Austin Bears White Confessions of Racism After an MLK Memorial Service

Austin’s experience after a Martin Luther King Jr. Day church celebration reveals how a public account of racism can prompt white listeners to seek personal relief from Black women rather than take responsibility for change. When Austin and Jenny tell the story of their friendship, the congregation’s response shifts from listening to confession: the people who have been harmed become the audience expected to carry white people’s shame and offer release from it.

The Service and the Story

During the celebration, Austin and Jenny stand onstage and recount a friendship formed on the Sankofa Trip when they were in college. They weave their individual histories together and end with details from a conversation they had on the bus. Jenny selects images to appear on the screen behind them, hoping the congregation will feel, through those images, as if it were sitting with them on that bus.

The story includes the first time someone called Austin a racial slur, a disrespectful plantation tour, and the horror of a lynching museum. The presentation works in one sense: the congregation is moved, and listeners reflect on their own histories. But the response also exposes a limit of sympathetic listening. Once Austin and Jenny leave the stage, people approach not to discuss the harm they have described, but to recount their own participation in racism.

Confession Becomes a Burden

White congregants line up to confess. A man in his thirties tells Austin that he once used a racial slur and feels ashamed. A woman in her early twenties says that her parents had forbidden her to date a Black man and that she has only recently recognized the significance of this. Another woman, about forty, describes taking pride in spending time with the church’s Black worship leaders, then admits that at work she has heard colleagues discuss an Indian woman behind her back without intervening.

The details differ, but the confessions have a common direction: each speaker brings a memory of racism to Austin as though her presence could make the memory easier to bear. After half an hour, Austin checks with Jenny to see whether anyone has made confessions to her. No one has. Yet the burden is not hers alone. The most prominent Black female worship leaders onstage that day are also receiving confession after confession. Black women, rather than the people who were directly harmed or those responsible for addressing the conduct, are made the recipients of white listeners’ efforts to ease their guilt.

Austin does not dismiss the fact that the story has moved the congregation or that people are considering their histories. What disturbs her is the mismatch between the confessions’ small place in the confessors’ lives and the larger, ordinary ease with which racism continues to be practiced. The stories turn the immediate aftermath of testimony into another occasion for Black women to do emotional work for white people, without any apparent consideration of what hearing those accounts costs them.

A Pattern Beyond the Church

A similar pattern follows a conference talk in South Carolina a few months after the Charleston Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church Shooting. The predominantly white audience responds warmly during Austin’s speech, crying, laughing, and affirming its points. Then the confessions begin. Over the conference’s final two days, people tell her about racist relatives at holiday dinners, Confederate flags displayed at homes, and church pastors who treat kindness as an answer to racial injustice.

These accounts do not describe acts committed against Austin personally. Even so, hearing them makes her feel as though she were present when a racist joke went unanswered or inside a home where a Confederate flag troubled no one else. The confessor’s Black listener becomes a stand-in for the people who were actually harmed. In that substitution, the listener is left with the weight of events she did not experience and is implicitly expected to provide absolution.

The contrast between the church celebration and the conference makes the pattern harder to mistake for an isolated misunderstanding. In both settings, white audiences listen to a story about racism and turn toward Black women to disclose their own histories. Their emotion may be sincere, but the act of confession does not itself repair harm; without a changed response, it can ask the person already burdened by racism to comfort the person confessing it.

Refusing Absolution

Austin’s refusal is direct: she is not a priest for the white soul. She no longer accepts confessions as though saying something aloud settles the matter. She identifies the appeal of an easy ending—an admission followed by reassurance that youth, ignorance, or innocence explains the behavior—and rejects the expectation that a Black person should supply that reassurance. Reconciliation cannot mean that one racist act is confessed and then forgiven while the work of transformation remains undone.

Instead, Austin now challenges confessors to say what they will do differently. The question shifts responsibility away from the person hearing the confession and back to the person who made it. A confessor may respond with excuses, but that response, and its consequences, belong to the confessor. Austin’s intervention does not promise that any particular person will change; it refuses to make her responsible for producing that change or relieving its maker of the responsibility to pursue it.

She distinguishes this challenge from rejecting every apology. At another conference, a planner sincerely apologizes for decisions that had elevated white women over women of color as presenters. The planner explains her earlier thinking, reflects on it, and speaks vulnerably about the difficulty of organizing the event. Austin is interested not simply in the apology but in whether reflection can alter future practice. Rather than close the exchange with acceptance, she proposes giving people of color the most speaking time or paying them the highest presenter fees, recognizing their expertise and the emotional labor involved in discussing race and justice. Whether those ideas are adopted is not hers to carry. The distinction is consequential: confession matters when it opens onto action, not when it secures comfort for the person confessing.

The church encounter therefore marks a change in Austin’s response to White Guilt. She moves from receiving confession as if it were hers to resolve toward asking the confessor to take the next step. Her question returns the work of change to its proper owner and refuses to let a moving service, a sympathetic audience, or an act of disclosure stand in for transformation.