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.

It’s work to be the only person of color in an organization, bearing the weight of all your white co-workers’ questions about Blackness.

It’s work to always be hypervisible because of your skin—easily identified as being present or absent—but for your needs to be comp...

Togetherness across racial lines doesn’t have to mean the uplifting of whiteness and harming of Blackness.

“I just want to say that I’m having a hard time even being mad at you white people anymore. I think I’ve just been convinced that white people are innately evil. You can’t help it. You steal and kill, you enslave and lynch. You are just evil.”

“I don’t know what to do with what I’ve learned,” she said. “I can’t fix your pain, and I can’t take it away, but I can see it. And I can work for the rest of my life to make sure your children don’t have to experience the pain of racism.” And then she said nine words that I’ve never forgotten: “Doing nothing is no longer an option for me.”

The role of a bridge builder sounds appealing until it becomes clear how often that bridge is your broken back.

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.

I love being a Black woman because we are demanding. We demand the right to live as fully human. We demand access—the right to vote, to education, to employment, to housing, to equal treatment under the law. And we do it creatively: Sit-ins and die-ins, signs and songs, writing and filmmaking. We demand because our ancestors did. We demand because we believe in our own dignity.

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. It happens in classes and workshops, board meetings and staff meetings, via email and social media, but it takes other forms, too.

White fragility protects whiteness and forces Black people to fend for themselves.

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.

Ultimately, the reason we have not yet told the truth about this history of Black and white America is that telling an ordered history of this nation would mean finally naming America’s commitment to violent, abusive, exploitative, immoral white supremacy, which seeks the absolute control of Black bodies. It would mean doing something about it.

President Clinton signed an act that called for mandatory minimums for multiple drug offenses, and police departments around the country started cracking down on nonviolent crime.

Whiteness has never needed much of an excuse for our deaths. Accused of looking at a white woman. Resisted arrest. Scared the officer. Thought he had a weapon. Had a criminal record (that the officer knew nothing about). Looked suspicious. Looked like someone else.