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 4-6Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 4 Summary: “Ain’t No Friends Here”
After graduating high school, Brown attends North Park University, a private Christian college in Chicago, Illinois. Her freshman year, she and her classmates embark on Sankofa, a three-day bus tour of the American South that pairs Black and White students. On the first stop, the students tour a Louisiana plantation led by guides who downplay the brutalities of slavery and romanticize plantation life. Afterwards, when the Black students express their anger at the guides’ historical revisionism, the White students respond defensively. They cite the Holocaust and the Irish potato famine as tragedies suffered by White people, effectively minimizing the atrocities of slavery.
Next, the students visit a museum devoted entirely to the history of lynching. Genuinely shaken by the images of White families celebrating amid burnt and mutilated Black bodies, the White students nevertheless react even more defensively, as if to distance themselves from these unforgivable crimes. In a break from the social conventions of respectability politics, one Black student says, “I think I’ve just been convinced that white people are innately evil. You can’t help it. You steal and kill, you enslave and lynch. You are just evil” (57). The words that most impact Brown, however, come from a White student, who says, “Doing nothing is no longer an option for me” (58).
After Sankofa, Brown commits herself to fighting for racial justice. In a reflection of how Whiteness and White supremacy can infect attempts at racial reconciliation, she admits that these early efforts centered too much on White people and their needs. As Brown feels her Blackness slip away, she is pulled back from the brink by a Black professor named Dr. Simms. Through his class, Brown experiences a paradigm shift in her views on racial bias in film, literature, and history books. Most importantly, Dr. Simms gives her a piece of advice she carries with her to this day whenever White people she believed to be allies disappoint her: “Ain’t no friends here” (63).
Chapter 5 Summary: “Whiteness at Work”
When Brown enters the workforce after college, she considers herself the “white culture whisperer” (67), fearlessly shutting down racism wherever she encounters it. Yet she is unprepared for the unique challenges presented by racism in a professional setting. To illustrate these challenges, Brown outlines a “normal” day at the office for people who look like her.
As soon as she enters the building, a security guard asks if she needs help finding the company’s outreach center, as if to assume she is a needy woman off the street. Once in the office, a coworker tries to touch her hair without her consent, expressing a sense of both exoticism and entitlement toward her body. Sensing Brown’s natural aversion to this invasion of space, the coworker informs a supervisor who later seeks to mediate the situation. Yet the supervisor invariably interprets Brown’s feelings of hurt and misunderstanding as hostility. At lunch, Brown—at the risk of alienating her White coworkers—commiserates with Black employees from other offices in the building. Later, a White coworker inevitably steers a conservation about Brown’s upcoming presentation toward supposedly “Black” topics of conversation, like hip-hop. Finally, during the presentation itself, Brown’s ideas go unheard until a White person rephrases them with the introductory phrase, “I think what Austin’s trying to say is...” (75). To Brown, the message is clear: Her ideas require White permission before they can be considered worthwhile.
To protect herself against these projections of Whiteness—subtle and unsubtle alike—Brown relies on a series of life-hacks. She keeps an email folder containing every word of praise directed at her work—not because her self-esteem is fragile but because she may need to produce these emails should a coworker unfairly criticize her performance. She maintains relationships with other professional Black women who will listen to her grievances and understand them without further explanation. Brown also belongs to private Facebook groups where Black professionals share coping strategies for microaggressions.
Interlude Summary: “Why I Love Being a Black Girl”
Given the extent to which White spaces threaten to minimize her sense of self, Brown reminds herself daily that she loves being a Black woman. Black women are creators, pioneers, and survivors, comprising the backbone of churches and protest movements. Certain in the belief of their own dignity, Black women demand access and representation.
Chapter 6 Summary: “White Fragility”
As a Black woman and an authority figure in the predominantly White world of Christian nonprofits, Brown continually faces down White resentment and fragility. For example, after leading a seminar on race and faith, a White man stands up and yells, “Trayvon Martin is not a victim” (86). As the confrontation grows more heated, it is clear to Brown that the man’s true grievance is not the substance of her arguments but her status as a Black woman in charge. She views this attitude as one of the most dangerous expressions of white fragility, in that it “ignores the personhood of people of color and instead makes the feelings of whiteness the most important thing” (89), Brown writes. This focus on Whiteness is also evident in a staff meeting the following day, when her coworkers begin the conversation by wondering how Brown could have behaved differently to calm the man down.
White fragility emerges again when Brown works for a mission in Chicago that invites students and youth pastors to learn about the work done by God in Black neighborhoods. One day, a group of students and their parents refuse to get off the bus, clearly afraid to step foot in a neighborhood they perceive to be prohibitively dangerous. After coaxing the nervous students and parents off the bus, a youth pastor asks to speak with “Austin,” assuming the director is a White man. Upon learning that the director is a Black woman, the parents proceed to question her authority and ask who is “really” in charge: “The message behind their questions was clear: My neighborhood was untrustworthy, and so was my Black female body” (93). Later, a White man confesses to calling the police the moment they arrived at the mission, outraged that no “welcoming committee” escorted him from the bus to the building, a walk of only 15 feet.
Fortunately, not every group leaves the mission with the same close-minded attitudes they brought with them. Brown recalls one young student acknowledge her own racism when, upon seeing some young Black men on the street that she met previously at a group home that weekend, she realizes that under different circumstances she would have assumed they were gang members, due to their skin color, clothes, and tattoos.
