Austin Channing Brown Is Full of Herself

This interview is part of The Reconstruct, a weekly newsletter from Sojourners. In a world where so much needs to change, Mitchell Atencio and Josiah R. Daniels interview people who have faith in a new future and are working toward repair. Subscribe here.

To be a minority woman in a white supremacist society is to bear many unjust burdens. The biggest challenge is experiencing life as a second-class citizen while simultaneously being expected to feel sorry for the people who uphold the system that keeps me there. To be a “good” minority, I shouldn’t acknowledge any of this. I’m expected to quietly accept my place just to spare white people from feeling bad about putting themselves above minorities in the racial hierarchy of American society.

Some may want me to stay quiet, but I want to be loud. I want to scream. I want to cry. I want to embrace the full spectrum of my humanity, the same way that author Austin Channing Brown has learned to embrace herself. In her upcoming book, Full of Myself: Black Womanhood and the Journey to Self-Possession, she details this journey.

Brown is an author and speaker devoted to the racial justice movement in America who believes that antiracism is for everyone. Her first book, I’m Still Here: Black Dignity in a World Made for Whiteness, is a New York Times bestseller and has been featured in several news outlets. It was even Reese Witherspoon’s June 2020 selection for her monthly book club. In comparison to Still Here, Full of Myself is a more intimate book that chronicles Brown's desire to “live as her full self in a society that wants women—and Black women in particular—to do anything but that.”

Brown’s book is full of personal and vulnerable stories about her life experiences, such as getting fired from a diversity and inclusion position at a megachurch, the brutal reality of giving birth, and relearning to take care of her body and soul in the aftermath of that birth. These stories are interwoven with sharp social commentary about what it means to exist in spaces that dehumanize Black bodies. She also writes about disparities within Black maternal health and works through guilt from burning out. As a reader, I experienced so much frustration for Brown’s sake as I read through the many stories she shared. But Full of Myself is not a book about despair. Rather, its core focus is its beautifully written moments of hope, of joy.

In my interview with Brown, we talked candidly, from one minority woman to another, building upon the shared resonance between Black women and Asian women. We discussed the burden it takes on one’s body to try and love yourself in a world that desperately tries to convince you that you’re not worthy of love. We talked about self-love, white supremacy, and how to push back when the world punishes minority bodies for simply being human. We talked about how to become full of ourselves.

Brown’s Full of Myself will be released on August 26.

The interview has been edited for content and clarity.

Hojung Lee, Sojourners: One of the first things I noticed was the structure of your book. Instead of chronological order, you chose to organize essays around emotion. I'm curious about how you landed on the emotions that you did. What made you decide that emotional logic, not linear time, was the way to tell the story?

Austin Channing Brown: So, the first book was chronological, and I intuitively knew that this one wasn't supposed to be. But in all honesty, the structure is the thing that took me the longest [to figure out] for this book. I had actually written out, in addition to what's in the book, probably an additional 25 stories.

I knew I needed to figure out what the structure is, what the theme of each structure is, to figure out which chapters and which stories would be included. I went and sat down with some girlfriends and was like, I cannot figure this out. They started tossing out all kinds of options.

I got home, went for a walk, and was thinking about this on my bookshelf called I Love Myself When I Am Laughing And Then Again When I Am Looking Mean and Impressive. It's an anthology of Zora Neale Hurston's writing, and I have heard that quote over and over again, but I had no idea what the context for it was. So, I looked it up and it turned out that Zora was responding to her headshots. And I thought how rebellious in 1930 or 1940 for a Black woman to look at photos of herself and say, “I love myself when I'm laughing. And I love myself again when I'm looking mean and impressive.”

It made me think about all the other times that Black women and women of color are told not to love themselves. Black women are literally punished for laughing too loud. We get kicked out of restaurants. We get in trouble for being too quote unquote loud.

When we are mean and impressive. When we've just killed that presentation or in those moments we're really proud of, we're told that we were too aggressive. So literally on my walk, I was like, OK, when else are we punished for just being human?

That is when the structure started to fall into place. Once I had that figured out, I knew exactly which stories were going to go where.

If you could speak directly to another young woman learning to become full of herself, what would you want her to know about how to begin?

You know, I really wish that when I get questions like this, that I could give a one step, two step, you know what I mean? Just follow these three simple rules. But I just can't because everyone's journey is so different and so specific to them.

