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 11-14Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 11 Summary: “A God for the Accused”
After reading Jimmy Santiago Baca’s prison memoir A Place to Stand, Brown is reminded again of Dalin. To fund his rap career, Dalin became a drug dealer at the worst possible time, amid the signing of President Bill Clinton’s crime bill and a national crackdown on nonviolent drug offenders. After Dalin’s third arrest, he received a mandatory 10-year jail sentence. Though Brown hadn’t contacted Dalin since the start of his 10-year sentence, reading A Place to Stand spurs her to write to him in prison. Weeks later, she nervously opens his reply letter, in which he graciously responds to everything in her letter: “I don’t think I’ve ever felt more overwhelmed by another person offering me mercy and love” (142). A few weeks later, lightning strikes and kills Dalin while he is outside in the prison yard during a thunderstorm.
Brown overflows with anger—at God, at the state, at the police. She also looks inward to acknowledge that Black lives matter, even when they aren’t like hers. She writes that many will dismiss Dalin’s death because he is a drug dealer, a criminal, or a “thug” (145): “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” (145). Moreover, Dalin’s death causes Brown to rethink the relationship between Christianity and incarceration, given that Jesus Himself was accused and incarcerated.
Chapter 12 Summary: “We’re Still Here”
Brown recalls how Barack Obama’s election led many White Americans—and some Black Americans—to believe America had entered a post-racial era. Brown knew better, and was not at all surprised to see America’s first Black president face a racist backlash. More surprising to her was the police response to the 2014 Ferguson protests in the wake of Michael Brown’s death at the hands of police officers. Even as someone who is fully aware of pervasive racism in the 21st century, Brown is shocked by images of police clad in riot gear confronting Black residents “with tanks in front of the damn McDonald’s” (149).
Images like these remind Brown of leading diversity training sessions during which attendees expect her to celebrate “how far we have come” (150) as Americans. Yet Brown always refuses. The abolition of slavery and Jim Crow do not impress her. Meanwhile, the extrajudicial killing and mass incarceration of Black people signify that America has yet to reach the “baseline for human dignity” (151). Brown also cites the 1963 Birmingham church bombing that killed four young Black girls and the 2015 Charleston church shooting that killed nine Black congregants as evidence of how little progress she sees in America. Moreover, given the joy and grace bestowed upon Brown every Sunday in Black churches, the Charleston shooting shatters her illusions that she is immune to racism.
Interlude Summary: “A Letter to My Son”
Brown includes a letter written to her unborn son, with whom she is pregnant at the time of writing this book. She writes to him that she and her husband talk frequently about what movies he will like and whether he will play sports or become an artist. What they do not discuss is the first time somebody will direct a racial slur at him, or the first time a cop pulls him over without cause. In closing, Brown writes, “I will never be able to protect you as I can now. So, you stay safe and grow strong” (164).
Chapter 13 Summary: “Justice, Then Reconciliation”
Brown writes that while many in progressive circles use the term “racial justice,” Christians tend to prefer “racial reconciliation” (165). Although true reconciliation is powerful, Brown regretfully reports that many Christians believe simply having people of different races in their church amounts to racial reconciliation: “We have allowed reconciliation to become synonymous with contentedly hanging out together” (166).
True reconciliation, on the other hand, involves inverting power structures and achieving justice on behalf of marginalized communities on a large scale. Brown argues this is difficult for the church, given that it views power as its “birthright” rather than something that must be ceded to balance the scales of justice. Instead, many churches are content to facilitate dialogue and little more. Thus, teaching White people about racism becomes “the end of the road, rather than the beginning” (169). Moreover, these listening sessions are easy and satisfying for White people, allowing them to affirm their supposed goodness again and again.
Brown has little patience for White people stuck at the dialogue stage. This liberates her to seek allies for whom the process of transformation is already underway. This doesn’t concern her, given that across American history, every moment when activists and legislators corrected racial justice transpired without the permission of every White person.
Chapter 14 Summary: “Standing in the Shadow of Hope”
When Christians tend to talk about race, Brown writes, they focus on the word “love.” Yet Brown has little interest in a love centered around accommodating Whiteness that fails to take responsibility for racial injustice. Brown also knows that it is hopeless to expect any other kind of love from Whiteness.
Brown goes into further detail about her relationship with hopelessness. For Brown to hope for racial justice, when so much of what she sees on television and in her daily life represents the opposite, is to chase a delusion. However, rather than fear the death of hope, she embraces it: “The death of hope gives way to a sadness that heals, to anger that inspires, to a wisdom that empowers me the next time I get to work, pick up my pen, join a march, tell my story” (178).
This space is what Brown calls “the shadow of hope” (180). She quotes the author Ta-Nehisi Coates who speaks of the resistance and struggle of slaves, even though nothing about their personal experiences or the political and economic climate of their times suggested that slavery would ever end. In a similar way, Brown strives for a future that cannot be hoped for because it is unseen and unimaginable.
