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

by Austin Channing Brown

She didn’t know a name like Austin could be stretched wide enough to cloak a little Black girl.

instead of offering empathy and action, whiteness finds new names for me and offers ominous advice.

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 always be hypervisible because of your skin—easily identified as being present or absent—but for your needs to be completely invisible to those around you.

The ideology that whiteness is supreme, better, best, permeates the air we breathe—in our schools, in our offices, and in our country’s common life.

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 about surviving in a world not made for me—where my parents tried to arm me with the cultural cash of a white, male name.

I had no idea what I was supposed to be afraid of. The only thing I feared was being discovered.

Heartbreak and struggle weren’t the end of our story.

Slowly, over time and in layers, Blackness had found me. It found me and it changed my life.

harmony—the absence of outright conflict—often leaves deeper complications untouched.

And yet, I had no desire to be the Black spokesperson. It felt too risky.

I wasn’t sure that my classmates had earned the right to know, to understand, to be given access to such a vulnerable place in my experience. For me, this was more than an educational exercise. This is how we survive.

“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.”

It’s amazing how white supremacy even invades programs aimed at seeking racial reconciliation.

Dr. Simms wanted us to be suspicious of the language of America.

white supremacy is more like a poison. It seeps into your mind, drip by drip, until it makes you wonder if your perception of reality is true.

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

White institutions are constantly communicating how much Blackness they want. It begins with numbers.

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

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.

The ultimate expectation is that I will come to realize that white ways of thinking, behaving, communicating, and understanding the world are to be valued above all else.

We are not tokens. We are valuable in the fullness of our humanity. We are not perfect, but we are here, able to contribute something special, beautiful, lasting to the companies and ministries to which we belong.

I love being a Black woman because we are demanding. We demand the right to live as fully human.

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.

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

there are other times when white fragility is so self-obsessed, so over the top that the damage it inflicts on marginalized people becomes immediately apparent.

The message behind their questions was clear: My neighborhood was untrustworthy, and so was my Black female body.

It was a painful week, but it taught me that I cannot control expressions of white fragility. Each group was responsible for their own reaction. One indulged their fragility, the other resisted it.

white people who believe they are safe often prove dangerous when that identity is challenged.

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.

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.

The monster has always been well dressed and well loved.

They want to believe their proximity to people of color makes them immune.

white guilt is like having tar dry all over your hands and heart. It takes so much work to peel off the layers, rub away the stickiness, get rid of the smell.

But just as I cannot make myself responsible for the transformation of white people, neither can I offer relief for their souls.

We have not confronted the humanity, the emotions, the heartbeats of the multiple generations who were born into slavery and died in it, who never tasted freedom on America’s land.

those signs weren’t just “mean.” They were perpetual reminders of the swift humiliation and brutal violence that could be suffered at any moment in the presence of whiteness.

We don’t want to acknowledge that just as Black people who experienced Jim Crow are still alive, so are the white people who vehemently protected it—who drew red lines around Black neighborhoods and divested them of support given to average white citizens.

whiteness was not prepared to sober up from the drunkenness of power over another people group. Whiteness was not ready to give up the ability to control, humiliate, or do violence to any Black body in the vicinity—all without consequence.

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

It is haunting work to recall the sins of our past.

Diversity gets treated like a passing trend, a friendly group project in which everyone takes on equal risks and rewards.

It’s hard to be calm in a world made for whiteness.

Even more frustrating, there are so few acceptable occasions for my rage to be expressed. Because I am a Black person, my anger is considered dangerous, explosive, and unwarranted. Because I am a woman, my anger supposedly reveals an emotional problem or gets dismissed as a temporary state that will go away once I choose to be rational. Because I am a Christian, my anger is dismissed as a character flaw, showing just how far I have turned from Jesus. Real Christians are nice, kind, forgiving—and anger is none of those things.

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

Anger is not inherently destructive.

We fear the overreactions of white people who clutch their purses in elevators and lock their doors when we walk by.

We fear that appearing guilty means incurring the repercussions of being guilty.