I would say that what has helped me on my journey the most are the people who love me and see me. Those are the people who have reminded me who I am when I almost lost myself. The people who called out something good in me when I felt I was failing and was disappointed. The people in my life who are willing to tell me the truth.

READ MORE: Vincent Lloyd on Salvation From ‘Anti-racist Hell’

If it wasn't for family and friends, I absolutely would have lost myself a long time ago. Who are the people in your life who can remind you of who you are when you begin to feel yourself slipping away? They help us root ourselves. They water us, they add new dirt, they prune us, and they help us grow our roots.

Some of the most moving moments in the book for me were when you wrote about the people who hold you: mentors Chi Chi and Christina, [your husband] Tommie, your mom, your friends Zakiya, Brenda and Gail.

How have these relationships changed how you ask for or accept support now?

I think there's something really special about the idea of having a chosen family. Those who are adopted have taught us a lot about that. Those who are queer have taught us a lot about that.

I just know for myself that leaning into that community has saved my life over and over again. I love being married. My husband's my best friend. We've been married for almost 16 years. I adore him, and I still need Zakiya, and I still need Brenda, and I still need Gail. All these other folks in the book. No single person is responsible for seeing me.

Because all those various people see something different. I am a whole human being. And so are you. And so, you need more than one person in your life. You need your mentors, and you need your friends — and you need all the chosen parents, the chosen aunties, the chosen cousins, and the chosen sisters — who remind you of the fullness of who you are.

To hold one another up is countercultural to this idea of capitalism and rugged individualism. We do something special when we're in community with one another.

Your tactics for racial reconciliation have changed, and I wanted to ask about that. How do you build solidarity even when we can't fully understand each other's pain?

This is something that Audre Lorde writes a lot about, especially in Sister Outsider. So, for anyone interested in relationships across race, run to the bookstore and pick up Sister Outsider.

One of the things that Audre Lorde teaches us is that because we all know so much about marginalization and because we all know about it in our particular ways, that should be a point of connection [encouraging us] to believe one another.

READ MORE: Is ‘Wokeness’ Worth Saving?

Now, when you say that there is something particular about what you face as an Asian woman. I don't have to look at you and think, “Huh, I wonder if she tried this. I wonder if she's thought about that.” I can look at you and go:

“Oh, I know, sister. Tell me more.”

I like how you fight against white supremacy, but you've learned along the way how to put up boundaries. You write about an experience with a white nurse, where you were explaining your plans to move out of a culturally white neighborhood, and she told you, "You can't move. We need you." This isn't about you!

That's one of the lies of white supremacy, that everything is about white people. It's about their comfort. It's about what they need. It's about what they need to learn. It's about their ignorance. It's about their privilege. Everything is about them.

But consequently, we spend a lot less time talking about what that focus costs us and what we're expected to do as a result. The expectation is that I will stay in boardrooms that do not respect me, I'll stay at jobs that do not pay me well, and I'll stay at churches that will not talk about racial justice.

The expectation is that I will inconvenience myself, that I will sacrifice myself, I will sacrifice my body, and I will sacrifice my needs and my wants. All for the sake of white people. And I think there is a fundamental change that needs to happen in every conversation about racial justice in the church.

There was a line in your intro that I underlined.

Oh, tell me.

“All the women within me should be free.” How did writing this book honor all the women within you?

That is a big question. I had to learn how to accept myself over and over and over again. I had to learn how to embrace my particular brand of goofy over and over and over again. I had to sit in conference rooms where I was not seen several times before I figured out how to become full of myself, you know?

And so, it was just really important to me that I explore having a chronic illness, depression, being in the workplace, and becoming a mom, because all those things are a part of who I am. And I feel that too often women, women of color, Black women are expected to only be a thing.

We can only talk about [Black women] as mothers, or we're only going to talk about them in the workplace. Singular stories sometimes don't serve what we are trying to showcase about ourselves, which is that all these things are interconnected in our bodies and in the ways that we show up in the world. I just wanted to create space for that, for us to come to a book that says your mental health matters, your physical health matters, and your workplace experiences matter. It all matters.

"To hold one another up is countercultural to this idea of capitalism and rugged individualism. We do something special when we're in community with one another."