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

Although the book covers a wide range of topics related to the Black experience, Brown sums up her central goal by writing, “This book is my story about growing up in a Black girl’s body” (21). The narrative begins from this personal perspective and expands outward, capturing how history, the media, and a society predicated on Whiteness all conspire to make the personal political for Black Americans. At numerous moments in her life, a television report on police brutality or a black-and-white photo of a lynching victim causes Brown to feel “the distance between history and myself collapsing” (58), a common motif across the book.

Brown frames her attempts to navigate a world, in which the perceptions of her identity are subject to cultural forces beyond her control, as a struggle to keep hold of her Blackness. By extension, this means maintaining dignity in White spaces where she is expected to be precisely “Black enough” but not “too Black” for the expectations of Whiteness, an impossible and unfair ask. For Brown, this is most challenging in the workplace, where coworkers use coded language to describe her as “surprisingly articulate” (18) before interrogating her about the issues they believe—usually incorrectly—are most important to the Black community, like single moms and “black-on-black crime.” This state of affairs plays into one of Brown’s most important themes: that Blackness is acceptable only when it serves the needs and expectations of Whiteness.

Before Brown can successfully maintain dignity in Blackness, however, she must learn what Blackness means to her. In this, her childhood friend Tiffani proves essential. Brown writes:

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 (34).

For Brown, the crucial lesson here is that Blackness need not be defined by its relationship to Whiteness, despite Whiteness’s best attempts to define it as such. Over the course of her life—in college, at work, in social gatherings—Brown must repeatedly remind herself of this, as each new environment brings with it new threats to her conception of her own Black identity.

This resistance to the idea of “Whiteness as the norm” is consistent with a growing body of scholarship in the field of sociology in the 21st century. While historians and sociologists have long explored the idea of Blackness as a social construct—one that arguably took shape in 17th century America in response to the growing threat of cross-racial labor rebellions—the idea of Whiteness as a social construct has grown in prominence in recent years. According to historian Nell Irvin Painter, in the 1940s, anthropologists collapsed Saxons, Celts, Italians, and other European peoples into one race: White. There was a strategic element to framing Whiteness so broadly, Painter writes: “The useful part of white identity’s vagueness is that whites don’t have to shoulder the burden of race in America.” (Painter, Nell Irvin. “What is Whiteness?” The New York Times. 21 Jun. 2015). Yet by constructing Whiteness as a neutral race, it casts White culture as “blandly uninteresting” in Painter’s words, thus normalizing it. In turn, Whiteness came to define Blackness by what it isn’t—White—rather than what it is. Particularly given that much of Brown’s upbringing takes place in a majority-White environment, fighting against this exclusionary definition is an enormous challenge for Brown.

A huge part of how Brown defines Blackness independent of Whiteness is through the Church. These early chapters mark the beginning of Brown’s spiritual journey as a Black Christian, one that runs parallel to her temporal journey through White spaces. She briefly mentions James Cone, a theologian who argued that Jesus’s teachings best manifest themselves in America as resistance to White supremacy. Yet although Brown maintains her faith in the Church as a powerful source of community and an outlet for asserting one’s Blackness, she comes to view the Church in its current form—even the Black Church—as insufficient for achieving racial justice and reconciliation in America.

Another major theme Brown introduces here concerns how the illusion of racial harmony obscures and even exacerbates deep-seated structural and personal racism. At this point in the narrative, Brown’s world is largely limited to her neighborhood and her high school, and thus it won’t be until college that she acknowledges the systemic biases that manifest in virtually every corner of society. The anecdote concerning Ms. Phillips reveals that even well-intentioned efforts to preserve this racial harmony by acknowledging one’s biases often come at the expense of Black dignity. By overlooking the effect her public admission of racism will have on Black students like Brown, Ms. Phillips prioritizes her own White feelings, a phenomenon that repeatedly emerges in expressions of White guilt. This is a reflection of another theme Brown revisits later in the book: that “Whiteness wants enough Blackness to affirm the goodness of whiteness” (80)—but not so much that it places Black feelings on an equal or higher plane as White feelings.

Finally, it is instructive to consider the book’s title. Though Brown never explicitly explains the title, multiple meanings may be inferred from it. The most obvious is to interpret the title as an assertion of Brown’s Black identity amid attempts to marginalize it or subjugate it to Whiteness. Yet another possible meaning, which becomes clearer as the narrative moves forward, is that for all the supposed racial progress made over the past 150 years, Brown and the millions of other Black Americans are still “here.” By “here,” she means in a place where they are still subject to the same prejudices, assumptions, and sometimes violence that leave an indelible mark on the Black experience in America.