Brown's first encounter with a racialized America came at seven years old, when she learned why her parents named her Austin: so that future employers, reading the name, would picture a white man — and give her the interview. Raised between Toledo and Cleveland and educated and employed mostly inside white schools, churches, and nonprofits, she catalogs how institutions that profess to love diversity so often love it in the abstract and resist it in the particular — and how she herself had to learn, in her phrase, what it means to love Blackness. Part memoir, part summons, the book became a New York Times bestseller and a Reese's Book Club pick, and it ends not in despair but in a discipline of hope.
Author: Austin Channing Brown · Original publisher: Convergent Books (New York), 2018
