Austin Channing Brown not only has an
interesting name, which she deconstructs in the book, but she also has
compelling perspectives and stories. Several friends had spoken enthusiastically
about the book, primarily women friends on Facebook, so it was with some
trepidation that I engaged the book, a book written by a woman, a Black woman.
Then, later, another good friend reminded me that I had read other books at her
recommendation, one by Toni Morrison and others by Maya Angelou. That said, the
book was a challenging read, and one that I could only put down because there
was so much to absorb and ponder, and, besides, it was time to go to sleep.
So, what did Ms. Brown teach me, and how
did she engage this 70-year-old reader?
In some ways, she helped me put into words
some of my emotions and beliefs about justice and advocacy. She as a Black
woman insisted that I sit in a chair in the back and listen and listen intently
to what she as a woman of color can teach me, a white person, a man, an elderly
man, a white elderly man, and a white elderly man who is a professed Christian,
can learn from her.
People like me, white people, are in her
words, “exhausting.” We ask ridiculous questions, make insulting accusations
and insinuations, and gather comfort from our whiteness which excludes people
like her. I am a white man and I have probably been exhausting through the
years to my Black friends. For that, I apologize.
People growing up as Black in Black
families carry extra burdens. Living while Black in white cities or
neighborhoods, or walking while Black in their own neighborhood, or having to
have the talk, “what to do when someone someday calls you a n****r.” Or, how to
conduct yourself in public spaces such as always walk out with your purchases
in a bag, never open them up in the store, and always carry the receipt because
you may be accused of stealing the items you bought. I have worked in retail
businesses before, and if I treated a person of color with suspicion, and I
probably did, I apologize.
People experience growing up differently.
For Ms. Brown, she comments about her education and neighborhoods and all, and
going back home to relatives’ homes during the holidays. She said at one point
in the book that she was too Black for her white friends and too white for her
Black friends. Speaking as a young woman who was maturing into adulthood, that
must have been difficult to negotiate those paths. This spoke to me as a white
male living in this world.
Her Black church gave her a sense of
identity and aliveness that other white churches could not. Worship
experiences, rituals, the preaching, the singing, the energy, and all,
captivated her and gave her meaning and purpose, as I understand her. As a
white, older male, I resonate with her, not in terms of identity, but in terms
of the beauty of Black worship experiences. My wife and I have been to numerous
through the years, and I am typically moved to tears by what I hear and feel
and experience as a worshipper in Black churches where we are the only white
faces in the crowd.
Her educational experiences were
provocative. The white teacher who apologized to her and her classmates for
seating charts that would keep the Black kids separated. The awful challenges
at times of feeling compelled to speak for the entire Black race. Then there was
Mr. Slavinski and the “Why We Wear the Mask” and her emotional reactions to
this realization. She articulated this as a woman, and I recall men telling me
through the years how they have to switch from talking the way they talk to
talking the way they need to talk around white people so as to protect
themselves and to not make the white people feel uncomfortable.
In college, the empowerment that she felt
with Ms. McMath, her first Black teacher, was profound. Then, the Sankofa
experience of traveling through the South, teamed up with another college
student and her experiences and those of the white students. Then tension in
Louisiana and the power of speakers and leaders. The nine words of one white
student, “Doing nothing is no longer an option for me.” This was after brutal
and emotional learning experiences. Ms. Brown’s history and her life collided.
There was no longer distance. She says, “I did start showing up.” White people
sanitize if we even address slavery and plantation life. We do not listen well
to the historical narratives or to the lived experiences of people of color. We
don’t show up in spaces and places that are important for them. I hear Ms.
Brown as she grows in her sense of self with her history and her own lived
experiences. I would love to talk face to face with her.
She critiques the misconception that she
was made for white people. She realized that white people are centered in
social justice efforts and all. She says, “And so I contorted myself to be the
voice white folks can hear.” Then she met Dr. Simms who believed in the “power
of Black history and Black culture. He believed it could change our lives.”
Among other things, he made her aware of racial bias as they learned in class,
analyzed news stories, and movies. Living in a racialized society within
America, she heard him say, “Ain’t no friends here.” That apparently had a
profound effect upon her.
Dr. Simms, Professor McMath, and a few
others helped her to understand her Black self in white spaces, how to speak
her voice and opinions, how to respond to racist white people, and how to find
meaning and comfort in Black history and Black community.
Her stories of being a Black woman in
white work spaces, even Christian work spaces was painful to read. The
insensitivities of her co-workers and bosses as they critiqued her clothing,
hairstyle, personality, means of communicating and problem-solving, and how she
figured out how to be herself in environments that appeared welcoming but were
not really welcoming. She chronicled an entire day of the forces that she met.
At one time a white woman captivated by her hair tried to reach out and touch
it. A conversation with her supervisor with the underlying message that she is
responsible for white feelings and that her boss would not defend her. And on
and on went her day. Ultimately, she realized that those environments were
oriented toward shaping her to become like them, to do like them, think like
them, behave like them, and to deny her own sense of self as a Black woman.
Those were teachable moments for me. I’ve heard stories of white people
presuming themselves into the spaces of Black people, hair touching, dress
commenting, insulting double messages clothed in generosity and whiteness and
all.
Her chapter on white fragility was one that
I approached with much interest. Would she speak generically or would she speak
out of her personhood as a Black woman to this problem? White fragility is that
thing that makes people who look like me become hostile, defensive, angry,
uneasy, anxious, and all manner of other things. White fragility she writes,
“protects whiteness and forces Black people to fend for themselves.” In
particular she deconstructs one volatile scenario with a white leader and then
it dawns on her that the conversation has shifted into a mode of one that
describes and defines how she should behave so as to protect the white guy’s
fragile nature. She called him on it, that he was “centering” the conversation
around white feelings and she was having no part of it. There are other stories
like the one when she was working in the inner city of Chicago and kids and
parents would come and go for a week at a time.
