I'm Still Here: Black Dignity in a World Made for Whiteness

At a work retreat, as Brown and her coworkers eat lunch at a restaurant bar where all of the other patrons are White, one coworker asks her, “Are you doing okay?” (99). Although Brown knows that the coworker means well, the circumstances of this show of concern are baffling:

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 (100).

Rather than tell the coworker this, Brown bites her tongue. To do otherwise would be to blur the lines between the “bad” whiteness of the restaurant and the “good” whiteness of the coworker; it would, in short, endanger the coworker’s conception of herself as a “good white person” (100).

Although the coworker’s intentions were good, Brown writes that “niceness” is too often cited to prove the absence of racism. Racism becomes the domain of outwardly cruel bigots, thus absolving all other White people of racism.