Note: Can I Say This at Church is produced for audio listening. If able, I strongly encourage you to listen to the audio, which has inflection, emotion, sarcasm where applicable, and emphasis for points that may not come across well in written word. This transcript is generated using a combination of my ears, software, and the help of a friend and so it may contain errors. Please check the episode for clarity before quoting in print.

Austin 0:00

[My husband said], “There are some folks who are so sick,” and by sick he meant ‘a cold’ sick, “that the medicine you have for them will never be strong enough.” And he said, “And in the case of right racism, sometimes white folks just have to talk to white folks, that because you are a black woman, he'll never hear what you have to say, ever. And that's not a reflection of you. That's a reflection of how sick he is. He needs a different kind of medicine.”

Seth 0:54

Hey there, welcome back to the Can I Say This At Church podcast, I am Seth, your host. A little bit of a caveat before we get started. Thank you so much to everyone that is involved with the show on Patreon and on Facebook and on Twitter. I am very, very thankful for you all. To the Patreon supporters specifically, I am excited to share with you the upcoming blooper reel. I think it's going to be very fun and embarrassing for me. But hey, that's fine, we'll deal with it. If you haven't interacted, in a way, here's how you can help with the show. Just rate us on iTunes. It's free, takes a moment. Leave a comment on that as well. That would be great. I love the feedback. It helps make the show better, and that is my goal.

Today, I spoke with Austin Channing Brown. She has a new book releasing entitled I'm Still Here: Black Dignity in a World Made for Whiteness. And so we talked about that. The title basically says it all. How do we deal with race and culture and the world that we're in? How do we talk about white privilege without getting angry? How do we work through this so that, in 60 years, our children do not have to have the same conversations and arguments that we currently do? This matters for the church. It matters for our culture, it matters for our nation. It matters for our education. It matters for so many ways in life.

A bit of an aside. Austin was willing to come on, and you will hear in the back her newborn. You might hear some noise and a few baby cries and whatnot. Moving beyond that, I'm looking forward to you hearing the episode. Have a great one.

Seth 2:57

Austin, thank you so much for being able to join me today on the Can I Say This At Church podcast. I've enjoyed reading the book that you so graciously sent me, and I'm excited for today's discussion. I will be honest. I am slightly worried about it because we're talking about a world made for whiteness, and I am white and you are not. So we'll just address that elephant in the room. Hopefully we'll be all right.

Austin 3:21

I think we can handle it. I think we can do this.

Seth 3:24

Well, good. Well, Austin, can you just bring people up to speed? What's a little bit about you? The whole book is really a story of you and the world that we live in, What's a little about you? What would you want people to kind of understand about you going into this, as they read your book?

Austin 3:40

Yeah, so I feel like I've read a lot of books about blackness that take place in the Deep South, or that take place in The Hood, that are sort of coming of age stories around other black folks. Mine is a story of coming of age around a lot of white people. I really wanted to write a book that explored my identity development, having always been around white folks, as opposed to growing up around black folks and then being introduced to white-dominant culture.

Seth 4:19

What do you do now? Besides an author? What else do you do?

Austin 4:22

That's it. I take care of my son, who is seven months old. Before he was born, I was a resident director at Calvin College. I did that for three years, in addition to doing some multicultural stuff on campus. But now I just stay at home with my little baby and write and speak.

Seth 4:46

Nice. Nice. Yeah, I enjoy your writing, and I've listened to a little bit of your speaking. So what was the thought process behind you wanting to put all of this to paper, because you've laid yourself awful bare in your book. Well, probably not everything as personal as it could be, there's a lot of you in this. I can say, personally, when you do that in a public forum, like a podcast or like a blog or like a book that there is a lot of a lot of risk that comes with that and a lot of vulnerability. So what was kind of the genesis of this book?

Austin 5:20

The truth is, I've been talking about race and justice for a long, long time. I'm not a historian. I'm not an academic. I'm not a theologian. The only way for me to approach this work is via my own story. I personally have appreciated particularly academic approaches to this conversation. I like having new language. I like understanding America's history, it really fills me up. But I felt like, if there's a hole in our conversations about racial justice, it's this present moment. I feel like we've got a lot of books out there on history and understanding how we got here. I wanted to try my best to help people understand what racial injustice looks like on an everyday basis, no matter where you live, no matter where you are. I wanted to try and unpack how people of color, who are in the minority, may be feeling on a daily basis.

