I'm Still Here: Black Dignity in a World Made for Whiteness

by Austin Channing Brown

White people who expect me to be white have not yet realized that their cultural way of being is not in fact the result of goodness, rightness, or God’s blessing. Pushing back, resisting the lie, is hella work.

White supremacy is a tradition that must be named and a religion that must be renounced. When this work has not been done, those who live in whiteness become oppressive, whether intentional or not.

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.

This is partly what makes the fragility of whiteness so damn dangerous. It ignores the personhood of people of color and instead makes the feelings of whiteness the most important thing.

If Black people are dying in the street, we must consult with white feelings before naming the evils of police brutality. If white family members are being racist, we must take Grandpa’s feelings into account before we proclaim our objections to such speech. If an organization’s policies are discriminatory and harmful, that can only be corrected if we can ensure white people won’t feel bad about the change. White fragility protects whiteness and forces Black people to fend for themselves.

When you believe niceness disproves the presence of racism, it’s easy to start believing bigotry is rare, and that the label racist should be applied only to mean-spirited, intentional acts of discrimination. The problem with this framework—besides being a gross misunderstanding of how racism operates in systems and structures enabled by nice people—is that it obligates me to be nice in return, rather than truthful. I am expected to come closer to the racists. Be nicer to them. Coddle them.

Even more, if most white people are good, innocent, lovely folks who are just angry or scared or ignorant, it naturally follows that whenever racial tension arises, I must be the problem.

When this narrative of goodness is disrupted by the unplanned utterance of racial slurs, jokes, rants, or their kind, whiteness has perfected another tool for defending its innocence. I call it the Relational Defense.

White people desperately want to believe that only the lonely, isolated “whites only” club members are racist. This is why the word racist offends “nice white people” so deeply. It challenges their self-identification as good people. Sadly, most white people are more worried about being called racist than about whether or not their actions are in fact racist or harmful.

Entertaining a discussion about race with someone who believes in white innocence often feels like entering the twilight zone. This is largely because those who believe in white innocence don’t have enough of a knowledge base to participate meaningfully in the discussion. They haven’t educated themselves through books or courses. They are unfamiliar with the lexicon on race, not realizing their words have particular meanings. Their understanding of both America’s racial history and current racial landscape is lacking. But this does not prevent them from being convinced of their rightness and need to reassert dominance.

White people are notorious for trying to turn race conversations into debates, and then becoming angry or dismissive when people of color won’t participate. White people believe this is because people of color haven’t thought it through or are stumped by a well-made point. But the truth is, oftentimes people of color don’t have the time, energy, or willpower to teach the white person enough to turn the conversation into a real debate. To do so would be a ton of work. Even on the occasion when a conversation actually proves itself productive, Black folks still have to be on the lookout for white fragility’s cousin: white guilt.

Our only chance at dismantling racial injustice is being more curious about its origins than we are worried about our comfort. It’s not a comfortable conversation for any of us. It is risky and messy. It is haunting work to recall the sins of our past.

Then Audre Lorde saved me. In her book Sister Outsider, Lorde wrote an essay entitled “The Uses of Anger.” She writes that anger is not a shortcoming to be denied, but a creative force that tells us when something is wrong. Every woman has a well-stocked arsenal of anger potentially useful against those oppressions, personal and institutional, which brought that anger into being. Focused with precision it can become a powerful source of energy serving progress and change…Anger expressed and translated into action in the service of our vision and our future is a liberating and strengthening act of clarification.