43 pages • 1 hour read
Austin Channing BrownI'm Still Here: Black Dignity in a World Made for Whiteness
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2018A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 7-10Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 7 Summary: “Nice White People”
At a work retreat, as Brown and her coworkers eat lunch at a restaurant bar where all of the other patrons are White, one coworker asks her, “Are you doing okay?” (99). Although Brown knows that the coworker means well, the circumstances of this show of concern are baffling:
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 (100).
Rather than tell the coworker this, Brown bites her tongue. To do otherwise would be to blur the lines between the “bad” whiteness of the restaurant and the “good” whiteness of the coworker; it would, in short, endanger the coworker’s conception of herself as a “good white person” (100).
Although the coworker’s intentions were good, Brown writes that “niceness” is too often cited to prove the absence of racism. Racism becomes the domain of outwardly cruel bigots, thus absolving all other White people of racism. Even worse, these assumptions cause all racial tensions between a Black person and a “nice” White person to be attributed to the Black person.
According to Brown, that most people who believe in “white innocence” (105) lack meaningful knowledge of the history of race in America doesn’t stop them from turning discussions on race into debates. When Black people refuse to participate in such debates, White people often use these refusals to justify the rightness of their position. In truth, Brown writes, most Black people simply lack the energy to engage in such exhausting conversations, especially with individuals who lack a strong knowledge base on these issues.
Brown also explores the concept of White guilt, which she characterizes as “white fragility’s cousin” (106). While she previously interpreted white guilt as a sign of nascent racial enlightenment, Brown now considers expressions of guilt over past racist sins as largely self-indulgent and more to the benefit of the White sinner than the Black person asked to grant absolution. She adds, “I am not a priest for the white soul” (109).
Chapter 8 Summary: “The Story We Tell”
Brown recalls a diversity training seminar during which a White woman trembled at the revelation—new to her—that “slavery happened on purpose” (112). To Brown, this speaks to the enormous power of the myths and false narratives that make up most White Americans understanding of U.S. history. From slavery to Jim Crow to the era of mass incarceration, a startling number of Americans have never honestly reckoned with the extent to which White supremacy lay at the heart of these institutions. Brown is adamant that Americans must banish their comfortable myths, like that Jim Crow was solely about the inconveniences of segregation, or that Dr. Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech instantly won over millions of racist Americans: “Our only chance at dismantling racial injustice is being more curious about its origins than we are worried about our comfort” (117). Brown also frames this truth-telling as a holy act, situating it in her own Christian religious traditions.
Chapter 9 Summary: “Creative Anger”
Here, Brown quotes the essayist James Baldwin who writes that to be an African American is “to be in a rage almost all the time” (119). She echoes this rage, expressing anger over the ways her body and the bodies of other Black women are constantly judged by friends, coworkers, strangers, and the media. Even more infuriating are the deaths of Black men and women, whether at the hands of the police or open white supremacists.
Yet the way others receive her anger is complicated by her skin color, gender, and religion. As a Black person, her anger is viewed as “dangerous, explosive, and unwarranted” (122). As a Christian, her anger is viewed as a flaw in her character and a betrayal of Jesus’s teachings—never mind that Jesus was quite angry when he cast the merchants and moneylenders out of the Temple in the New Testament gospels. Brown also struggles to reconcile her rage with her innate personality, which she characterizes on multiple occasions as “mild-mannered” (124).
After years spent trying to express her pain through other emotions like sadness or disappointment, Brown learns that anger need not be destructive; rather, it can be a creative force used to build a more just world.
Interlude Summary: “How to Survive Racism in an Organization That Claims to Be Antiracist”
Here, Brown lists 10 strategies for driving cultural change in workplaces that purport to be racially progressive. These strategies including building an antiracist cohort, finding and maintaining outside donors, practicing self-care, and accepting that “it is not your responsibility to transform an entire organization” (130).
Chapter 10 Summary: “The Ritual of Fear”
While the deaths of Trayvon Martin, Eric Garner, Michael Brown and many others helped launch the Black Lives Matter racial justice movement, Brown points to a different and more personal moment that forced her to ask herself: “Do all Black lives matter?” (131).
Brown introduces Dalin, her vibrant and hilarious first cousin who is eight years her senior. She recalls one evening when her grandmother talked Dalin out of hunting down a man who stole his brand-new sneakers, remembering it as “the moment when I understood the rules governing my cousin’s life were different than those governing mine” (134).