Seth 6:32

Yeah, yeah. I think you've hit that tone. I kept taking a few screenshots and sending it to a friend of mine that happens to be black as well, living just 25 or 30 minutes east to me. He's like, “I want that book. I want to read all of it.” I [replied], “Patience, it’ll be all right.”

Austin 6:50

That makes me really happy because I want the book to resonate with people of color, so that they can say, “Yep, this is my experienced too,” and hand it to their white friends and say, “Read this book.”

Seth 7:05

Yeah, I agree. Speaking for just my whiteness, “White people read this book.” It is challenging. We'll get into it in a little bit when we talk about white privilege and that type of stuff. It is challenging. I like the story that you tell about how and the reasoning you got your name. Can you go into that a little bit? I honestly never thought about [it]. I interview many people, and I can say, “I do filter people that same way.” I didn't realize that I did until I read you say it. Then I went back and I looked at how I filter people. I'm like, “You know, I do actually [filter], the name matters.” And I don't even know why the name should matter. Can you talk a bit about that lineage? Why you got the name? That story in the library, there’s just a bunch there, it really spoke to me.

Austin 7:55

Yeah. So, my first name is Austin, with is my grandmother's maiden name. Growing up, I always heard that I had the name Austin because I was the last Austin of our family line.

Seth 8:13

No boys.

Austin 8:14

No boys. Yeah. I was always very proud of that. I thought that was perfectly reasonable. But I always had known that it was a boy's name. I knew that because, back in the 80s, when I was growing up, mid 80s, early 90s, they always had those little key chains that had the nameplate on. My nameplate was always blue instead of pink. I was like, “Well sheesh.”

Seth 8:49

You didn't get a license plate for your bicycle?

Austin 8:52

I did not, unless I wanted a blue one, and that was unacceptable to me at the time.

Seth 8:57

I take it blue is not your favorite color.

Austin 9:00

I was an unenlightened child, what can I say? Blue was for boys, and I didn't appreciate it. Adults always reacted to my name as if I was supposed to be a boy. So teachers would walk into a classroom on the first day, not know who I was, called out Austin, and then would look towards where all the boys were sitting, waiting for one of the boys to raise their hands. I would literally be on the opposite side of the room doing jumping jacks trying to get their attention.

Seth 9:25

Yeah, “I'm right here.”

Austin 9:27

The girl is over here. I am a girl and my name is Austin. So all of that was very clear to me. But we spent a lot of time in our library near near my home. There was a day when I handed the librarian my card. And she said, “Is this your card?” And I was like, “I think so,” like I didn't double check before I handed it to her. But I was pretty sure it wasn't my mom's or my brother’s. So I said, “Yeah, I think so,” and she said, “Well, this card says Austin.” I said, “Yep, that’s mine.” She said, “Are you sure?” And I thought, “Am I sure my name is Austin?” Like I don’t understand the question. What does that mean?

Seth 10:12

I’m fairly certain.

Austin 10:16

It really pissed me off. I was so insulted that she would be doubting my intelligence or something. So I marched over to my mother. I was like, “Why on earth did you give me this name? I don't understand.” She sat me down and started to tell me about my grandmother's, and I was like, “Mama, I already know this. I'm asking you why you liked it. Like why did you pick this?” And she said, “Austin, we picked it because we knew one day you would have to fill out applications for college or a job, and we knew that having a white male name would be an asset.” She said, “We just need to get you to the interview.” She said, “Now once you get to interviews, we know you'll blow people away, but we just had to get you to the interview.”

I was like, “Huh, interesting.” It wasn't until that moment that I realized that every time I had met another Austin, not only was it a boy, but it was a white boy. That was a revelation for me, but I was young so I can’t say…

Seth 11:29

How old were you?

Austin 11:32

Probably eight, seven or eight, something like that. But it was my first “Aha-moment” beyond just, “I'm different from the kids at my school.” Right. I knew that my hair was different from the white girls’ hair. It’s it's not that I hadn’t noticed race before, but I didn't know the significance of race until that moment.

Seth 11:55

Yeah, no, I agree with that. I mean, my son just turned nine last Tuesday, beginning of April. I can say it's about that time that you notice a huge difference between what they begin to comprehend, as opposed to what they see.

Austin 12:13

Right, right, right. Kids notice race pretty early, just differences in skin color and hair and all that kind of stuff. But then there's this moment when we realize what America thinks about race, thinks about what those things mean. That was my moment.