Nice white people, one of her chapters,
was a challenging read. I consider myself a “nice white person,” pretty
informed and pretty engaged, not mean-spirited toward people of color, pretty
accepting. But people like me, nice white people, have to be taken care of. We
need to be affirmed that our motives and agendas are good and that we are doing
good things for the Black community and its people. We have that “relational
defense” thing going: I have Black friends, I’m not a racist, there’s not a
racist bone in my body, and other such machinations. To be called a racist is
an insult. However, racism can be buried deeply within us because we have been
raised in a racialized society that categorizes people by race, culture, class,
and so on. We don’t want to know that Black people know us. Then there is white
guilt with all of its manifestations, weeping after conference talks, apologies
for “my people” doing X, Y, or Z, and her summation she was expected to “offer
absolution.” And she says, “But I am not a priest for the white soul.” Ouch.
Truth.
Her chapter on “the stories we tell” was
convicting. There is the white collective silence that is deafening to Black
people as we do not engage their stories with all of the nuances and pain and
suffering and degradation that they feel and would like us to know, at least
some of us. Slavery was no accident, she asserts, and neither are racism, mass
incarceration, and on and on. White people tell one set of stories. Black
people tell another set of stories. America tells another set of stories. We do
not admit our failures. We could have ended slavery and uplifted the spirits
and stories of Black people. We didn’t. We told ourselves stories of their
inferiority. This chapter I will need to read again and again and again because
it is rich with things that I need to ponder. I must admit that I have told
inaccurate, ill-informed stories out of my own ignorance or because my
education was woefully limited.
Coming to grips with her anger, as she
quotes James Baldwin’s famous line, comes full circle when she engages her own
anger and speaks to the anger of God at the atrocities committed against her
people. God’s anger connected with her people and the freedom of belonging,
healing, participating as “full members of God’s house.” As an ally, I resonate
with her.
Her chapter on how to survive racism in an
environment that claims to be antiracist was eye-opening. Ten things to do: ask
why they want you, define your terms, hold the organization to the highest
vision, find your people, have mentors and counselors, practice self-care, find
donors who’ll contribute to your causes, know your rights, speak, and remember
that it is not your job to change an entire organization. Practical wisdom
here. This chapter should be a must-read for all leaders of organizations that
want to “diversify” the organization.
Her stories of her cousin, Dalin, and the
injustices that he experienced cut across two chapters, one on fear and one on
God being the God of the accused. Her story is engaging as the reader can see
the family, Dalin, and his presence and his absence in their lives. Her
deconstruction of her rage when he died in prison felt like sacred ground. The
cross and the lynching tree come to mind, a powerful work of James Cone.
Black people, she asserts, are “still
here,” having survived slavery, Jim Crow, lynchings, and on and on. Racism was
never eradicated, but rather it evolved. The Black Lives Matter movement speaks
to the unspeakable things that Black people experience that white people are
clueless about. No, not much progress has been made although we white people
want to say that things have improved. Again, this chapter is rich in its
descriptions and merits its own space, especially the notions that her walls
collapsed between her past and history and her present in the face of the
murders of the 9 people in the church against the story of the 4 girls killed
during Sunday school.
I wept reading her story to her unborn
child. I’ll leave that there. The story is too sacred for someone like me to
attempt to summarize it.
She challenged me around the notions of
racial reconciliation and justice. First, she says, we have to have justice and
then we can talk and move toward reconciliation. To do otherwise is to center
white feelings of needing to have done the right thing in our churches,
numbers, outreach efforts, and the like. Reconciliation must be more than a
window dressing. It must involve structural changes in leadership, foci, and
the importance of people for sake of their value, not for what we get by having
them in our sanctuaries. White churches, she says, consider our power as our
birthright. And thus, we “stage” moments of reconciliation. I am convicted
here, seriously convicted. Dialogue is important as are “marches and protests,
books and Scriptures, art and sermons, and active participation in the
coalitions seeking change-----are equally transformative.” Reconciliation, she
says, is what Jesus does. Let that sink in. “What Jesus does” is
reconciliation.
She concludes her book with a chapter on
hope. To get too hopeful is dangerous, to be cynical appears equally dangerous,
but to “stand in the shadows of hope” is hopeful, not love or niceness or
patience but a “love that is troubled by injustice. A love that is provoked to
anger when Black folks, including our children, lie dead in the streets.” And
she says more than that on page 176. Sacred material there.
She challenged me to think about some
things. She challenged me to go deeper in things that I’ve been thinking about
and working on for a while. She challenged me to do something for the sake of
justice and then reconciliation.
The book is well marked up. That’ll make
it a challenge when Charla reads it. Sorry, my Beloved. I have a feeling that
this book will sit front and center on my desk and in my head and heart for a
while.
November, 2007. He and others had
organized a protest near Frankfort, Kentucky at a USDA regional meeting of
sorts. There were several of us, Harry Young, for whom we were protesting,
whose land had been stolen from him; my wife, Charla; Monica Davis, free lance writer; and Melissa
Seaver, farmer from Indiana. There is a broader set of
reflections of that event on this site, Let Justice Roll. It is called "Not an Ordinary
Day." The team had been mistreated
for several days as the powers that be told us first that we could protest in
one location and then several other options were posted, all of which were
farther and farther from people. These places were chronicled also in Let Justice Roll. 
