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.

Quite frankly, the work isn’t just tedious. It can be dangerous for Black women to attempt to carve out space for themselves—their perspective, their gifts, their skills, their education, their experiences—in places that haven’t examined the prevailing assumption of white culture.

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.

It’s funny how in these little life lessons, I always knew that “someone” was white people.

My parents made sure I knew that at any moment when I wasn’t paying attention, when I was just being a person, everything could be interrupted.

Tiffani didn’t just teach me about Black culture. She also taught me that I could embrace new things about Blackness without being stripped of my identity.

White institutions are constantly communicating how much Blackness they want.

Whiteness constantly polices the expressions of Blackness allowed within its walls, attempting to accrue no more than what’s necessary to affirm itself.

It wants to see a Black person seated at the table but doesn’t want to hear a dissenting viewpoint. It wants to pat itself on the back for helping poor Black folks through missions or urban projects but has no interest in learning from Black people’s wisdom, talent, and spiritual depth. Whiteness wants enough Blackness to affirm the goodness of whiteness, the progressiveness of whiteness, the openheartedness of whiteness.

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.

This is in part because most white people still believe that they are good and the true racists are easy to spot.

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.

It does not matter that the “well-intentioned” questions hurt my feelings or that the decisions made in all-white meetings affect me differently than they do everyone else. If my feelings do not fit the narrative of white innocence and goodness, the burden of change gets placed on me.

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.

The monster has always been well dressed and well loved.

But I suspect that white people really don’t want to believe that we (people of color) know them, too. They want to believe their proximity to people of color makes them immune.

Entertaining a discussion about race with someone who believes in white innocence often feels like entering the twilight zone.

Slavery was no accident. We didn’t trip and fall into black subjugation. Racism wasn’t a bad joke that just never went away. It was all on purpose. Every bit of it was on purpose. Racial injustices, like slavery and our system of mass incarceration, were purposeful inventions, but instead of seeking to understand how we got here, the national narrative remains filled with comforting myths, patchwork time lines, and colonial ideals.

Jim Crow meant paying taxes for services one could not fully enjoy; working for meager wages; and owning nothing that couldn’t be snatched away. For many black families, it meant never building wealth and never having legal recourse for injustice. The mob violence, the burned-down homes, the bombed churches and businesses, the Black bodies that were lynched every couple of days—Jim Crow was walking through life measuring every step.

We can survive honest discussions about slavery, about convict leasing, about stolen land, deportation, discrimination, and exclusion. We can identify the harmful politics of gerrymandering, voter suppression, criminal justice laws, and policies that disproportionately affect people of color negatively. And we can expose the actions of white institutions—the history of segregation and white flight, the real impact of all-white leadership, the racial disparity in wages, and opportunities for advancement.

We can lament and mourn. We can be livid and enraged. We can be honest. We can tell the truth. We can trust that the Holy Spirit is here. We must. For only by being truthful about how we got here can we begin to imagine another way.

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.

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. It doesn’t really matter. At the end of the day, Blackness is always the true offense.

If all you could see were the police officers, you would’ve thought these images were from another country, or that the police were staring down folks armed with rifles and bulletproof vests. But in the widened camera lenses, we saw that the standoff was with our parents, our aunts and uncles, our cousins and children. All of them dressed in shorts and T-shirts demanding that an officer be held accountable for the shooting of an unarmed teen.

The parallels to the photos from my history book could not be ignored.

am grateful for my ancestors’ struggle and their survival. But I am not impressed with America’s progress.

am not impressed that slavery was abolished or that Jim Crow ended. I feel no need to pat America on its back for these “achievements.” This is how it always should have been.

Because the extrajudicial killing of Black people is still too familiar. Because the racist rhetoric that Black people are lazier, more criminal, more undeserving than white people is still too familiar. Because the locking up of a disproportionate number of Black bodies is still too familiar. Because the beating of Black people in the streets is still too familiar.

What I knew was this: White people had been willing to bomb a Black church, right in the middle of Sunday school, and kill four Black girls. These weren’t just words in a history book. I was a teenager who loved being in church. What if I had been born in another day and time?

Until June 17, 2015, I had never been afraid of walking into a Black church.

For all their talk about being persecuted, white Christian Americans don’t know this kind of terror. Generations of Black Americans have known nothing but this kind of terror.

ought to be immune by now; I know too much about our racial history to be surprised. I’ve learned about slavery and lynchings, about white riots and bombings. It’s not fair that my knowledge doesn’t save me, that I can still be hurt. But I am human. I am human. And I am still alive.

Tone policing takes priority over listening to the pain inflicted on people of color. People of color are told they should be nicer, kinder, more gracious, less angry in their delivery, or that white people’s needs, feelings, and thoughts should be given equal weight. But we cannot negotiate our way to reconciliation.

But reconciliation is not about white feelings. It’s about diverting power and attention to the oppressed, toward the powerless. It’s not enough to dabble at diversity and inclusion while leaving the existing authority structure in place. Reconciliation demands more.

Fortunately, Jesus doesn’t need all white people to get onboard before justice and reconciliation can be achieved.

at no point in America’s history did all white people come together to correct racial injustice. At no point did all white people decide chattel slavery should end. At no point did all white people decide we should listen to the freedom fighters, end segregation, and enact the right of Black Americans to vote. At no point have all white people gotten together and agreed to the equitable treatment of Black people. And yet there has been change, over time, over generations, over history.

talking about race in America is not usually a hopeful experience if you’re Black. It brings no pleasure to speak of the hatred inflicted on our souls, the stories of discrimination and pain and injustices large and small that populate our lives. At the same time, we are barraged by society’s reinforcement that we are less than.