Seth 12:28

Yeah. So talk about that a bit again. So you went to both kinds of schools. So you you talk a bit about when you were growing up, you had a school that was predominately white, and then you switch to a school that was not, correct?

Austin 12:41

I went to a summer day camp that was not. Yeah, yeah. So my schools have always been predominantly white. But there was a season in my life, probably three or four years, where the summer camp that I would go to was entirely black, and it was a culture shock. It was a big, big culture shock to be around all black kids, who were used to being in an all black neighborhood and all black school, like that's all they knew. I talked differently. I didn't know all the slang. I didn't know all the contemporary artists that were popular at the time. The SWV song “Weak” was extraordinarily popular that first summer. I did not know not one word, and I distinctly remember sitting on the bus lip-synching the entire thing, praying that nobody noticed no sound was actually coming out of my mouth.

Seth 13:40

You’re just soft spoken. You're hitting the falsetto. Yeah.

Austin 13:44

Right. It was a big, big shock to my system.

Seth 13:48

Yeah. So how do you deal with that? Because that still happens today. I mean, that happens every day, especially as more and more demographics seem to overlap, and people are able to move away from where they grew up. So how do we deal with that? Or how do we teach our kids to deal with that today? Because it's not going anywhere.

Austin 14:08

Truthfully, I have no idea. I will say this, though, it was really good for me. It was a hard, hard transition. I was called names. I was called like an Oreo, which means that I was black on the outside, but white on the inside. I was asked, why do I talk white? So there were a lot of hard days. It was just embarrassing to not know what all the other kids knew, to not be able to participate in their conversations about Whitney Houston and Bobby Brown. There was a lot of things that I didn't get.

It made me appreciate that blackness had a different culture, that they had a different way of talking, that they had a different conversation. They danced more, they joked more. In some sense, they were more free than anything I had experienced at an all-white school. Part of that is because it's a school versus day camp, right? There was still, nonetheless, a certain inner freedom that I experienced with these kids that I had never experienced in my white school. I'm really grateful to have to be able to appreciate what folks in my school would have called disrespectful or would have called unruly or would have called …. they would have had a name for it.

Seth 15:34

You mean, in the way that they acted? Or in the way that you all acted?

Austin 15:37

Sure, sure. It wasn’t. It was just fun and free and a different way of being. I was really glad to experience that.

Seth 15:47

Yeah, I've had a similar conversation with some of the other guests on the show, either from a Native American viewpoint or whatnot. What I'm coming to find is that, unless you can experience a down-pressing of culture on you, when you move past it, you genuinely experienced joy. Most people, at least in America, most white people don't ever experience that kind of oppression, the joy that I feel is - this is going to sound bad or it's going to sound trite - the joy that I feel doesn't compare because I'm coming from a place that is not as foundationally pressed on. I don't know if I'm saying that right or not, I don’t think I am.

Austin 16:29

Right. No, you totally are. I think an example of this is The Black Panther movie and how extraordinarily excited black folks were dressing up in African garb and giving each other the Wakanda Forever sign, taking pictures with the poster in the movie theater. You know, those are things we've never done before, and so to experience that level of freedom ,that level of joy comes from not having the opportunity to celebrate that way at the movie theater all the time, right? White folks really enjoy superhero movies. I'm pretty sure they do. I think they like Superman and Batman and all the things, but they didn't feel it as deeply when it comes out., right? They go, they enjoy it, they wear the T-shirt, but they're not necessarily taking pictures in front of the poster, you know what I’m saying? They're not giving each other a sign as they walk in the door.

Seth 17:29

I did see the movie, I gave nobody a sign. But that's because I'm not…I wouldn't do that anyway. It was a great movie, I took my son to see it. He didn't get any of the colonization cultural overtones of it because he's eight. I think Black Panther might be his favorite movie, he just likes him.

Austin 17:51

I think that's what made it such a fantastic movie, that for adults who are thinking through race, there was so much to have a conversation about. But if you’re a kid or if you just wanted to enjoy an action movie, perfect. It’s still a fantastic movie, I think I did both really, really well.

Seth 18:11

You talk in your book a bit about the ideology of whiteness as supreme? Can you speak to that a bit?

