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

“Tiffani was my bridge to understanding that Black is beautiful whether it looked nerdy like me or cool like her. I could choose what felt right for me without needing to be like everyone, or needing everyone to be like me. Black is not monolithic. Black is expansive, and I didn’t need the approval of whiteness in order to feel good in my skin; there was no whiteness available to offer an opinion. It was freedom.” 

Until she meets Tiffani, Brown struggles to embrace her Black identity. At home in Toledo, she largely assimilates herself into the majority-White culture of her school and neighborhood. When she code-switches to better fit in during summers in Cleveland, it feels like a pose—one her Black friends see through. Tiffani teaches her that Blackness runs deeper than the way one speaks or behaves. Rather, Blackness involves asserting one’s identity and dignity as Black person, both inwardly and outwardly.

“The stereotype about sassy, disrespectful Black girls was not lost on me—but until then, I had thought it was just a convenient movie trope. I didn’t realize it could be used against me.” 

Given the illusory racial harmony at her high school, Brown never realized she was the target of stereotyping by her teachers. This changes when Ms. Phillips publicly admits how her seating charts reflect implicit racism in that they tend to separate Black girls whom the teacher fears will be disruptive. While Brown welcomes Ms. Phillips’ honesty, the admission causes Brown to feel enormously self-conscious. This plays into the theme that White people, even in their efforts to correct racial injustice, tend to center their own Whiteness over the feelings and needs of Black people.

“I was surprised by own reaction. It felt deeply gratifying to have my own experience named, lifted up, discussed, considered worthy of everyone’s attention. 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.” 

Here, Brown explores how White teachers and students often expect Black students like her to be spokespeople for their race whenever they discuss Black literature or history. The reading of Paul Laurence Dunbar’s “We Wear the Mask” is a profoundly intimate moment for Brown, and thus one she prefers to keep private. That White people often expect Brown to hold court on issues related to the Black experience reflects a sense of entitlement over Brown’s mind and emotions, which runs parallel to their sense of entitlement over her body, most dramatically illustrated by a tendency to touch her hair without her consent.

“I worked as if white folks were at the center, the great hope, the linchpin, the key to racial justice and reconciliation—and so I contorted myself to be the voice white folks could hear. It’s amazing how white supremacy even invades programs aimed at seeking racial reconciliation.” 

The pervasiveness of Whiteness across American society is a dominant theme in Brown’s book. Yet what most surprises Brown is the extent to which Whiteness even infects her own efforts to achieve racial justice. Once again, Brown must fight to maintain her Black dignity in the face of a White culture that would seek to bend it to its needs.

“Ain’t no friends here.” 

This refrain spoken by Dr. Simms emerges at frequent intervals in Brown’s life. It initially refers to instances in which White people who are presumed to be allies betray the cause of racial justice. Yet as the narrative progresses, it comes to refer to White America in general. While Brown is happy to welcome White people who are already transformed into her movement, she has no illusions that the uninitiated will be friends to Black America.

“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.” 

Brown comes to this conclusion upon joining a presumably progressive organization, only to find stringent limits placed on its own commitments to racial justice. These limits, Brown argues, are not the result of a lack of courage or resolve. Rather, they are the inevitable consequence of a White culture that seeks only to exploit Blackness to its own self-indulgent ends.

“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.” 

Once again, the tenets of White fragility prioritize White feelings over actual racism. White fragility twists the cultural conversation so that being labeled a racist—rightly or wrongly—is deemed as insulting and offensive as racist language itself. This is yet another way that Whiteness centers all conversations on race in America on itself.

“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.” 

According to Brown, one of the biggest obstacles to restorative justice and racial reconciliation is White fragility. White fragility works to suppress harsh but necessary truths by prioritizing White feelings over Black feelings and even Black lives. This value system thus dehumanizes Black people, reinforcing the very injustices that White fragility prevents them from raising.

