This is yet another of those books that languished on my shelves for absolutely ages before I finally came across the audiobook from my library and decided to give it a try. I’m really glad that I finally got to it, because it was excellent.
This book is part personal memoir, but also largely an account of one woman’s experiences as a Black woman in the US. It’s been a few months since I read this book (I really need to work on writing my reviews right away), so a lot of the details have faded. But what I remember was feeling deeply connected to the voice in the book, and leaving it with a better understanding of the microaggressions that BIPOC have to face in their daily lives, as well as the weight of the history they still carry.
Brown shares a series of very personal stories, starting when she was a child trying to check out books from the library and challenged because the name on her library card didn’t match what the librarian saw, and continuing through college, navigating work and finding purpose working in the community and through the church. Each story is unique and yet they all share a central theme: otherness. As painful as I imagine it might have been to put these stories on paper, they serve a vital purpose in helping readers step into day-to-day interactions from the perspective of a Black person, and to see the small things we often don’t notice, or that we overlook, which create a feeling of never quite fitting in, no matter the setting.
I really enjoyed spending time with Austin Channing Brown. I’m not religious myself, and I normally have trouble connecting with religious people in books, but Channing Brown discusses her faith and connection to her community in a way that I can understand and respect her for. She is someone who is looking for the good in a world that has so much bad, and who wants to foster that wherever she finds it. So despite the serious and difficult subjects she explores in this book, she leaves behind a feeling of hope and of a person who is looking for (and finding) ways to make the world around her a better place. Both for herself and her entire community. This was an excellent book, and one I expect to return to again.
Austin Channing Brown’s first encounter with a racialized America came at age 7, when she discovered her parents named her Austin to deceive future employers into thinking she was a white man. Growing up in majority-white schools, organizations, and churches, Austin writes, “I had to learn what it means to love blackness,” a journey that led to a lifetime spent navigating America’s racial divide as a writer, speaker and expert who helps organizations practice genuine inclusion.
In a time when nearly all institutions (schools, churches, universities, businesses) claim to value “diversity” in their mission statements, I’m Still Here is a powerful account of how and why our actions so often fall short of our words. Austin writes in breathtaking detail about her journey to self-worth and the pitfalls that kill our attempts at racial justice, in stories that bear witness to the complexity of America’s social fabric–from Black Cleveland neighborhoods to private schools in the middle-class suburbs, from prison walls to the boardrooms at majority-white organizations.
For readers who have engaged with America’s legacy on race through the writing of Ta-Nehisi Coates and Michael Eric Dyson, I’m Still Here is an illuminating look at how white, middle-class, Evangelicalism has participated in an era of rising racial hostility, inviting the reader to confront apathy, recognize God’s ongoing work in the world, and discover how blackness–if we let it–can save us all. – Goodreads
Book Title: I’m Still Here
Author: Austin Channing Brown
Series: No
Edition: Hardback/Audiobook
Published By: Convergent Books
Released: May 15, 2018
Genre: Non-Fiction, Memoir, Race
Pages: 185
Date Read: May 9-10, 2021
Rating: 9/10
Average Goodreads Rating: 4.38/5 (57,978 ratings)