Austin 18:20

So a lot of people, when the phrase “white supremacy” shows up in the blog or on the news or whatever, people have a tendency to jump straight to the KKK or people who would say, “White power,” sort of an extreme buy into the ideology around white supremacy. In the whole book, I try to make clear that white supremacy shows up in a lot of small ways. At its core, it's this belief that what white folks are doing is the best way, is the right way, is the only way, is the most holy way, and don't genuinely stop to rethink what they're doing from the perspective of anyone else.

Not all organizations have the same white culture. I've been a part of organizations that are super minimalist and communal and you own as little as possible. You spend every waking moment together. You work together, you live together, you go to church together, and that is what is valued. Then there are other white cultures that are highly corporate, and you climb the ladder, and you do what you have to do. You dress a certain way, you look a certain way. It doesn't always look the same.

The point, though, is that whatever the culture that's created, there's no room for diversity within it. Let's take the communal white culture. Should I decide that I have other friends that I would really like to spend time with and I skip the Friday night dinners, instead of someone asking, “Huh, maybe we should investigate whether or not we all should form outside relationships and develop community beyond ourselves,” instead of doing that, white folks be like, “Does she not like us? Do you know if she's questioning her faith? Do you think she's as committed as the rest of us are?”

Seth 20:43

Bless her heart. We’re going to have to pray for her.

Austin 20:44

Then when they pray they say, “God, would you just move her heart to be more like us,” essentially, right?

Seth 20:53

Yeah, yeah. Usually when you're in the room, that's what it sounds like.

Austin 20:58

Yeah, yeah. That’s what I mean. I’ll try and give another hardcore example of this. So I have a lot of friends who are vocalist who sing at conferences and sing at churches. The nature of my work just lends me to know a lot of vocalists. It is not unusual for women of color, in particular, to be asked to be able to perform both in an ethnic-specific way, as well as the Christian contemporary country, pop, rock, whatever. It’s horrible.

Seth 21:35

What do you mean perform in an ethnic-way?

Austin 21:38

So if you're a black woman, you need to be able to sing all the songs that would normally be sung that the culture is used to. But then you also have to be able to sing gospel music on MLK Day, and you have to be able to put out a little rap, hip-hop spoken, word thing, for when they talk about justice Sunday. You gotta be good at both, but there’s one that still is dominating. There's one that's still dominant. Right, there's still one great way of doing this, and then the others we do, you know, occasionally.

Because the culture doesn't actually change, because we're not actually going to infuse gospel or rap or Spanish language songs, right, because we're not actually going to infuse that into our way of being, the vocalists who are white never have to learn that. They never have to try out hip hop. They never have to learn how gospel music actually works. They never have to study Spanish in order to make sure they're getting the lyrics right. You know what I mean? That is one way in which churches, consciously or not, are making whiteness supreme. There is a cultural way of being which elevates white Christian contemporary music above that of all the other different kinds of music that exists in the world and that are highly spiritual for people of color.

Seth 23:16

Yeah, yeah. Well, I will say worship is hard. I and other people lead the worship at one of the services at my church. On the way there, my son, who is who is nine now, he comes and he plays the djembe with us. He has a full drum kit just on the other side of the room, but he's not good on that yet. He comes and he practices with us, so he's there at 7:15, 7:30 in the morning before most people even come to church. On the way there he requests, so this is usually what we listen to, we'll listen to Propaganda or Andy Mineo. This week it was Heath McNease. It doesn't matter if they're white or black, just good, rhythmic music, which is almost always hip hop or spoken word. It's never really Chris Tomlin or Passion. Not that there's anything wrong with those songs, it’s just they're not there. I find it fun to watch him wanting to listen to music with his friends. They want to listen to country, and he’s like “I don’t, why do you like this? This isn't fun. This is not even music.” I don't know if I've indoctrinated him or if I'm making him something, I don't know what I'm doing to him, but I'm probably breaking him. But it'll be fine. He'll get older and it'll be fine.

Austin 24:28

We all are. It's okay. We're all just going to get them therapy.

Seth 25:02

I have a friend that teaches school. I let her read your book because I thought she would enjoy it. She is black as well, and I wanted her perspective from it. I wanted to ask you a bit to talk a little bit about the seating chart story that you go about in your book at that Catholic school. The reason being is, I think most people that are white will not admit fault. I'm not allowed to be wrong. I can say I'm wrong to my wife, but I'm not telling you. That’s what I liked the most about that. Can you go into a bit about that? Then I wanted to ask a few questions that she asked me. I said, “If you could ask Austin something, what would you ask?” She sent me a few from a feminine perspective, which I can't bring.