“She was right. I was the only person of color in the bar that day. But I had also been the only person of color on the bus we drove up in, in the conference room we occupied for our work, on the boat we had just disembarked. And when we returned to our workplace, I would often be the only person of color in the room again.” 

This quote reflects the need for Brown’s coworker to delineate “good” Whiteness—herself and the rest of her coworkers—from the “bad” Whiteness of the all-White restaurant bar. This plays into Brown’s larger contention that even when expressing empathy or compassion toward Black people, White people tend to do so to affirm their own goodness. That the coworker never even considers that her own Whiteness could be problematic for Brown is a testament to her limited framing of racial issues.

“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. Coddle them.” 

This quote encapsulates the mistaken and destructive belief that only “mean” people are racist. By using overt and intentional cruelty as the bar for evaluating racist behavior, White people who meet this exceedingly low bar absolve themselves of racism. Even worse, it creates a situation in which niceness demands niceness in return, making it that much more difficult for Black people to address harsh racial truths in the company of White people without offending them. 

“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 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.”

This quote reflects a common thread in America’s cultural discourse in which White people will often ask questions of Black people in a presumably good-faith effort to learn more about systemic racism. Yet the problem with this “just asking questions” approach is that it tacitly assumes systemic racism is a debatable proposition. Moreover, it places the onus on the Black person to synthesize centuries of history and scholarship in way that is both persuasive and sensitive to the White person’s need to be comforted—a virtually impossible demand.

“We have painted the hundred-year history of Jim Crow as little more than mean signage and the inconvenience that white people and Black people could not drink from the same fountain. But 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.” 

Again, the nice-mean dichotomy of racism serves nobody well, nor does it paint an accurate historical portrait of race in America. Indeed, history textbooks on segregation tend to focus on blatantly discriminatory “Whites-Only” signs without acknowledging the threat of violence they symbolized. Moreover, by focusing on now-eradicated symbols of the Jim Crow era, White people can more easily congratulate themselves on how far America has come.

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

To Brown, the eradication of ahistorical myths is perhaps the most important step toward racial reconciliation. These myths include that the Civil War was only tangentially about slavery; that Jim Crow was more about inconvenient signs than state-sanctioned terror against Black bodies; and that America instantly purged itself of racism after hearing a speech by Dr. Martin Luther King. Standing in the way of dismantling these myths is White fragility, which makes it difficult for many White people to accept uncomfortable truths.

“In the mind of whiteness, half-baked efforts at diversity are enough, because the status quo is fine. It is better than slavery, better than Jim Crow. What more could Black people possibly ask than this—to not be overtly subject to the white will? ‘Is there more?’ white innocence asks before bursting into tears at the possibility that we would dare question its sincerity.” 

If more White people reckoned with the horrors and indignities of slavery and Jim Crow, they would more readily acknowledge that ‘better than slavery, better than Jim Crow’ is a low bar for human decency. The attitudes Brown identifies here also underscore how slavery and Jim Crow used to be the ‘status quo,’ meaning that prevailing anti-progressive attitudes on race are rooted in the same motives that perpetuated those old systems of oppression. Finally, these attitudes ignore the extent to which the era of mass incarceration is a form of racial social control not unlike slavery and Jim Crow.

“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.” 

As Brown’s spiritual and temporal journeys collide, she is forced to reckon with how little room there is for anger in the modern church. Compounding this difficulty are attitudes toward anger when it is expressed by Black people and Black women in particular. Moreover, the emphasis on niceness and forgiveness in the church plays into the same dynamic as the “nice white people” phenomenon. 

“Jesus throws folks out the building, and in so doing creates space for the most marginalized to come in: the poor, the wounded, the children. I imagine the next day’s newspapers called Jesus’s anger destructive.” 

Brown reconciles her anger and her Christianity by recalling Jesus’s Cleansing of the Temple incident in the gospels of the New Testament. Alongside Jesus’s kindness and compassion was a potent anger—not the vengeful anger of an Old Testament God but an anger that seeks to correct injustice. Despite many of her peers in the church viewing her anger as a character flaw, Brown sees it is as a function of her Christianity.

