Nick Brown

“The whole church desperately needs to renounce all forms of lording over others and all forms of centralizing white normativity. We need to make sure that the whole church can be seated around the table of God together as equals, where only Jesus is centralized and Lord over all.”
― Drew G.I. Hart, Trouble I've Seen: Changing the Way the Church Views Racism

“The ideology that whiteness is supreme, better, best, permeates the air we breathe - in our schools, in our offices and in our country's common life. White supremacy is a tradition that must be named and a religion that must be renounced. When this work has not been done, those who live in whiteness become oppressive, whether intentional or not”
― Austin Channing Brown, I'm Still Here: Black Dignity in a World Made for Whiteness

“White people desperately want to believe that only the lonely, isolated “whites only” club members are racist. This is why the word racist offends “nice white people” so deeply. It challenges their self-identification as good people. Sadly, most white people are more worried about being called racist than about whether or not their actions are in fact racist or harmful.”
― Austin Channing Brown, I'm Still Here: Black Dignity in a World Made for Whiteness

“Portions of the African American community, like most ethnic minority groups in America, still espouse a doctrine of respectability. Today, when we discuss issues around mass incarceration and police brutality, too often the conversation turns toward how black people should act: pulling up pants, taking out earrings, and speaking “properly,” as if such behavior merits being treated as less than human. In the early twenty–first century, Bill Cosby went on tour to critique black people for not living up to the standards of white dominant culture. While some of his points were about personal responsibility, much of it was about dominant cultural respectability. He even at times made fun of African Americans’ names. As we’ve seen, this mind–set, as deeply colonized as it was, has a long history.”
― Drew G.I. Hart, Trouble I've Seen: Changing the Way the Church Views Racism