Austin 25:51

Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's great. I think this is another really good example of how white supremacy operates, even in people who are really nice and who aren’t actually trying to be mean. I had a religion teacher, who was amazing, in high school. She was extraordinarily honest. She told us all about her life, no matter how embarrassing it was. She used curse words on a regular basis, which was so much fun, because she's the religion teacher. She was just la breath of fresh air.

Seth 26:21

I don't remember you saying any of that in there, but I like it better now.

Austin 26:28

So one day, we walk into the classroom, this must have been at the turn of the semester, when she had a new class, and she says, “Guys, today you get to choose your own seats. Once you get seated, I'm going to tell you why.” We were like, “Okay, this is unusual. I don't think I've ever had a teacher who just switched mid semester.” So we all sat down. She was so serious, which was very unusual for her. And she said, “Guys, I realized I had made a seating chart for a new class, and I realized that I was doing something racist.” I was like, “Oh, my lord, where is this story going?” She said that she had made a seating chart, and the first time that class had walked into the door, there were two black girls who ended up sitting next to each other. Her first thought was, “Oh my goodness, these two girls are going to be so disrespectful for the rest of the year.” Then literally, she gasped in front of us, she went, “Ahhhhh,” as if she was having the realization all over again.

She said, “I realized, in that moment, as I thought that to myself, that I have been making seating charts based on trying to separate students of color, because I assume that if two students of color sit next to each other, they are going to be disruptive.” She said, “I will no longer create seating charts. All of you will sit where you want to sit.” I was like, “Whoa!” I think it's a really good example of how she's a woman in authority, she has power in her classroom. Even though she was super nice, she was still unwittingly using that power to enforce a racist bias.

Seth 28:30

If you're a teacher and you're listening to this and you hear that story, be you a white teacher, a black teacher, a Spanish teacher, an Asian teacher, it doesn't matter, how do you honor the people that are white, or not make them uncomfortable in a way that they no longer can learn, but how do you also, then, teach the staff to embrace culture so that you can then embrace culture with the students?

Austin 28:51

I speak and teach a lot, but not in the same way that teacher teachers do. I want to acknowledge my own limitations in being able to answer this question. I think in the book there's another teacher, whose name is Mr. Slavinski. He was a white teacher, and he did a fantastic job of honoring different cultures, all the cultures of his students, by infusing that into his curriculum. It’s perhaps easier for some than others, because he was an English teacher, but he was really, really thoughtful about varying the authors that we were reading, and the characters in our stories and the poetry and the time-frame. He just was very, very intentional, and he expected us to learn from everybody, that no matter who he put in front of us, no matter which author, no matter what background, whether they were Christian or not, it didn't matter. Everybody had something to teach us. I think that's one way.

I think teachers really have to attempt to be self-reflective of their own racial biases, right? So she probably got that bias easily, right? We were in a predominantly white school. I'm sure at some point, there were two black girls who sat next to each other and talked through her class. But why? I think it's hard for white folks to appreciate how difficult it can be to be the only one, the only one who looks like you, the only one who shares your cultural background, the only one who was hoping for something different from the teacher. That’s really hard to go through your whole day, and potentially not see anybody who looks like you. Then you get your one class where you get to sit next to your friend and, you know, you might get a little disruptive. The difference is, she had easily been teaching for a decade, I am sure that over the course of her 10 plus years, there was a moment when two white students were disruptive.

Seth 31:20

Yeah, but it just went unnoticed. It was fine.

Austin 31:22

But it unnoticed right, it wasn't attributed to their race. I think that was what she suddenly became aware of, that the two black girls wasn't about them not seeing each other, it wasn't about them just being 16, right? It wasn't attributed to anything other than race and her desire to stop students of color from her assumption that they would be disrespectful if they sat next to one another.

Seth 31:48

So when I talk to people on Facebook or Twitter and I say anything about race, or the president, but mostly about race, it quickly gets to be a, “Why do we have to discuss white privilege?” I mean, that happened just this morning, a friend of mine shared something from John Pavlovitz talking about white privilege. [My friend said], “White privilege isn't a thing. We shouldn't teach this way. We shouldn't try to change the culture. We should just try to be better.” But I am realizing often that I was born into a system geared for me to win, which isn't fair to me. It doesn't mean that I shouldn't be allowed to win, either, but it doesn't mean that you shouldn't be able to not win if you're a person of color.