Chapters 11-14 Analysis
When Brown’s cousin Dalin is sentenced to 10 years in prison—and later killed in a freak accident—the distance between herself and history once again collapses. As a nonviolent drug offender, Dalin is one of millions of Black men imprisoned for long periods of time because of President Bill Clinton’s notoriously punitive 1994 crime bill. Though widely-supported at the time of its adoption, later research by activists and legal scholars like Michelle Alexander concludes that the legislation was part of a concerted effort beginning in the 1980s to lock up Black men in startling numbers. In her landmark 2010 book The New Jim Crow, Alexander points out that the War on Drugs came not in response to public concern about the drug trade but rather to perpetuate racial caste systems in post-Jim Crow America. Alexander writes, “Slavery defined what it meant to be black (a slave), and Jim Crow defined what it meant to be black (a second-class citizen). Today mass incarceration defines the meaning of blackness in America: black people, especially black men, are criminals” (Alexander, Michelle. The New Jim Crow. New York: The New Press. 2010.)
Brown echoes this sentiment in the wake of Dalin’s tragic death, as she believes that many will say he deserved to die—or at the very least that his death doesn’t merit attention—because he was a “thug” or a “criminal.” Brown acknowledges that, given the connotations of these labels in a society that seeks to brand Black men as criminals, the message is the same: Dalin’s life didn’t matter because he was Black.
More than anything, Dalin’s death causes Brown to reconsider the dichotomy between “good” churchgoing Black men and “bad” Black criminals like Dalin. The academic and activist Cathy Cohen spent much of her career drawing attention to the falsity of this dichotomy to dismantle the “indigenous constructed image of ‘good, black Christian folk.’” (Cohen, Cathy. The Boundaries of Blackness: AIDS and the Breakdown of Black Politics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 1999.) Though Brown remains a devout and devoted member of the church, she acknowledges, “Most of all, I had to reject the notion that my cousin’s life was somehow less valuable because he did not meet the ‘Christian criteria’ of innocence and perfection” (145).
Meanwhile, in the chapter titled “We’re Still Here,” Brown lends credence to the double-meaning of the book’s title. The chapter concerns how little is changed since the 1960s, despite developments that many Americans—most of them White but some of them Black—would consider racial progress. Prior to the Ferguson protests, Brown adopted a view that racism—though still as pernicious as ever—evolved to fit into a post-Jim Crow paradigm of colorblindness. In short, racism persisted, albeit couched in the putatively colorblind language of the criminal justice system. Yet watching the state respond to the racially-motivated extrajudicial killing of Michael Brown by declaring war on Ferguson’s rightfully aggrieved Black community, Brown cannot ignore the similarities to the violent suppression of Black protesters in the 1960s. In the same vein, the Charleston shooting reminds Brown of a time when “White folks were making clear that they would rather see Black people die violent deaths than attend school with their children” (152). While Brown never mentions President Trump by name, she refers to “the election of a chief executive who stoked the fire of racial animosity to win” (180). These and other developments suggest that the era of “colorblind” racism is over, a conclusion Alexander echoes in the 2020 Preface of The New Jim Crow.
All of this gives Brown little reason to hope that real racial justice is on the horizon. Especially as a Christian, Brown’s attitude toward hope is complicated. She repeatedly invokes the idea of living in “the shadow of hope. Knowing that we may never see the realization of our dreams, and yet still showing up” (180). One way to frame Brown’s attitude is to say that she possesses faith but not hope, playing into a long tradition of Christian debate over the difference between these two concepts. Indeed, Brown writes toward the end of the book, “How dare I consider surrender simply because I want the warmth of the sun? This warmth has not been promised to me. My faith does not require it” (181).
In the secular world, Brown is joined in her hopelessness by the American author Ta-Nehisi Coates, whose National Book Award-winning memoir Between the World and Me drew criticism in some corners for its pessimism. Brown explicitly acknowledges the similarities between their approaches to the notion of hope. Despite these similarities, Brown’s attitude is shaped by her faith in God, while Coates’—at least according to historians like Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins—is rooted in atheism. (Steinmetz-Jenkins, Daniel. “Is atheism the reason for Ta-Nehisi Coates’ pessimism on race relations?” The Guardian. 22 Oct. 2017. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/oct/22/atheism-ta-nehisi-coates-pessimism-race-relations.)
Given the centrality of Coates’ worldview to the last chapter of I’m Still Here, it is telling to point out what Coates recently said about hope in the wake of the 2020 George Floyd protests. In conversation with Vox editor-at-large Ezra Klein, Coates said, “I can’t believe I’m going to say this, but I see hope. I see progress, right now.” (Klein, Ezra. “Why Ta-Nehisi Coates is hopeful.” Vox. 5 Jun. 2020. https://www.vox.com/2020/6/5/21279530/ta-nehisi-coates-ezra-klein-show-george-floyd-police-brutality-trump-biden.) Coates cites his father’s observation that, in 1968, the idea that non-Black people from Des Moines to Berlin would join protests against systemic racism as they are now would have been “unfathomable” to him. Thus, the emergence of a multi-ethnic coalition fighting for this issue is a source of guarded optimism for some.
