Austin

Austin is the central figure and first-person narrator of I'm Still Here, a Black woman whose life reveals the costs of moving through institutions that treat whiteness as the norm. Her story follows the consequences of being misread, asked to explain racism for others, and pressed to make white people comfortable; it also traces the practices, relationships, and memories through which she sustains her sense of self and imagines a future for her child.

Identity and Background

Austin grows up in a middle-class, family-friendly neighborhood, not in the Deep South or a place defined by either extreme poverty or wealth. Her surroundings and schools are mostly white, though never exclusively so. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, public professions of racial color blindness coexist with the daily force of assumptions that whiteness is superior. At her Christian elementary school, children sing that all are precious in Jesus Christ's sight; adults tell her that they do not see color. Austin nevertheless learns early that such assurances do not keep racism out of American life.

Her parents try to give her an advantage in that world by choosing Austin, a name people are likely to assume belongs to a white man. As a child, she comes to understand that strangers who call the name are often addressing an imagined boy, and that a librarian's doubt about her identity is not only about gender: her brown skin makes the name difficult for the librarian to reconcile with the child standing there. Her parents' calculation is meant to help her get as far as a job interview, but the name cannot make the person who arrives match the expectations it creates.

A Name at the Threshold

The plan works, in Austin's words, almost too well. She continues to receive emails addressed to Mr. Austin Brown and voicemail asking Mr. Brown to return calls. People sometimes try to feminize her name as Autumn or assume it belongs to her husband. Even when her cover letters identify her as a Black woman, hiring committees are surprised when she arrives in person.

The surprise is especially stark at a final-stage group interview. Dressed up and nervous after passing the essay, personality test, or human-resources phone screen, Austin waits in the lobby for someone to collect her. An assistant approaches tentatively and asks whether she is Austin. She answers yes, acting as though she has not noticed his panic at the possibility that a Black woman has been invited by mistake. As they walk toward the conference room, she takes deep breaths while tension gathers beneath her shoulder blade.

Inside, every face registers surprise. The interviewers look at one another, then down at her résumé, searching it for clues instead of attending to the person who has entered the room. Austin recognizes the questions their reaction raises: whether her presence changes how impressive she seems, what it means for the position, and whether she belongs on the team. They expected a white man; her body turns that expectation into an immediate test she must endure before the interview can begin.

Voice, Privacy, and the Classroom

Austin's school experiences show how racial understanding can be demanded from Black students even when their own account is uncertain to be welcomed. In one class, she tries to make herself smaller as discussion of We Wear the Mask approaches. The poem gives language to an experience she recognizes, but recognition does not make her want to disclose that experience to an all-white room. For her, the mask is not merely a literary image or a classroom topic; it belongs to the practices by which Black people survive.

Austin does not want to become the class's spokesperson or explain what Black people think as though they had reached a collective answer in a committee meeting. Mr. Slivinski does not call on her. She listens as white classmates interpret the poem and observes that even thoughtful readings cannot give them her experience. The teacher's decision to let her keep her thoughts private earns her trust: the class can discuss race without turning her into a substitute teacher responsible for making the subject intelligible to everyone else.

A different classroom moment makes the operation of unexamined assumptions unusually visible. Ms. Phillips tells her students that she will stop using a seating chart, then explains that she has realized the practice is racist. She had been separating Black students; when she once failed to separate two Black girls, she panicked that they would laugh and talk through the lesson. Austin freezes, conscious of being one of perhaps three students of color in the room. Ms. Phillips speaks openly about the bias behind an ordinary classroom routine, making explicit the suspicion that had previously governed where students could sit.

Work, Exposure, and Survival

In professional settings, Austin encounters racial and gendered assumptions not as a single confrontation but as an accumulating pressure. At 8:55 one morning, she is asked three times in the lobby whether she needs help finding the outreach center, while the white coworker walking behind her is not asked. The implication is that a Black woman must be poor and in need of assistance. At 8:58, that coworker sees Austin's pineapple fro for the first time, reaches to touch her hair while complimenting it, and is startled when Austin pulls away. The compliment does not make the unexpected intimacy welcome; Austin is treated as different, exotic, and available to touch.

