81 Quotes by Austin Channing Brown

The march toward change has been grueling, but it is real. And all it has ever taken was the transformed – the people of color confronting past and present to imagine a new future, and the handful of white people willing to release indifference and join the struggle.

The monster has always been well dressed and well loved.

Far from an imposing beast, I found that white supremacy is more like a poison. It seeps into your mind, drip by drip, until it makes you wonder if your perception of reality is true.

And even though the Church I love has been the oppressor as often as it has been the champion of the oppressed, I can’t let go of my belief in Church – in a universal body of belonging, in a community that reaches toward love in a world so often filled with hate. I continue to be drawn toward the collective participation of seeking good, even when that means critiquing the institution I love for its commitment to whiteness.

This is partly what makes the fragility of whiteness so damn dangerous. It ignores the personhood of people of color and instead makes the feelings of whiteness the most important thing.

Dr. Simms wanted us to be emotionally connected to our learning, to sit in the pain, the horror, the absurdity of America’s racist history, and to humanize those who dared stand against the system. Dr. Simms made us believe that we could follow that legacy of resistance, but one piece of his advice stood out to me more than all the others. “Ain’t no friends here.

Even when our babies aren’t perfect, even when they are rude or disrespectful, even when they make mistakes or fail, even when their sixteen-year-old brains tell them to do risky, stupid things, we still want them to live.

It’s work to be the only person of color in an organization, bearing the weight of all your white co-workers’ questions about Blackness.

The death of hope begins in fury, ferocious as a wildfire. It feels uncontrollable, disastrous at first, as if it will destroy everything in the vicinity – but in the midst of the fury, I am forced to find my center. What is left when hope is gone? What is left when the source of my hope has failed? Each death of hope has been painful and costly. But in the mourning there always rises a new clarity about the world, about the Church, about myself, about God.