“I know they think Tommie and I do this because we are inseparable, or because he is demanding. For a moment my feminist card is revoked in their eyes. But these are our rituals for staying safe when we’re out in the world. This is how we beat back the fear.” 

This is a stark reflection of how some of the White people in Brown’s life are so far removed from the fear experienced by Black Americans that they jump to conclusions about her frequent calls with her husband. This also reflects a tendency Brown identifies among White people to view the rituals and history of Black people through their own experiences, without stopping to think how being Black affects one’s interactions with the police. This is also seen in the way White people think about the Jim Crow era, reducing that period of violence and oppression to a matter of inconvenience.

“The young man had just been released from prison. He’d learned about Christ while inside but wanted to make another commitment to God as he started his life again. The church roared in approval, and the man’s ten-year-old daughter raced down to the front and into his arms. It was so beautiful. And it pissed me off.” 

After Dalin’s death, Brown is forced to confront that her church doesn’t always make room for all Black people. Instead, it falls into a false dichotomy of “good” churchgoing Black men and “bad” criminals. Brown too feels herself fall into this dichotomy before finally rejecting it in favor of a Christianity that expresses equal compassion for regular church attendees and incarcerated nonbelievers alike.

“Even as I write these words, I am bracing myself for the reaction of those who will not care, those who will tell me that Dalin’s death is his own fault. They will spit out the words drug dealer, just as they spit out the word criminal. […] But the one word that will go unspoken is the word black. Underneath all the other hurtful words, this is the one that whiteness really wants to spew.” 

This quote reflects how the post-Civil Rights Movement lexicon of race uses presumably race-neutral words to express racism. After the end of Jim Crow, America entered an era of putative colorblindness. Yet this illusion of racial harmony didn’t eradicate racism, and therefore the new vocabulary of racism relied on terms like “criminal,” “thug,” and “welfare queen” to demonize and dehumanize Black people without the use of racist slurs or even overtly racial language.

“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. But as I stared at my screen in horror and sadness, watching Black residents being treated like enemies of the state, it seemed to me that racism hadn’t evolved at all. Instead of confronting Black residents on horseback with nightsticks, police now showed up in tanks with automatic rifles strapped to their back.” 

This notion that racism neither went away nor even evolved is one of Brown’s more dispirited conclusions. Yet it is inescapable for her as she watches a scene play out in Ferguson on television that resembles the displays of racist police brutality common to the 1960s. Perhaps the only way racism evolved with respect to police brutality is that the police now have weapons of war like tanks at their disposal.

“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.” 

It would be easy for Brown to become jaded and cynical in the wake of so much violence against Black men and women, past and present alike. Yet as a human being, she will never be immune from the hurt of extrajudicial killings of Black Americans at the hands of police, or White supremacist attacks on Black churches like Mother Emanuel in Charleston. In short, that which does not surprise Brown nevertheless hurts her immensely.

“This is why white American churches remain so far from experiencing anything resembling reconciliation. The white Church considers power its birthright rather than its curse.” 

According to Brown, reconciliation requires an inversion of power. This is, after all, the essence of justice. Yet like many American organizations, if given the choice between retaining power or ceding it, the church will inevitably choose the latter. Thus, it is satisfied by shallow diversity initiatives and “starting dialogues” that pose no real opportunity for reconciliation, and thus no threat to its power.

“Rather than making white people’s reactions the linchpin that holds racial justice together, I am free to link arms with those who are already being transformed. Because at no point in America’s history did all white people come together to correct racial injustice.” 

Again, Brown works hard to de-prioritize Whiteness in her racial justice efforts, something she struggled with in college. This makes sense given her belief that Whiteness usually only gestures toward Blackness to the degree that it affirms the goodness of Whites. That said, she acknowledges there are White allies in her midst who operate without placing their own Whiteness above the cause.