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.

Jesus may be cool with racial diversity, America is not.

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.

Conversations like this were normal with this crew, but my white school was different. There, we weren’t supposed to question history. We were expected to learn the names of Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King Jr., thank God that we could all share an integrated classroom now, and move on to another lesson with hearts of gratitude.

I fell in love with a Jesus who saw the poor and sick and hurting, a Jesus who had bigger plans for me than keeping me a virgin, a Jesus who loved and reveled in our Blackness.

Knowing it was true for white people, and having gotten used to white teachers’ assumption of universality, we would all nod our heads and move on. Who had time to teach the teacher?

“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.”

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.

When I begin to doubt myself, I remember that we are creators. We are pioneers of language itself. We invent new words and kill old ones.

Black women are the backbone and muscle of every church I’ve attended. They are prophets speaking a word when it seems God is silent. They are hospitality, welcoming with food and kindness, with a seat at the table, with a place you can call home.

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.

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.

Sadly, most white people are more worried about being called racist than about whether or not their actions are in fact racist or harmful.

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.

How long will it be before we finally choose to connect all the dots? How long before we confess the history of racism embedded in our systems of housing, education, health, criminal justice, and more? How long before we dig to the root? Because it is the truth that will set us free.

We live as if the ghosts of the past will snatch us if we walk through the valley of the shadow of death. So instead we walk around the valley, talk around the valley.

Our only chance at dismantling racial injustice is being more curious about its origins than we are worried about our comfort.

But I also feel something when we are dying in the streets. When we are derided for our bodies even as white women try to imitate them. When feminism is limited to the needs of whiteness, or when Blackness is used for profit without acknowledging the brilliance of the creators.

She writes that anger is not a shortcoming to be denied, but a creative force that tells us when something is wrong.

Whiteness has never needed much of an excuse for our deaths.

All those years ago, I learned in church that Jesus understood the poor. Because of Dalin, I realized that Jesus also understood the accused, the incarcerated, the criminals. Jesus was accused. Jesus was incarcerated. Jesus hung on a cross with his crime listed above his crown of thorns.

By the time the era called Black Lives Matter began, I was already familiar with the theory that racism never went away; it just evolved.

I 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.

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.

The white Church considers power its birthright rather than its curse. And so, rather than seeking reconciliation, they stage moments of racial harmony that don’t challenge the status quo.

In too many churches and organizations, listening to the hurt and pain of people of color is the end of the road, rather than the beginning.

White people need to listen, to pause so that people of color can clearly articulate both the disappointment they’ve endured and what it would take for reparations to be made.

Reconciliation is what Jesus does. When sin and brokenness and evil tore us from God, it was Jesus who reconciled us, whose body imagined a different relationship, who took upon himself the cross and became peace.

The persistence of racism in America—individual and societal—is altogether overwhelming. It doesn’t lay the best fertilizer for hope to grow.