Y’all, I love reading…but we already know that. Black culture in the United States has been a fascinating topic to me as soon as I realized that Black people in this country are not a monolith. One of my first experiences with this was when I was a kid and my cousins from Maryland would visit us in Virginia. I noticed that their accent was different although we shared the same family lineage. “Why do they talk like that?”
Then I remember noticing differences when people from church with college degrees would share about places they traveled, unique foods they tried, music they liked, and the TV shows they watched. “Why do they act like that?”
Then my next encounter was in college. Only about 1,200 students out of 27,000 of us were people who looked like me. So naturally, being away from home, I wanted to connect with people who would feel familiar in terms of jokes and other cultural norms, food, and even faith. I quickly learned that while some people were extremely similar to me, many of them were different from me as they came from various parts of the country with varying life stories. However, as we started having conversations with each other, many of us realized that we all had experienced discrimination of some form whether personally or in our neighborhoods based on the color of our skin. People also came with contrasting religious views and values. This blew me away and intrigued me at the same time. Even in an internship I had in Missouri during college, I faced this. The other interns who looked like me did not share my specific, Southern experience. I felt alone and confused. Until I decided to embrace the fact that Black people are beautifully unique, and I love it!
These experiences led me to read I’m Still Here by Austin Channing Brown. Chile, I luh dis book! One of my friends told me about it years ago, but I didn’t read it back then. I was in the library a couple of months ago and saw it. The title immediately caught my attention!
As soon as I read the inside flap and read that Austin’s parents named her Austin so that she would have an advantage when it came to hiring so that people wouldn’t know that she was Black and automatically discount her.
As I got caught up in her masterful storytelling, I felt like I was sitting with her on the sofa in a Black-owned cafe with our banana pudding and slice of pound cake. Chile, she wrote about the Black church, learning to play spades, “talking white,” being called the n-word, and dealing with white people who feel like they need to confess to individual Black people while refusing to address their own racism…Listen: she just tells it like it T-I-S as my daddy would say!
Please definitely check out this book and let me know what you think!
