I'm Still Here: Black Dignity in a World Made for Whiteness

In this remarkable new memoir, Austin Channing Brown takes us on a journey through her childhood and into the current world of fraught race relations in America. Growing up Black, Christian, and female, Brown's first encounter with race came when she learned that her parents named her Austin so that potential employers might believe she was a white man. Spending much of her childhood in majority-white spaces, Brown had to learn to love Blackness on her own terms, and this memoir takes us along for the journey. By exploring her own childhood and journey to adulthood, Brown shows the reader all the ways in which America still does not live up to its stated ideals and reveals how a specific white, middle-class Evangelicalism has taken part in this era of rising racial hostility. Brown asks us to confront our own apathy, recognize God's ongoing presence in the world, and points to a way away from the seemingly intractable tensions of our time.