How do we have a conversation about white privilege? Specifically, I'm interested in what you said about white fragility, where, somehow, it doesn't matter what I say or you say, you still have to give me permission to feel guilty. I don't hear people talk about that. Usually, it just quickly escalates into calling someone a fascist. How do we get to a level where we can talk about just the way that the rules are set?

Austin 33:00

I think white people have a lot of work to do, to be honest. I once ended up in a situation where I had been teaching a class and the content of my class made a white guy really, really angry. He was sort of all up in my face and pointing his fingers at me and just really, really angry. I went home and told my husband what happened. I never calmed him down. Another white guy, a co-worker had to intervene in order to calm him down.

So I went home and told my husband, and he said to me, “You know what Austin there are? There are some folks who are so sick,” and by sick he meant ‘a cold’ sick, “that the medicine you have for them will never be strong enough.” And he said, “And in the case of right racism, sometimes white folks just have to talk to white folks, that because you are a black woman, he'll never hear what you have to say, ever. And that's not a reflection of you. That's a reflection of how sick he is. He needs a different kind of medicine. The medicine that he needs is another white man to say, ‘This is what's real, and this is what is happening in the world.’” Yeah, I think white folks have been silent too long, to be truthful.

Seth 34:25

So how do I do that, then? How do I, as a white man, or someone listening as a white woman, how do I be that medicine without being prideful or arrogant or whatever the word is? How do I do that and be genuine about it?

Austin 34:40

I think you have to [first] remember what it was like when you weren't informed, right? To remember that there was a moment when you didn't get it either. There was a moment before you read that really good book, or before you made that friend, or before you travelled to that country, before you went to that great conference. And I think that's how you begin with humility and say that, “Everybody has to start somewhere,” and to remember that you, yourself, started somewhere. I think the second thing is to remember why you're doing it, that you don't do it because you're right. You don't do it because you're trying to “indoctrinate someone.” You’re doing it because you really believe in justice and you really believe in community. You really believe that, if we all join hands together, we could make the world better.

Truthfully, I think it takes a lot of courage, because I do know white folks who come really passionate about justice, who get talked about by their family members, or who have to have to take all the snide remarks. I think the risk is real. I had a handful of college students who were learning about justice, and particularly the criminal justice system, and how racialized it is. A number of them, right after the election, were very concerned about going home for Thanksgiving because they didn't know what to say and how to be gracious and how to be loving and how not to be ostracized. Especially if you're a student, how do you stand up to your uncle? What does it look like to be respectful?

Seth 36:32

I wanted to end with hope. I don't want to quote you unless it's okay. Is that okay?

Austin 36:39

Yeah, please do.

Seth 36:40

You said, “I ask myself, ‘Where is your hope, Austin?’ The answer, ‘Is it but a shadow.’” What does that mean?

Austin 36:48

Yeah. So I am a Christian, I do believe in ultimate Hope, hope that God is making all things right, hope that heaven will touch Earth and things will be perfect, right. I believe that with my whole heart, but this book was all about trying to acknowledge the place I live now. So though I believe in ultimate Hope, the exploration of hope in my chapter is about my daily experience. My hope is tentative these days.

I accept an invitation to go preach at the chapel service where all the students are required to be there, and my hope is tentative. I go and I preach the best sermon I possibly can and hope the students are inspired. But I'm also highly aware that there's probably going to be three or four students who fall asleep, another three or four who are angry by my message, and another two who are going to come up to me after the service and challenge me. Same thing for churches, for the blog. For all the folks who appreciate the book, hop on Amazon and read all the people who did not. That’s real. Am I hopeful about what could be on a daily basis? Am I hopeful about the church? Am I hopeful? Hopeful enough to do the work, hopeful enough to show up to preach the sermon, to write the next blog, to be on Twitter, to have these conversations with you?

Seth 38:36

Do you think it'll be better in 50 years than it is now?

Austin 38:39

I don't know. I think some things will be better. Our history, though, is that we just find new ways to perpetuate old systems. I think the question is, will we…

Seth 38:59

Find a new system?

Austin 39:00

….find a new system. Will we decide that there's a different way of being and of doing? I think that remains to be seen.

