessary journey.