43 pages • 1 hour read
Austin Channing BrownI'm Still Here: Black Dignity in a World Made for Whiteness
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2018A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Symbols & Motifs
“Ain’t No Friends Here”
The phrase “Ain’t no friends here” recurs at numerous intervals. Brown first hears it from her African American History professor Dr. Simms in reference to Abraham Lincoln’s true feelings about racial equality; like most White men of his era, including some of the most fervent abolitionists, Lincoln did not recognize Black Americans as social equals to Whites. To Brown, the phrase is a warning that White Americans—even those who purport to be allies—may betray the movement at any time, should real sacrifices be asked of them.
As the book progresses, the phrase takes on an even darker meaning. What once signified disappointment when White allies fall short comes to signify a large-scale recognition that America is no friend to Black women and men. Brown’s final invocation of the phrase comes in the wake of the Mother Emanuel shooting: “I cried not because I felt sorry for myself but because—in spite of all I had witnessed in the previous year—I still wanted to believe that America had become better than this. Ain’t no friends here” (155).
The Shadow of Hope
At the end of the book, Brown addresses her inability to hope for a better future for Black Americans, given everything she sees in her personal life, in the news, and across history. Yet for Brown, the absence of hope is not the same thing as despair. She cites the author Ta-Nehisi Coates who in detailing his own pessimism about racial justice points to the generations of slaves who continued to struggle for equal rights, even though nothing suggested an end to slavery was imminent. This space—where one fights for justice despite having no reason to believe it is attainable—is what Brown refers to as “the shadow of hope” (179).
Rather than mourn hope’s death, Brown writes that “[t]he death of hope gives way to a sadness that heals, to anger that inspires, to a wisdom that empowers me the next time I get to work, pick up my pen, join a march, tell my story” (178). To hope, Brown suggests, despite having no rational reason to do so, is to bask in the false sunlight of delusion. Instead, she remains in the shadows, fully aware of the dangers of placing one’s hope in an America that continues to show the bare minimum of decency to Black men and women.
The Distance Between Past and Present
Brown feels “the distance between history and myself collapsing” (58). The first time this happens is during Sankofa, when a tour of the American South’s racist history, combined with her White classmates’ defensive attitudes about racism, causes Brown to feel the weight of centuries of racism in a real and palpable sense. That gap closes again whenever the images of the present remind Brown how little progress was made in the decades since slavery and Jim Crow. The bridging of this distance thus symbolizes Brown’s conclusion that racism is neither gone nor evolved; it’s virtually the same as it’s always been in America.
