Im Still Here

A leading new voice on race and justice lays bare what it’s like to grow up a black woman in white Christian America, in this idea-driven memoir about how her determined quest for identity, understanding, and justice shows a way forward for us all.

“I had to learn to love blackness,” Austin Channing Brown writes near the beginning of this searing, page-turning memoir. As a black woman whose parents gave her a white man’s name, Austin grew up attending white, Christian schools and has spent most of her life navigating the choppy waters of racial inequality, gender, assimilation, and cultural conflicts that have played out at large in stories of police violence, campus unrest, and the national conversation over Black Lives Matter.

I’m Still Here is a book about how, even in a time when predominantly white institutions (churches, school, universities, etc.) are trying to get it right, there remain many ways in which we are blinded to the realities and effects of racial bias in our midst. Having stood in that gap as a leading speaker and practitioner helping churches and faith-based universities to practice genuine ethnic inclusion, Austin shares her experience as a way of holding a mirror up to the failures and blind spots of white culture–pinpointing the injustice in us that produces injustice in the world–while also offering the hope of her conviction that God is still working in the world, and can help us in our efforts to make that world a more just place.