Seth 39:10

Yeah, well I hope so. For my kids’ sake. I would hate to know when I'm 90 that my son and daughters are having to have this same conversation or that your kids’ kids are having to have this same [conversation]. I don't know if you saw that Procter & Gamble commercial?

Austin 39:25

No.

Seth 39:26

There's a Procter & Gamble commercial and it's - I'm going to say this poorly - I had a friend that sent it to me, and they've gotten a lot of pushback. It basically is it that that we're going to market products to whoever we need to market products to. So it starts with a black mom combing out her daughter's hair. It talks about a woman trying to teach her daughter to drive and say, “When you get pulled over, you don't say anything.” She's like, “I'm not going to get a ticket.” She's like, “This ain’t about you getting a ticket. This is about you coming home.” The mom combing the daughter's hair basically says, “No, that was not a compliment. You are not beautiful for a black girl. You are just straight beautiful.” That’s what i mean. If you haven't seen the ad, I’d go to YouTube. And I think it's called “Black is beautiful, Procter & Gamble” or something like that. Very similar to that Dove commercial where they had the person describe the person in the waiting room with them, and it was talking about just the way that you see yourself as ugly and the way they see you is so beautiful and and glowing. I would really hate for, 50 to 60 years from now, my kids are having to have the same exact wheels-are-in-the-mud conversation at church, conversation at work, conversation with their kids.

Austin 40:36

I am in agreement that it would be really, really sad. The reason that I can't say, “Yes, we're so clearly moving that direction,” is that in 2015, a white supremacist shot up a black church, and just last year, a white supremacist ran his car into a group of people and killed a young woman.

Seth 41:02

Yeah. Just for context, I'm 20 miles from that, that is quite literally where I live.

Austin 41:09

Are you? I did not realize that.

Seth 41:10

Yeah, that day we actually had debated whether or not to go to a park in Charlottesville with my family. We decided, instead, just stay home and turn on the news ‘cause I'm not interested in driving across the mountain to go over there.

Austin 41:29

These are young folks. These people aren’t 70 years old and still screaming about segregation. These are young folks who have learned from someplace about the power of white supremacy. There are other people excusing, not necessarily Charleston, but certainly the parades… It’s a “both and.” I will say, in the book that at no point did all white people have to get it together in order for there to be progress. We don't have to have 100% participation to make progress.

Seth 42:24

Just more than zero.

Austin 42:25

That's right. That's right. And that's why these conversations are so important, because we can make change together. We just all have to be committed to doing that and taking the risk and having the courage to do so.

Seth 42:37

Right. Well, Austin, how would you point people to get involved with you, directed towards you and towards some of the work that you're doing? For those that are listening, as this releases, you'll be able to most likely buy the book, so I'll put a link in for that. It is well worth your time. I can tell you from experience, I would sit down at nine o'clock at night, intending, in preparation for this interview, to just read one chapter and look up and it would be midnight. That is a great problem; either either way, it was still a problem for me. I am sleep deprived, but it is well worth the read. I appreciate you writing it. But how would you direct people to get involved with you and interact with you a bit if they want to?

Austin 43:16

Sure, sure, sure. So I would love to have this conversation that you and I are having in person with folks. I still get a lot of invitations to preach or to speak somewhere. I am discovering that having these kinds of conversations, answering questions, is perhaps more productive, I think. I think it’s more productive, is more effective. I would love to do more of that.

Also, I'm in the process of creating a discussion guide to help groups think through this book, and it will also include a video series. I would just say look out for that. I'm hoping to release them in like June or so. Follow on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and and all the things that are coming down the pipeline. There’ll be a couple book release parties. So stay tuned. I would say Twitter is probably where I spend most of my time, but Facebook and Instragram would be great. (Austin’s Website)

Seth 44:14

Yeah, no, I agree. I enjoy Twitter. I find I have the most honest conversations in small pieces on Twitter with random people. So it’s fun.

Austin 44:25

Yep, yep. I love it.

Seth 44:27

Well, thank you again for your time and for your patience with me. I'll let you get back to to your son.

Austin 44:34

Oh, you have definitely been the patient one. He and I both thank you.

Seth 44:55

The music that you heard today is provided with permission from artist Jordan St. Cyr. You can check out his music on Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube, anywhere else that you listen to music, as well as go to his website, jordanstcyr.com. As with all of the music featured on any of the episodes, you'll also find Jordan’s music on our own Spotify playlist called Can I Say This At Church.