81 Quotes by Austin Channing Brown

If my feelings do not fit the narrative of white innocence and goodness, the burden of change gets placed on me.

When white people stop short of reconciliation, it’s often because they are motivated by a deep need to believe in their own goodness, and for that goodness to be affirmed over and over and over again.

Fortunately, Jesus doesn’t need all white people to get onboard. For me, this is freedom. Freedom to tell the truth. Freedom to create.

Our only change at dismantling racial injustice is being more curious about its origins than we are worried about our comfort. It’s not a comfortable conversation for any of us. It is risky and messy. It is haunting work to recall the sins of our past. But is this not the work we have been called to anyway? Is this not the work of the Holy Spirit to illuminate truth and inspire transformation? It’s haunting. But it’s also holy.

I look back and see centuries of creative evolution of the hatred for Black bodies. I look at the present – police brutality, racial disparities, backlash against being “politically correct,” hatred for our first Black president, the gutting of the Voting Rights Act, and the election of a chief executive who stoked the fire of racial animosity to win – and I ask myself, Where is your hope, Austin? The answer: It is but a shadow.

Too often, dialogue functions as a stall tactic, allowing white people to believe they’ve done something heroic when the real work is yet to come.

My story is not about condemning white people but about rejecting the assumption – sometimes spoken, sometimes not – that white is right: closer to God, holy, chosen, the epitome of being.

White people need to listen, to pause so that people of color can clearly articulate both the disappointment they’ve endured and what it would take for reparations to be made. Too often, dialogue functions as a stall tactic, allowing white people to believe they’ve done something heroic when the real work is yet to come.

Whiteness wants us to be empty, malleable, so that it can shape Blackness into whatever is necessary for the white organization’s own success. It sees potential, possibility, a future where Black people could share some of the benefits of whiteness if only we try hard enough to mimic it... Rare is the ministry praying that they would be worthy of the giftedness of Black minds and hearts.