At 9:58, her supervisor calls her into a closed office after receiving a note that Austin made someone uncomfortable when they were trying to be friendly. The supervisor advises her to be a better team player and less closed off. Austin wonders whether this is one complaint or part of a regular stream of emails from awkward white colleagues. The burden has shifted: she is expected to manage other people's feelings, while her supervisor does not defend her against their accusations. At 10:05, when Austin tries to respond, the supervisor asks her to change her tone, interpreting her hurt as anger and presenting the correction as help that might allow her to remain at the organization long-term. Her account of her own frustration is waved aside.

At noon, Austin seeks out women of color in another department. Their lunch conversation and encouragement help her feel able to breathe again; although they do not share her department, she considers them a reason she has survived at work. That support is part of a larger repertoire developed by Black women facing workplaces where praise for their work can be outweighed by complaints about their tone. Austin describes saving affirming emails in inbox folders as insurance against negative reports to supervisors, helping one another write messages that will be scrutinized, finding a trusted lunch companion, and using private Facebook groups to process microaggressions and consider how to respond.

These strategies can slow the harm but do not remove the conditions producing it. Austin has seen white employees receive praise for their gifts while women of color are told only that they have leadership potential; she has watched supervisors find new positions for white employees who perform badly while telling people of color to improve or leave. She has also witnessed promises to diversify leadership, boards, pastoral staffs, and faculty followed by the appointment of a white man. The familiar advice to leave if a workplace is intolerable ignores the economic reality that changing jobs can mean losing paychecks or benefits.

At a Christian organization, pressure to conform can arrive in the language of care. After a hard week, Austin's coworkers ask to pray for her and gather around her with hands on her shoulders. The prayers turn from her circumstances toward the person they want her to become: they ask that she show more grace and acquire skills her coworkers think she lacks, rather than asking that she be understood or that doors open for her. Austin reads the moment as a demand that she become like the people around her. She describes the broader expectation as a progression from code-switching to a deeper demand that white ways of thinking, behaving, communicating, and interpreting the world be treated as superior. When conflict is framed instead as a question of whether God has called her to the organization, the people with power can avoid discussing the policies, assumptions, or interactions at its root.

Anger, Memory, and Black Love

Austin's account also shows how several parts of her identity shape the risk of speaking plainly. She feels anger at the mockery of Serena Williams's body, the racist insult directed at Michelle Obama, and the murder of nine Black people in a church. Yet she sees few acceptable circumstances for expressing rage: as a Black person, her anger is cast as dangerous or unwarranted; as a woman, as evidence of emotional instability; and as a Christian, as a failure of character. Even though she knows these judgments are unreasonable, their anticipated consequences have kept her from speaking. The confidence she possessed at school gives way under the pressure of supervisors, performance reviews, benefits, and the backlash that can follow criticism of the Church she expects to do better.

When professional life and other people's denials begin to erode her sense of self, Austin deliberately recalls what she loves about being a Black girl. Her connection to Black history is made tangible through the records families recover—census documents, photographs, certificates, and inscriptions—and through the cast-iron pot of her grandmother and the Bible of her great-grandmother. Her elders tell stories of triumph over slavery, lynching, and Jim Crow, preserving a history in which Black dignity survives attempts to crush it.

She also locates affirmation in Black language and communal speech. Black people create words, alter them, and share a depth of meaning that outsiders may misuse or miss. What an uncolored observer might mistake for interruption, Austin understands as call-and-response: a conversation carrying the affirmations of church into life beyond its walls. These histories, practices, and relationships provide counterevidence when the surrounding world makes her doubt her judgment or worth.

That inheritance shapes how Austin thinks about her unborn child. She and the child's father delight in imagining the baby's personality, laugh, eyes, and first visit to the barbershop, but they avoid speaking about the first racial slur the child may hear, a possible police stop, and the assumptions that will attach to the child's skin. They would rather imagine the child's humanity than dwell on the ways others may try to deny it. Still, they know they will have to explain the world, and they intend to be present when the child is treated as dangerous after first being seen as beautiful and innocent.

Austin imagines home as both refuge and preparation: a place of dancing, laughter, soul food, Stevie, Michael Jackson's moves, and late nights watching the NBA finals with the child's father, as well as a place where tears are allowed. She describes the child as entering Black Love, a community that will undergird and warm them, remind them who they are, and affirm their worthiness of joy, love, and adventure. The ending does not promise a world free of racism. It gives Austin's child a home, a history, and a community with which to meet it.