Brown shares moments of reckoning, everyday evidence of yawning racial divides, and her insistent joy in embracing her black identity and self-worth.
Austin Channing Brown's book is slim (185 pages), but I wore out my highlighter as I marked lines and passages to discuss with the group I read it with.
In I'm Still Here: Black Dignity in a World Made for Whiteness, Brown details growing up female, Christian, and black within mainly white educational, religious, and societal frameworks--with a name her parents gave her to intentionally create assumptions that it was the name of a white man.
She shows the reader what it's like to navigate organizations that purport to value racial diversity and inclusion, then unapologetically points out where good intentions often go awry, identifying pitfalls (and also some promise) gleaned through everyday life and also in her work as an expert in helping organizations attain increased diversity.
She shares shocking, frustrating, heartbreaking moments of reckoning, evidence of yawning racial divides, and her insistent joy in embracing her black identity and her self-worth.
Through asking for deeper thought, engagement, and action from all of us, Brown pushes the reader to listen with care and then to do thoughtful, better, specific work toward achieving racial diversity and shifting racial value systems.
Any Bossy thoughts on this book?
I mentioned this book in the Greedy Reading List Three Books I'm Reading Now, 12/14/20.
You might want to check out So You Want to Talk About Race by Ijeoma Oluo or Raising White Kids: Bringing Up Children in a Racially Unjust America by Jennifer Harvey if you haven't yet read them.