Chapters 4-6 Analysis
Once in college, Brown observes the ahistorical beliefs and assumptions to which she most attributes America’s refusal to reckon with its racist past. Her White classmates readily accept the plantation tour guides’ romanticized view of slavery. This is not wholly surprising given that such views continue to pervade parts of mainstream society. For example, in 2011, Republican presidential hopefuls Michele Bachmann and Rick Santorum signed a statement that read, “[S]adly a child born into slavery in 1860 was more likely to be raised by his mother and father in a two-parent household than was an African-American baby born after the election of the USA’s first African-American President” (Haberman, Maggie. “Marriage pledge language retracted.” Politico. 9 Jul. 2011. https://www.politico.com/story/2011/07/marriage-pledge-language-retracted-058631.)
When slavery isn’t romanticized, it is often downplayed, particularly in Southern school curricula concerning the causes of the Civil War. While the historical record clearly indicates the centrality of preserving slavery to the South’s decision to secede from the Union, it wasn’t until 2018 that Texas upgraded slavery as the primary cause of the Civil War in its textbooks. (Daley, Jason. “Texas Will Finally Teach That Slavery Was Main Cause of the Civil War.” Smithsonian Magazine. 19 Nov. 2018. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/texas-will-finally-teach-slavery-was-main-cause-civil-war-180970851/.) Thus, it is likely that many of the White students on Brown’s Sankofa tour were taught an ahistorical narrative deemphasizing the role White supremacy played during arguably the most pivotal moment in American history.
Even worse than the White students’ poor understanding of history is their defensive reaction to attempts to correct this lack of education. For example, the White students invoke the Holocaust, presumably to point out that Whites too were victims of historical atrocities. This is a flawed comparison for numerous reasons, not least of which the fact that the Nazis’ doctrine of race did not consider Jews to be White; it considered them members of the Levantine or “Semitic” race. Moreover, the Holocaust comparison is particularly ironic, given that Germany is famous for having reckoned with the Holocaust in a way Americans never have with respect to slavery. According to the American moral philosopher Susan Neiman, in the 1960s, amid the televised Eichmann and Auschwitz trials, West German youths demanded an honest national reckoning with the country’s Nazi past, one which outpaces anything she observes in America. Thus, invoking the Holocaust says little about “comparative evil” and everything about “comparative redemption”—and on that front, America’s response is woefully insufficient. (Lipstadt, Deborah. “Slavery and the Holocaust: How Americans and Germans Cope With Past Evils.” The New York Times. 27 Aug. 2019. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/27/books/review/learning-from-the-germans-susan-neiman.html/.)
The White students’ defensiveness is a reflection of what Brown and others call “White fragility.” Popularized by the American academic Robin DiAngelo, the term refers to the defensive instincts of White people when confronted with issues of race. As Brown points out, it is rooted in the same pervasive cultural forces she mentioned earlier that prioritize White feelings over Black struggles. She writes, “If Black people are dying in the street, we must consult with white feelings before naming the evils of police brutality. If white family members are being racist, we must take Grandpa’s feelings into account” (89).
Particularly in the wake of the George Floyd murder in 2020, there’s been a surge of interest and debate pertaining to White fragility theory. Given the rather sudden emergence of this theory in the mainstream cultural conversation on race, it is important not to conflate Brown’s examination of White fragility—which is rooted primarily in personal experience—to DiAngelo’s, which details White fragility chiefly from a diagnostic standpoint. Brown’s frequent encounters in college and at work with White fragility prove that it is a phenomenon worth taking seriously if America is to reckon honestly with systemic and individual racism. Indeed, the fear of offending fragile White sensibilities facilitated the emergence of respectability politics, a strategy used by some members of marginalized groups that emulates rather than challenges the perceived value system of a dominant group. Brown rejects respectability politics, most explicitly when she celebrates the Black student who speaks directly and disarmingly of the White students’ complicity in systemic racism: “She had done what social convention and respectability politics said not to do—she had spoken the truth even if it meant hurting the feelings of every white person on that bus” (57).
The rejection of respectability politics and acknowledgement of White fragility also speaks to one of the book’s dominant refrains: “Ain’t no friends here.” Spoken by Dr. Simms, the phrase recognizes that White people who present themselves as allies to the cause of racial justice and reconciliation cannot always be relied on to follow through on their promises. This is not to say that White allies committed to true restorative justice cannot and do not exist. Yet it speaks to Brown’s broader warning against centering the pursuit of justice on Whiteness or hoping that White people will make any kind of significant sacrifices in support of her cause.
Finally, Brown enters arguably the most challenging stage of her journey as a Black woman: the workplace. Here, the narrative reads as both a memoir and a handbook, providing useful life-hacks for Black people—and particularly Black women—to help them survive in predominantly White workspaces. Meanwhile, her experiences leading missions and seminars reflect an inversion of her parents’ hope that people will expect her to be a White man. Both the White man at the faith seminar and the parents at the Chicago youth retreat are disarmed by the revelation that “the director Austin” is a Black woman. Yet rather than take the opportunity to acknowledge their assumptions, these individuals refuse to cede an inch of authority to Brown, because to do so would be to call into question deeper-seated biases around race and gender.
