I'm Still Here by Austin Channing Brown

Author:Austin Channing Brown
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The Crown Publishing Group
Published: 2018-05-15T04:00:00+00:00

7

Nice White People

We were on a working retreat. Earlier that day, the seven of us had left the safety of the diverse city and traveled north to a quieter, whiter town. After working for a couple hours, my group decided to take a break from the hotel conference room. We spent the rest of the morning sailing—we’ll get to that in a second, but let’s just say it didn’t go well for me. After departing the boat, we ended up at a restaurant bar with a distinctly nautical theme for lunch.

We were waiting for our drinks when a co-worker walked over to me. “Are you doing okay?” she asked. I thought she was referring to the reason our sailing trip had ended early. I was not used to being on a boat. Out on the water, my stomach had felt like it was moving around as much as the waves. While everyone conversed and laughed on deck, wearing big sunglasses and leaning against the walls of the boat, I was practicing deep breathing techniques and weighing which would be more embarrassing—throwing up or asking the captain if we could return to shore.

But that’s not what she meant. “I noticed you’re the only person of color here and I know that can be uncomfortable,” she said with great concern.

She meant well, and part of me was really proud of her for noticing. I was pretty sure this was a moment of growth for her to walk into a room and realize it’s white. But truth be told, I was equally perplexed by the timing of her question. She was right. I was the only person of color in the bar that day. But I had also been the only person of color on the bus we drove up in, in the conference room we occupied for our work, on the boat we had just disembarked. And when we returned to our workplace, I would often be the only person of color in the room again.

I smiled, thanked her for noticing, and told her I was fine. To point out that I am always aware of my color, even with her and our fellow co-workers, would have been too much for that moment. I would have been telling her that her whiteness is not fundamentally different than the whiteness of the space we currently occupied. It would have threatened her sense of goodness—of being a “good white person,” the kind who notices when we are in a restaurant with no people of color. In my experience, white people who believe they are safe often prove dangerous when that identity is challenged.

This is in part because most white people still believe that they are good and the true racists are easy to spot. The true racists wouldn’t have hired me, wouldn’t have brought me on this trip, wouldn’t have noticed the homogenous environment. My colleagues were much too nice to be racists.

I don’t know where this belief comes from, but I do know it has consequences.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.