The fear she saw in Dalin’s face—the fear that urged him to take matters into his own hands rather than call the police—is the same fear she feels when her father drives through rural Ohio; the same fear that the police will mistake her brother or her husband for someone wanted for a crime. Her friends smirk at the constant phone calls she makes to her husband when she is out, believing this to be a sign of their enormous affection or perhaps his need for control. Brown never tells them she makes the calls so they can confirm with one another that they are still safe, one of many rituals they practice to cope with fear.
Chapters 7-10 Analysis
In Chapter 6, Brown detailed her interactions with openly hostile White people, like the man at the faith seminar or the scared parents at the youth retreat. In subsequent chapters, however, Brown turns her focus to more insidious expressions of Whiteness: the so-called “nice white people.” There are many levels on which “niceness” operates to perpetuate systemic racism. Foundationally, the cult of racial niceties is built on an extremely narrow view of what constitutes racism. For example, members of the Ku Klux Klan are racist. “Whites-Only” signs are racist. White people who use vicious racial slurs are racist—though even that is conditional and based on context, according to this view. In short, only the most brazen and overt expressions of racism are, in the mind of Brown’s “nice white person,” in fact racist. This leaves an entire spectrum of racist words and behavior open to be dismissed as non-racist.
Again, Brown attributes these attitudes to a poor understanding of America’s racist history. Yet she is at a loss as to how to fix this. On one level, niceness expects niceness in return, thus creating a self-reinforcing system of delusion: “The problem with this framework […] 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” (101). Thus, harsh yet necessary historical truths are dismissed as “meanness.” Once again, Brown reasserts the theme that Blackness is expected to affirm the goodness of whiteness, not question it.
Yet even if every White person was open to hearing difficult truths, the gap in knowledge is often so wide that it is too much to expect Black people to bridge it for them. For example, Brown describes one White woman in a diversity session who didn’t realize slavery was “on purpose” (112). Many others collapse their understanding of Jim Crow-era oppression into extremely narrow terms. They think of “Whites only” signs by filtering them through their own experiences, deeming them unacceptably “mean” inconveniences without recognizing that these signs were symbols of the “swift humiliation and brutal violence that could be suffered at any moment in the presence of whiteness” (114).
Another myth Brown identifies is the notion that Martin Luther King’s soaring oratory convinced White America overnight to abandon racism. According to Smithsonian Magazine, King’s public disapproval rating in the U.S. reached as high as 75% in 1968, the year of his death. (Cobb, James C. “Even Though He Is Revered Today, MLK Was Widely Disliked by the American Public When He Was Killed.” Smithsonian Magazine. 4 Apr. 2018. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/why-martin-luther-king-had-75-percent-disapproval-rating-year-he-died-180968664/.) In that same article, journalist James C. Cobb points out that King’s 90% approval rating in the 21st century is largely the result of a selective collective memory of the activist’s messages and opinions. Cobb writes, “[I]t is far more comforting to focus on Dr. King’s success in making a bad part of the country better than to contemplate his equally telling failures to push the whole of America to become what he knew it should be.”
Given the pervasive nature of American mythmaking, educating White America—one nice White person at a time—is not a workable solution. Not only that, the difficulty of this task only reinforces the cult of nice White innocence even further. Brown writes:
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 (105).
Making matters worse, the emotional bandwidth of many Black people is already consumed by the very injustices White people seek to deny. Writing in The Boston Globe, Miranda Dias states that when White people ask her to help educate them on racism she feels “so tired. Tired of seeing people who look like me get murdered. Tired of having to help white people understand it. I don’t have the mental or emotional capacity to do that.” (Dias, Miranda. “I want white people to take the time to educate themselves.” The Boston Globe. 13 Jun. 2020. https://www.bostonglobe.com/2020/06/13/opinion/i-want-white-people-take-time-educate-themselves/.)
Finally, Brown’s spiritual journey as a Christian begins to collide here with her temporal journey as a Black woman. In some ways, the two journeys’ values are in alignment; for example, she likens the much-needed corrections to the historical record on race to a holy act of truth-telling. Brown struggles to reconcile her anger at racial injustice with the Church’s focus on compassion, charity, and forgiveness—qualities which, framed in the lexicon of Whiteness, often constitute little more than empty “niceness.” Nevertheless, she is careful to point out that alongside Jesus’s core message of love and compassion sits a righteous anger—not the punitive anger of an Old Testament God but an anger directed at corruption and injustice. She highlights the hypocrisy of Christians who would reject anger in all forms by writing of Jesus’s casting out the moneylenders from the Temple, adding drolly, “I imagine the next day’s newspapers called Jesus’s anger destructive” (127).
